Tommy Bildström
Chuckie Thomas
Mike Player
Robert Walton
E.S. Canela
Finnish physicist-novelist and HelixNano CEO
Featuring an exclusive interview with OCTOBER 2025
Volume 5/Issue 4
By Steven S Behram, MD Editor-In-Chief
What unfurls beneath October’s auroras and ash-red skies? This issue of SavagePlanets stalks liminal territories where invasive code rewrites identity, carnival oracles thread lovers across branching timelines, and elders speak futures into being. Within, you’ll cross picket lines at the rim of reality, hold the line against necroempires, and ride into dust-choked towns where a quiet nun carries both scripture and sidearm. These pages don’t just forecast tomorrow—they tamper with it. So crack the seal, lower the lights, and step into a cosmos tuned to interference and omen.
Step into the low thrum and hush of deep space, where the October edition of SavagePlanets glows with uncanny resonance and daring design. This quarter’s stories chart courses through abandoned waystations, self-rewriting minds rekindling folklore, and feral biologies thriving beneath lightless skies. Each tale exerts its own speculative gravity—drawing you toward futures warped by solitude, brilliance, and the returning echo of human will. These are not merely narratives; they are perturbations—fault lines in the orbit of ordinary thought. Let them take hold.
This issue’s Imaginaria resonates
with the physics of memory, duty, and irreversible time. These poems compress cosmos into needlepoint instants—ring lasers
reading wakes in spacetime, orchards sketching ellipses, nurseries of antibody light. We hear a night-shift oath etched into bone, a zealot who burns the instruments to bless unknowing, and an auditor tallying heat
where futures refuse to balance. Some verses arrive as ledgers and looped clocks; others whisper as field notes, haiku, and syringe-shaped hymns. Special gratitude to 'docbaum', a friend and colleague, whose contribution turns the burden of call into stark music. Let each line pull you toward the event horizon, where silence keeps the record and meaning returns like tide-lit code.
Amid the hush of drifting telemetry, a fresh Communiqué ignites— equal parts farce and flare. From Grawth’s ion-wreathed balcony, we watch a government costume its disease sentinel for pageantry, then cut the sentinel loose. The spectacle ripples outward: experts muzzled, labs darkened to the click-track of applause, slogans lofted like weather balloons while case counts rise. The choreography dazzles; the math refuses. Hojack logs the lesson in cold script: biology is not a brand, outbreaks ignore optics, and sacking the mapmaker does not move the cliff. From our apogee we file it as anomaly, spectacle, and warning.
The short stories in this edition of SavagePlanets chart vectors through identity hacks, multiversal intimacies, ancestral reckonings, border wars with the beyond, and hymns from dust-choked frontiers. In “An Invasive Species” by Tommy Bildstrom, a global breach rewrites accounts and selves, as Anton weighs the strange dividends of being hacked. Chuckie Thomas’s “Exploring the Elsewhere” walks a county fair
where a fortune teller threads two couples across branching timelines toward an unforeseen crossing. In “Tell Me a Story,” Mike Player seats Squirrel beside her great-great-grandfathers, where an old tale unwraps a secret with her name on it. Robert Walton’s “Picket Duty” stands Joe and Hannah on a cold line, guarding inter-dimensionals while the Necro-Fascist Alliance tests the perimeter. And in “The Gun-Slinging Nun,” E. S. Canela rides into Abilene III, chasing a thaumaturgic boy as WyrdBeasts darken the saloon doors. These fictions press the membrane of the known, humming at the brink of rupture and bloom.
Spectral Marquee
This issue’s Sci-Fi Entertainment surveys the bright edge where idea meets image. First, “The Entrepreneur Novelist” sits down with Hannu Rajaniemi to map the
circuitry between game theory capers, haunted uploads, and real-world immuno-engineering— tracing a line from The Quantum Thief to Darkome and the ethics of DIY biology. Next, “The Shrouds: It’s a Wrap” studies
David Cronenberg’s late-style meditation on grief, where a cemetery of cameras and an 8K burial shroud turn mourning into interface and obsession into enterprise. Finally, “The Assessment: Parental Guidance” examines a near-future rite that quantifies parenthood itself, following a botanist and a designer through a week of calibrated tests that measure love, patience, and the cost of survival. Together these features show how speculative worlds don’t just predict our media— they prototype it.
As we slingshot out of
this quarter’s gravity well, we chart the luminous wake it leaves behind. These pages moved through identity breaches and braided timelines, fireside ancestries and border watches, a quiet nun sighting down iron at alien dusk. In poems and communiqués, in screens and print, the paradox of speculation holds: to predict and to pierce, to model and to move. We depart with instruments hot and questions hotter, constellations still rewriting themselves. Keep your sensors tuned and your thresholds loose. Until the next approach—follow the signal.
BY TOMMY BILDSTRÖM
'This is how it's all going to end,' she whispered. 'Not with bombs and machine guns. Not with companies exploiting people for profit without logic. We've surrendered to something whose purposes make no sense at all'.”
At first, it only happened to careless individuals. Stolen identities on Facebook, Spotify, and other accounts like family life forums, not to mention adult websites. After a few tumultuous hours, it became widely known that hackers had accessed sex hookup platforms and caravan enthusiasts' forums, then used the passwords to take over other social media accounts. It took a long time—by the standards of the information age for anyone to react, if they did at all.
Perhaps, because of that, no ransom demands appeared. Or perhaps because there wasn't much they could do about it. Initially, the only inconveniences were people getting locked out of their Facebook accounts.
Anton sat at the table at his home with his new Huawei, looking at his own Facebook update from a fake account. A food picture. He had supposedly dined at Great Eastern, the restaurant next to the bus station. The image depicted some Asian dish he had
certainly never tried (and never would), making Anton suspect that someone had hacked his phone and taken a wild guess to copy his personality.
For what purpose no one could understand, least of all Anton. As far as he knew, this someone could be on the other side of the globe, or next door. He tried to log in again. He entered his new email address, but hesitated before entering the password.
If someone compromised his phone, he would have to repeat the entire process. He turned it off, completely this time, holding the button until the screen went dark so he could see his face mirrored in the screen. Anton Spångberg, called Anton Spadrig by friends and foes alike, faced his own reflection. He examined his face for flaws.
The long blond hair made him look youthful despite being thirty-two. He noticed small wrinkles around his eyes, where his age was creeping in. When he an-
gled the phone down, the mirror image captured his work clothes: a sturdy jacket for the job in cold storage where he worked at the warehouse.
He placed the phone on the table, harder than he intended. “When did I become such a loser?” he thought. Perhaps it was just a good thing someone locked him out of social media. He stared at himself through the dead electronic window, basking in his self loathing.
After a while, he heard Pontus pull into the parking lot. Anton sighed as he got up from the chair. He got out, locked the door and walked with heavy steps towards the parking lot and got into Pontus’s car.
“Damn, working 12 hours in the warehouse without music. That sucks.”
Pontus flicked on the turning signal, ignoring his friend, and rolled out of the parking lot.
“Are you locked out too?” Pontus
finally asked.
“Those cretins even hacked my new fake account.”
Pontus’s black car glided down the street. Despite the peak of summer, there was a bit of morning mist on the road at five in the morning.
“I feel invaded,” said Anton. “I've shut that crap down, no point.”
“We might as well entertain ourselves like in the 1800s,” said Pontus. He held the steering wheel with one hand and dug into his pocket with the other. He thrust the contents of the pocket toward Anton.
“MP5 player,” he said, grinning broadly. “Clearly, 1800 tech.”
“MP3 player, you idiot,” said Anton.
“Have you received any ransom letters? Like, pay 300 Bitcoins, and we'll unlock your account.” Pontus said.
"Maybe, but my email was hacked too," said Anton. "Those who did it might contact those who hacked my Facebook account and they might ask them to pay! More power to them if they can, because my digital ID isn't working either."
"Do you realize how much money you could make just by sending emails to a bunch of people and saying you're the one who hacked the accounts and demand a ransom?"
Anton formulated a response containing both idiot insults and a few other tasty bits since Pontus could never get hold of people’s emails. He saw Pontus ending up putting letters in mailboxes in the neighborhood. He had just sunk into the thought of using some kind of scanner that could read the names on the mailboxes and a portable printer when Pontus turned into their job’s parking lot.
The air was cold and chilly as he stepped out of the car. He could see the second shift, drowsily walking, emerging from the warehouse. He gave them the middle finger and got a few laughs in return. Sour on the way in, happy on the way home.
“I ride my brakes the entire way,” they joked when talking about their commute to work.
Pontus pulled out the little key fob and entered his number. A little figure on the display lit up green.
"Too bad they haven't hacked the central lock..." said Pontus.
Anton was too tired to be cheerful and didn't reply. He walked in with his colleague, even though he was supposed to upload his RIFD-tag too.
The truck was on time—a new driver who didn't speak Swedish. The major supermarket chains, Ica, Coop, and Willys, sorted the goods. They put protective blankets over the bananas so they wouldn't freeze, and then they settled down to lunch with the other workers.
Anton warmed up his leftover macaroni he had brought for lunch.
Pontus looked up from some papers. “Damn, it's going smoothly now," he said. "It's like all the stores have evenly divided all the sales.”
Anton nodded. “We better save some work for after lunch when all the office folks show up. If they see we’re not working hard, they'll start cutting people,” he suggested.
Anton picked up the newspaper for the day. The headlines had been warning about data breaches all week. He
skimmed through the editorials, which mentioned something about companies taking over and losing their profit interests. Someone had written a letter to the editor claiming that the Chinese were responsible because they used their Huawei mobile phones to hack us.
“I wonder if we would even notice if the Chinese took over,” he said. “I deliver goods to Ica and Coop, but I do not know who owns them. Wouldn’t surprise me if they bought those stores out.”
“You'll probably notice when you couldn’t vote anymore,” Thomas replied, working down another aisle from Pontus.
“Willys. Willys is taking them over now,” said Kjell.
“Shut up,” Thomas replied and continued, “it will be very clear to us when Sweden is no longer ours.” He glared at Habib, who just put down the Everything For Your Garden magazine.
“I don't know,” said Anton. “I barely know what they decide in Brussels
or Stockholm. I hardly know if it makes any difference.”
“You'll notice when they come to get Habib for being super gay,” said Thomas, throwing a crumpled pizza paper at the Arab.
“Yallah, Habibi!” Habib exclaimed, and Pontus laughed at his accent, which was a mix of Norrlandic and Arabic.
Anton tried to zone out. Thomas teased Habib because he read everything about gardening. And Habib emphasized how great it was to live in Sweden and that he's definitely not one of those migrants who cared about anybody else’s sexuality and didn’t mind being called gay. Habib had this peculiar tone, which was actually kind of cute if you hadn’t heard it a thousand times.
Later, the half-hour break passed quickly. Pontus and Anton drove the goods extra slowly and chatted with each other afterward to kill time. When the shift was finally over, the managers arrived—even the big boss showed.
They gathered in the break room to receive the day’s news. Nothing of interest affecting them, which was good. They shuffled out and smiled at the night shift stumbling in. Someone rewarded Anton with a middle finger.
Back home, Anton brought in the mail, tossed it casually on the desk, and turned on his computer. He was in a great mood, and he and Pontus laughed all the way home. The company cut down on staff, but for once, it was the office folks who were let go.
They even hired a few more warehouse workers. The boss paid their salaries in cash now, which was strange. He didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. In the end, he didn't care, money was money.
He sat down at his desk. It took a while for the computer to boot up. Anton went on Facebook out
of habit. He could access his account but couldn’t update or post anything. As he clicked around, he saw that his relationship status had changed from single to ’in a relationship.’ Apparently, he was together with someone he had never met. Fake Pontus wrote his congratulations in the comments to fake Anton. He seemed to have a great fake life based on the photos uploaded.
with a girl I've never met.”
He checked Karin Alfredsson, his new girlfriend whom he never met in real life. She was a few years older and lived in Umeå. Nothing strange about that. No sex ads. Just a changed status with someone he had never met.
He called Pontus.
“What the hell is happening on Facebook?” said Anton.
“I have no clue,” said Pontus. “I can't access my account anymore.”
There was silence on the phone as they both grew frustrated.
“So you weren’t the one who commented on my status update?” asked Anton.
“No,” said Pontus. “I haven't logged on for weeks. I've been hacked.”
“Apparently, I'm in a relationship
“Did you read the articles in VK, and not just the headlines?” Pontus asked, referring to the local newspaper. “It's like that for everyone. Social media is a complete mess. People sent like statuses and made new friends without pressing a single button. Even my mom has changed jobs randomly. It's some kind of glitch. Or it's just that Zuckerberg zucks.”
That caused a chuckle, and they hung up. Anton nervously drummed his foot on the floor. He had to wait until the next day at work to read the newspaper; the Internet wasn’t reliable anymore.
He logged into his bank account with his digital ID to check if anyone had withdrawn money from it. There was an unusually large amount left; he never bought much. It seemed to work fine; his salary would probably come digitally as usual any day, even though they paid him in cash. He definitely didn’t mind that.
The only thing he noticed was that
someone had deducted 4 SEK from him the previous week, probably for parking? His gaze fell on the physical mail he received. There was a sale at Elgiganten, the electronics store, but they were always running a sale.
Strangely, phone prices hadn't dropped. There was a letter to Karin Alfredsson in the pile, and it took Anton a while to connect the name with his Facebook relationship. He went to hitta.se online, a site where basic information could be found about pretty much anyone in Sweden, but the site was down. Eniro too. He tossed the letter in the trash and turned on Netflix and saw snow. Even the streaming services were
down.
“Helvete också!”
He paced back and forth, picking up books and leaflets, then throwing them back down. He looked at the clock, wondering if he should just wait until he started working again to read the VK.
But then a thought crossed his mind. The letter in the trash had Karin's address. He retrieved it and thought he’d deliver his response by hand. The return address on the envelope was a number on Glunten's road in Ålidhem, so it would only take fifteen minutes to drive there. He took a quick shower and got ready. It was better than sitting at home wasting
time. “Soon we'll have to stock up on canned goods,” she said, but Anton reassured her that grocery deliveries had never worked as well as they did now.
He had handed over the letter, made some small talk, and tried not to mention their shared relationship status. But aside from the weather, people mostly just talked about what was happening on social media. He surprised himself with how calm and confident he sounded talking to Karin. He felt oddly comfortable with her.
She said goodbye, and Anton turned around when he heard the door open again. “If you want, maybe we can grab an ice cream or something, sometime, om det känns, ok?” suggested Karin. She handed him an old-fashioned business card with her phone number, but she closed the door quickly after handing it to him, as if she was afraid.
Conspiracy theories emerged about big business taking over the world economy. Hackers continuously attacked servers worldwide; when small countries tried to stop the takeover or counter the attacks, the perpetrators, who could afford expensive lawyers, instead hired mercenaries from other third-world countries to thwart their efforts. It was the one conspiracy theory that didn't spread on the Internet. Because threats silenced the scarce few who knew about it. Hackers also attacked those in the know, compromising their Internet and newspaper accounts.
In a few days, there would be a general election. The Pirate Party expected to surpass the four percent threshold to get into the Swedish Parliament. The fact that happened now, when the Internet was down, was anybody's guess.
Our ruling party, the Social Democrats, wanted to lower taxes since unemployment in all the Nordic countries had dropped to Norway's level. All of this was being mulled over in the minds of Anton and Karin as they sat and looked out over the river. It was a concern that existed in the vague periphery of their future lives together.
Anton put his arm around Karin, and he saw she had a tear in her eye.
“Sometimes I'm just so plain scared-” she said. “I went on Facebook and…”
“Stop checking,” said Anton. “It's just a hack or a glitch. I read that it's becoming a mix of movies and newspaper headlines, anyway.”
A small family of ducks glided over the water; the ducklings looked like something out of a comic book. Karin leaned against Anton.
“Ikagi, Ikagi, Ikagi,” Karin read aloud, glancing at her tablet.
“It makes no sense,” said Anton.
“Everyone knows something is wrong, but no one is doing anything about it,” she sniffled.
her hand, but could feel it shaking.
Anton tossed a small piece of the ice cream cone into the water, even though the ducks were too far away.
“It's like the environment,” he shrugged. “Everyone knows it's getting worse, but no can do anything about it. It's tough for us regular people, we’re helpless. And those that could, don’t, afraid of reprisals.”
The sun reflected off the water, and Anton breathed in the clear air. He had never felt so happy, and he wanted to tell Karin that. He held
“This is how it's all going to end,” she whispered. “Not with bombs and machine guns. Not with companies exploiting people for profit without logic. We've surrendered to something whose purposes make no sense at all. Maybe the hackers think it will bring people together?”
“Or perhaps they want to wipe us out. We can't fathom it, and there’s nothing we can do about it, anyway. Relax, love, enjoy the day.”
The sun beamed down on the Umeå River. Anton should have been sweating in the heat, but he
felt a shiver down his spine despite his reassurance to her. He rubbed his hands as if he were cold. And continued, “Then again, maybe this is what the revolution looks like,” he mumbled.
It was a thought he hadn't been able to articulate before, but the clarity of the water and Karin's hand in his, awakened both confidence and inspiration.
A silent revolution from an invasive species from one nature never intended. If all these hacks were from the machines and they were truly taking over, would we even notice?
BY CHUCKIE THOMAS
There’s no way to interpret this any differently—in every single alternate universe the technology could detect, Jack and Chelsea are happily married… The way this paper reads, their current existence is the only one where they aren’t together."
Tattered, faded flags flap in the breeze at the entrance of the sparsely populated Fifteenth Annual Elsewhere Fair. This year, organizers decorated the fair with a forest theme. There are ferns, trees, and bushes everywhere, including several long-extinct species. The sign at the entrance said this was to evoke a “natural” and “fresh” feeling to “reinvigorate” guests.
Jack thinks it makes the whole fair feel garish, like a clown wearing a tuxedo. The lack of any food smell is the worst—no funnel cakes, no grilled peppers and onions, not even any popcorn. Worse, because of the DNA scan upon entry, the dominant sound vibrating in his ear is his own name. He attempts to hide his disgust over the whole affair as he and the others investigate each booth.
“You look like you’re smelling the world’s worst dog fart,” Chelsea says, rolling her crystal blue eyes. Apparently, Jack wasn’t doing as good a job as he thought.
“I made my feelings clear about us coming here,” Jack says, raising a bushy eyebrow at a booth purporting to predict your date of death. “On my list of things to do today—”
“Yes, yes, it’s at the bottom,” Chelsea says.
“Below the list, actually. Beneath the floor.” Jack shakes his head at the barker wooing him to the death booth. “I just don’t see the benefit of any of this.”
Abby, her long black hair tied up in a tight bun, playfully pinches her husband. “It’s just for fun, babe. Doesn’t really mean anything in real life. Think of it like advanced fortune telling.”
“Hmph. Well. I wouldn’t be caught dead visiting a fortune teller either, now would I?”
Chelsea and Abby share a look. Being best friends for twenty-five years meant you don’t have to say much to each other. Jack knows that look, and Chelsea has again found her platonic life partner wanting.
Jack bristles. “Richie knows. That’s why he didn’t come.”
“No, he didn’t come because he had a meeting with the non-profit he volunteers for.”
Jack detects a hint of sharpness in Chelsea’s tone. He briefly considers bringing up Richie’s last text message, essentially ‘thanks for covering for me so I don’t have to go,’ but doesn’t want to get his best friend of twenty years in trouble.
“Hey, look at this one!” Chelsea’s shrill voice cuts through Jack’s brain when she gets excited. He thinks it suits her shrill face. She’s found a booth that claims to show you your true love.
Chelsea grabs Abby’s hand. “Come on, it’s going to be fun! Like those online quizzes. Maybe I’ll be married to Harrison Ford in another universe.”
Abby laughs. “He’s so old!”
“Yeah, in this universe. But he was probably born much later in other ones.” She nods to the barker. “Right?”
“Sure!” The barker smiles so wide his face almost breaks in half. “Anything is possible as we peer into the mysteries of this universe… and beyond! Only three tickets per participant!” He gestures behind him to a giant multi-colored lever.
“Three?” Jack says, pulling out his roll of tickets. “Does that leave enough for us to take the people mover back to the car?”
“I charged ten the first year,” the barker says. “This is a clear bargain, pal!”
“We’ll skip the multiverse diorama. It’s probably the same thing from last year, anyway,” Abby says. “It must be so exciting running something like this!”
“It’s a living,” the barker replied.
Abby looks at Jack expectantly. “You in?”
“I loved the diorama last year,” Jack says, frowning. “It was literally the only interesting thing in there.”
Chelsea sighs—no, she SIGHS, and the SIGH floats above the three friends like a rain cloud. Jack looks at her. She stares back. Finally, Jack breaks, chuckling in irritation.
“Aren’t you interested? At least a little?”
“Zero percent,” Jack answers. “I have all the possibilities I need right here.”
Abby coos and squeezes him.
Chelsea shares a look with the barker and shakes her head. “Gross.”
The barker laughs and walks over to the lever. “When I pull this lever, it will reveal to you the mysteries of the vast array of universes out there. Our fantastical machine will wind its way through every possibility, every impossibility, every branch, every chance, in order to show you
your mind.”
Jack scowls. Before he can complain again about skipping the diorama, there’s a soft, mystical twinkling sound. The barker spins twice and slowly opens his hand to reveal a shiny slip of paper. “Voila! Magic!” He steals a look at the paper and his gigantic smile drops. “Huh?”
“Ooh, what is it?” Chelsea asks with bated breath. “Something juicy?”
The barker looks up at the group. “Who is married to who here?”
“This one,” Abby thumbs towards Jack. “He’s mine. I’m Abby.”
The barker looks at Chelsea. “So, you’re…huh?” He offers the printout to Chelsea but pulls it back before she takes it. “Just keep in mind, these are just for entertainment purposes only. We don’t take any responsibility for the results. Our limited liability only covers the licensed use of the multiverse data collection technology—”
what truly lies out there. Are you ready?”
“It’s only three.” He hands his tickets to Chelsea, who collects the rest.
“You won’t regret this! Here you are, my good sir.” Chelsea claps. Her bracelets rattle violently in Jack’s brain. “How fun is this, y’all?”
The barker collects the tickets from the ecstatic Chelsea, jumping up and down. “You’re easily the most excited customer I’ve had all day!” He notices Abby and Jack’s proximity. “You must be looking for true love like those two, huh?”
“No, no, my true love is elsewhere,” Chelsea gushes. “It’s just fun to explore my options. My possibilities, you know.” She turns to the others.
Abby nods. Chelsea claps again. The barker pulls a lever and rubs his hands in anticipation.
“Can you break down how this works?”
The barker motions for Jack to come closer. “Can’t reveal all my secrets. Would you believe…magic?” he whispers.
“Not in the slightest,” Jack whispers back. “I live my life by cold hard facts.”
“Oh, then you should definitely see the multiverse diorama this year. It’s amazing. Makes those ‘cold hard facts’ easier to understand. It’ll blow
The trio freezes as he drones on, looking at each other with growing concern. What is on that paper?
Chelsea is the first to shrug it off. “Yeah, yeah, we get it.” Chelsea wiggles her fingers in anticipation, a hint of worry in her voice. “You’ve got me on pins and needles!”
Everyone gathers around, and even Jack’s curious enough to push up next to Chelsea to see the results. Abby sees why the barker was so flummoxed. She puts her hand over her mouth and gasps.
Jack looks at the paper, then at the barker, who puts his hands up and disappears behind the curtain, mumbling, “That’s all, folks.”
Jack and Chelsea share a look, then stare at the paper some more while Abby laughs and points.
There’s no way to interpret this any differently—in every single alternate universe the technology could detect, Jack and Chelsea are happily married, or at least a couple. There’s
even one where they get married, get divorced, get remarried, get divorced again, and then remarry.
The way this paper reads, their current existence is the only one where they aren’t together.
The ride back from the fair started off normally, but as they near their neighborhood, Abby can’t take it anymore. She gets Richie on the phone via video chat and breaks the big news. Richie practically squeals in delight, his thick glasses bouncing as he laughs.
They point and laugh at their respective spouses, yelling “Oooooooh!” and “you’re in loooooooove!” like they’re in middle school.
Abby comes up with a chant, “Jack and Chelsea sittin’ in a tree… then they’re… goin’ to the chapel and they’re… gonna get marriiiiieeeeed!”
It doesn’t really work, but it just makes her and Richie laugh harder, espe cially after Abby connects Richie to the car’s audio.
Jack is not in on the joke, and he can tell by Chelsea’s face she isn’t either. They try not to look at each other.
“Sure, but, like, it’s not,” Chelsea says. “It’s real, right? Real data?”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, apparently, Abby says I marry some guy named Geoffrey in a few universes. Did not know that about myself. Well, I guess I did kiss Will that one time.”
“That doesn’t count,” Abby says. “That was on a dare.”
“I should call Will. Wonder if he’s gay now. Or bi, or whatever,” Richie says, tapping his chin with his finger. “I bet that kiss was my awakening in those gay universes.”
“I don’t think that you being gay
The group grows silent as the blue streets turn into green suburbs.
The box of newborn kittens Jack and Abby are fostering squeak and peep and beep as they walk into their townhouse. Jack can’t help but grin when he sees them.
“Hello, kitties.” He squats down next to the box. There’s a black one, a gray one, and an orange one. There was a white one, but it died.
“We ought to think about giving them names,” Abby says. “How are they?”
“Cut it out!” Chelsea yells, her face pinched. “Like I would ever.”
“Hey, now,” Jack says, a little hurt.
“Apparently you would!” Abby grabbed Chelsea’s arm and shakes it. “Just imagine the babies. Jack’s giant head with your beautiful blues? Their first words would probably be ‘the spice must flow…’”
Jack tries to catch Richie’s eyes through the phone. “Dude, are you not weirded out by this?”
Richie shakes his head. “Nah, man. It’s just a carney sideshow.”
there means the entire universe is—”
“We’re getting distracted. Jack, I marry Abby in a handful of universes, yeah? Does that not weird you out?”
“Doesn’t bother me a bit,” Abby says, winking at Richie. He finger guns back at her.
“A handful is not every single other universe.” Jack tries to catch Chelsea’s eyes in the rear view mirror, but she isn’t having any part of it.
“Exactly.” Chelsea stares out the window, her eyes flitting to avoid landing on any one thing.
“Is it?” Abby says.
“It’s too soon for names. Too risky.” Jack picks up the black kitten. It chirps louder and purrs. Jack rubs it softly against his cheek. “This one seems good.”
Abby checks the robotic assistant they assigned to watch over the kittens. “I meant this.” She taps a button on the assistant.
“The gray feline’s bladder is 93 percent full,” the assistant announces. “Please empty it immediately.”
“I’ll do it.” Jack puts the black one down and picks up the gray one. The robot moves to grab it from Jack, but he pulls it away.
“Let it do it for you. That’s why we bought the thing.”
“I like to do it myself.”
Abby smiles and stands, kissing Jack on the forehead. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Richie says Portishead is coming to the Tabernacle in a few months.”
“You two enjoy.”
“No interest?”
Jack smiles and looks up at her. “When Slayer comes back, I’m your guy. You and Richie can go to the Depression Fest. Maybe
Chelsea wants to join you.”
“She hates them more than you do. I’m going to get ready for bed. Don’t stay up all night playing with your little buddies again.”
“I’ll try not to.” Jack watches her go, then turns back to the peeping gray kitten. He grabs a Wet Wipe and rubs between the kitten’s legs to get things going. “Come on, buddy, it’s pee time. Do I need to sing the pee-pee song? Okay, I’ll just…” The kitten chirps and the Wet Wipe turns bright yellow. “Guess not. Great job!”
He hugs the kitten tight and puts it back down with the others. They crawl all on top of each other, vying for the best position in the box, occasionally looking up to see if Jack was watching and to squeak at him. The black one tumbles backwards and splats against the side of the box.
Jack waggles his fingers at them as they squirm. He pulls out his phone and checks his messages. A spam email that didn’t get caught by the filter, but otherwise, nothing. No texts from anyone, especially not from Chelsea.
He opens up all their text threads—mostly messages about the two couples getting together, occasionally a joke or two. Three years ago, they had chatted extensively about a work problem. Chelsea was having an argument with a coworker about their website. Jack knew he could help fix it for her, but she declined the offer. Nothing much since. Nothing worth traveling universes for, certainly.
Her car smells like cucumber melon, like she never left the 90s.
It should be raining, he thinks. Talks like this always happen in the rain.
“So.” Chelsea stops playing with them and turns to Jack.
“So?”
“Not gonna ask?”
“Why else would we be here?”
Chelsea flutters her lips. Jack watches spittle land on the dashboard. “What would you and I even talk about?” She plunges her hands into the air like she’s trying to grab onto an idea. Jack has never seen her do this before. “What do those
but-” Chelsea says, turning the air down. “Obviously you’re great for Abby. For Abby. Not for me. Me and Jack? Or Jackie? I wonder if I call you Jack or Jackie. Or Jacks. Or maybe Jacksie.”
“Um. Hopefully, zero of those.”
“I was just sitting at home, and it hit me. We’ve hardly ever shaken hands, or hugged, or pounded it out.”
Jack grins. “Phrasing?”
Chelsea clucks her tongue. “Like, fists, you know, fist-pound, whatever. Quit being a jerk.”
She holds out her fist, and Jack pounds it out. For a brief, insane second, he thinks something magic might happen, that it might turn into something else. But it’s just two platonic friends touching fists. No sparks flew from their fingers or knuckles.
other me and yous do together all day? I wouldn’t have a clue.”
“I don’t know either. Eat. Drink. Be merry…”
The orange one jumps up and bats at one of his fingers before plummeting back to the bottom of the box. Jack laughs and puts the phone down—but it buzzes in his hand.
Jack watches Chelsea fumble with the keys as they sit in her car, parked in an overgrown cul-de-sac near the rear of the neighborhood.
“Yeah, that third one is what I’m wondering about.” She stops fidgeting and sighs. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Are you kidding?” Jack rubs his temple. He can feel a pimple sprouting. “It has to be some sort of ‘magic trick’ like that screaming clown says. I mean, I don’t…not like you…” Yeah, definitely a pimple, maybe two.
“Like, yeah, the same, as a friend,
Chelsea looks at her hand like she was expecting something similar. “Why doesn’t Richie care more about this?” She rubs her fingers, and for the first time, Jack notices she chews the skin around her index fingers.
Why just those fingers? He catches himself wondering which fingers Richie kisses during sex and shakes his head to clear the image. “I don’t know. Abby, too. You’d think they were the ones made for each other.” He sees her staring at his forearms out of the corner of her eye.
“Right. Come on, then.” She fully turns to him, and he notices gold flecks in her left iris, and a freckle on the left side of her neck. He wonders if Richie’s beard tickles her when he nibbles her ear. She sees him looking, and they lock eyes.
“Come on? Come on, what?”
“Pucker up, dummy. Ultimate test. Well, not the ultimate, but I can only beg for forgiveness for so much.”
“No way! No, no way. No. No way.”
“Why else are you here, Jacksie?”
“Don’t-” She’s right though. He looks out the window at the sky—still no rain clouds. He remembers his first kiss with Abby, sitting on the dewy grass by the lake at their old college campus after they had stayed up all night talking. “Do you have any mints?”
Chelsea grabs his face and pulls him in. Their lips touch.
Jack is fourteen, both his legs in casts… she is there every day.
One day in July they kiss. Jack is a sophomore in college. He jumps in the lake… she jumps in after him, laughing and they kiss… Jack is eight and they meet at the park. He shows her a cool spider and they kiss… they are turning thirty and meet at a karaoke bar and duet the Friends song and they kiss… Jack returns home from war and they kiss… he helps her with her poetry and her arm brushes up against his in the hallway again and they kiss… they go on their first date after divorcing their first spouses and Jack sees her on a business trip to North Dakota; the birds fly by their boat and they kiss… she grabs a shared crayon in class… a glance across a crowded nightclub… a late night at an animal clinic… a rainy night downtown… a midnight climb onto the roof… a salty evening on the shore watching the moons dip into the ocean…
Chelsea nods, her face bright red as well. “The kittens. Yeah. How are they?” She starts the car.
“Good. Small. Cute.”
They drive in silence. Finally, Jack breaks it. “I saw a cat. In…that-”
“Me too.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
“Maybe that’s what?”
“It. Our connection.”
“I’m allergic to cats.”
“Oh. I think I knew that…”
Chelsea parks short of Jack and
“Looking for a good new board game for our game night,” Chelsea says. “Any suggestions?”
“Yes, cool! Right this way!”
They follow her to the board game section, Chelsea leading the way. Jack looks at the stacks upon stacks of comic books nearby and wonders how many of those stories are irrelevant now because of the multiverse technology.
“Oh, hey, Abby told me you guys found a home for the gray one?”
Richie looks weird to Jack with his face shaved. He does it once a year for some charity he’s into.
“Yep,” Jack says. “Took longer than we thought. I figured after they could pee and poo by themselves, they’d... Well, they’re all huge now. We might keep one. Popcorn, that’s what we call the orange
“You gave it a name? Now you have to keep it. Them’s the rules.”
“It’s true,” Abby says. “It is a rule.”
Their lips separate. Jack feels Chelsea’s spittle on his upper lip and licks it off with a trembling tongue. For a brief second, he swears there’s a bright light on her face, but he blinks and it’s gone.
“What…what the…” he stammers. Chelsea grabs him and pulls him in for another kiss. No magic this time. The kiss ends, and they stare at each other.
Jack’s face feels like it’s on fire. “I need to get back. The kittens, they, ah, need me.”
Abby’s house. No sign of movement inside. Jack considers another kiss for a second but lets it go. He steps out of the car and closes the door as quietly as he can. He pretends to tip an invisible hat to her. She forces a smile and waves as she drives past. He walks the rest of the way home.
A soft bell dings as the foursome walks into the comic book shop. The smell of plastic, old paper, and a faint patina of dust falls over them.
“Welcome to Infinite Realities,” the hip young woman at the counter says. “Need any help?”
They reach the board game section, boxes of all shapes and sizes and colors. There are nine different versions of Monopoly and five versions of Life. One of the Life games is a multiverse variation, letting you pop into other realities to try other lives. However, it plays exactly like every other version of Life.
“Here we are. This is the latest thing. It’s blowing up, now.” The hip young lady picks up a bright red box featuring bright spots of light with the title Exploring The Elsewhere. The spots of light look familiar to Jack. “Based on the game show, of course.”
Jack takes the box from her. “Does it work… like, for real?”
“Supposedly. I haven’t played it myself. But it’s supposed to be a miniature version of the tech. Real accurate data with something like five million compatible universes.”
Jack remembers the barker from
the fair. ‘It’s a living,’ he said. Not anymore. “That sounds awesome. We should get this.”
Chelsea grabs the box from him and put it back on the shelf. “Absolutely not. What else do you have?”
“Wait, why not? Doesn’t it interest you…you guys were so hot on this at the fair. Not anymore?” Jack asks. “It’s played out, isn’t it?” Richie says.
“Yeah, it’s boring, babe. I’m surprised you’re even interested,” Abby says. She points to a shelf filled with yellow boxes. “What’s this one over here?”
The group walks over to the other shelf. Chelsea steals a look at Jack, who steals one back, look ing for something in her eyes. She shakes her head.
“This game is too fun,” the young lady says, picking up the yellow box. “It’s cooperative, so you get to play together.”
“That sounds great!” Chelsea says as she claps. Her voice now feels like it’s draped in velvet. Her bracelets tinkle like wind chimes.
Jack tries to look inter ested, but his attention keeps returning to the red box with its many splashes of light, thick with possibili ties. He walks back over and picks it up, flipping it around to read the back. “The Power of Every Possibility in Every Spin.” The hip lady was off—it uses data from over six million compatible universes.
against it now?”
“I’m not. I just don’t want to buy into… it seems…disrespectful.”
“Disrespectful of what? Of who?”
“You know. Come on, just put it back. None of us want it, anyway.” She picks a piece of lint off of his shirt.
“Hey!” Abby says as she and Richie run over with the black box. “We like this one. Says it’ll take hours to play. Probably hours to set up, too.”
“Good question,” Abby says. “Did you decide if you want to see the opener or not?”
“It’s some Mooninite band. I’m not super into their type of music, but it’s up to you, fellow Portisfan.”
“I still don’t get why you two like that band,” Jack says. “Who wants to be sad for two hours?”
“Me and Abby, that’s who!” Richie says. “Ooh, and they have the reissued Marvel cards!” He grabs a few packs and tosses them on the counter with the board game.
“You can come with us if you want…” Abby says, pinching Jack’s arm. “It’s okay to be jealous.”
Suddenly, Chelsea is there. “I thought we decided we weren’t getting this.”
“I think that’s what you decided. I’m just looking.” Jack looks up to see Richie and Abby checking out some giant black box with a monstrous face full of teeth on the front. He lowers his voice. “Why are you so
“Perfect.” Chelsea grabs the red box out of Jack’s hands, puts it down with conviction, grabs the black box, and jogs to the checkout before either can respond.
Abby smiles at Jack. “You seemed into that one, babe. Did you want to get it, too?”
“No.” Jack ushers her and Richie up to the front with Chelsea. “No, you’re right. Totally played out.”
“I don’t know,” Richie says. “Now I’m wondering what Portishead sounds like in other universes. Or any band, for that matter.”
“Nobody is jealous.” Jack pretends to look through a barrel of dice near
Chelsea finishes paying. “The “Huh?” Richie asks.
“Portishead. I’m sure they sound the same in every universe. I don’t think things change as much as we think.” She gives the bag of goodies to Richie.
“Agreed,” Jack says.
“Hmm. We got everything?”
“Yes,” Chelsea says. “I’m ready to go.”
They say their goodbyes to the hip woman who helped them. Jack lets the door ease closed, so it doesn’t slam. Still, he hears the jingle of the bell from the other side. They drive home in Chelsea’s car, which Jack now realizes smells like fresh linen. As they pull into their neighborhood, he pulls out his phone and orders a copy of Exploring The Elsewhere through his Rainforest account, making sure they ship it to his office instead of their home.
As the others happily chat, Jack looks out the window, his world blurring as a sudden thunderstorm rolls through.
By
The Planetary Communiqué is a section reserved for the dissemination of official intergalactic communications from our galactic overlords to the subjugated planets and territories. The editorial staff does not endorse or hold opinions regarding the content of such communications. Frankly, we lost several of them who did! Therefore, Hojack requires compliance with all opinions and edicts issued by the Galactic potentate and its politburo.
Once more, Earthlings, you’ve confused science with stagecraft. From the trembling balcony of his ion-wreathed palace, Overlord Grawth commanded, “Activate ridicule thrusters,” as your latest drama in public health unfolded: the sudden beheading of your Center for Disease Control, executed with all the finesse of a guillotine built by interns.
Imagine Hippocrates arm-wrestling P.T. Barnum in a pit of hand sanitizer, and you’ll begin to approximate the spectacle. For there, in the corridors of supposed science, your freshly minted CDC director lasted fewer weeks than a fruit fly in a pesticide trial—ousted not for corruption, but for insisting that vaccines should be guided by data rather than
the vibrations of political whimsy.
She called it “evidence-based medicine.” We called it “a punchline in a hazmat suit.”
Hojack Was Momentarily Catatonic
Your species, ever inventive in its ability to dismantle its own safety nets, promptly replaced the banished director with a man whose
résumé reads less like epidemiology and more like “summer camp finance committee.” In protest, your scientists fled the building en masse, leaving laboratories as deserted as a disco after curfew. One by one, the stewards of your immune defenses clicked “logout” in solidarity, while the new appointee declared his first public health initiative would be to “streamline morale.”
The collapse was, as always, wrapped in absurdity:
• A resignation letter that read more like a hostage note.
• A walkout staged to the soundtrack of printer alarms and unanswered phones.
• And, most movingly, the sight of a government official insisting on “trusting the vibes” during a measles uptick.
Our diplomatic core briefly mistook it for
experimental theater.
According to Earth pundits (whom we observe chiefly as enrichment for our pet krakens), the purge was designed to “restore trust in public health.” Instead, it restored our faith in your bottomless capacity for chaos. One minister hailed the shake-up as “a triumph of common sense over bureaucracy,” while nurses across your nation quietly began updating their résumés.
Meanwhile, actual disease control falters. Clinical trials sit untended. Outbreak surveillance is staffed by interns armed with clipboards. And somewhere in Atlanta, a half-finished pandemic playbook flutters through abandoned cubicles like a ghost of competence.
Edicts from Grawth
In recognition of Earth’s ongoing campaign against its own respiratory tracts, the Galactic Authority now proclaims the following edicts.
Edict of Epidemiological Eligibility
Leaders of health agencies must possess more than a passing familiarity with biology. “Once dated a microbiologist” does not suffice.
Edict of Viral Veto
Firing your scientists during an outbreak is now classified as interstellar sabotage. Penalty: compulsory viewing of your own Senate hearings.
Cease coating your tanks in reflective paint. Our orbital sensors read your parade as an incoming solar flare and almost evacuated Sector 9.
Henceforth, all catastrophic dismissals must be accompanied by a soothing playlist. Hojack suggests whale song, though he fears nothing can drown the sound of your coughing.
And so, from the sterile nebulae to the fevered swamps of your capital, we extend our latest reminder: pandemics are not pageants, and contagion cannot be filibustered. Should you attempt to replace epidemiology with interpretive dance, we will be watching. Shaking. Filing intergalactic malpractice claims.
Grawth juggled Saturn and decided to make the rings disappear to Earthlings., I persuaded him the conspiracy theories would be far more interesting than a starting a new pandemic. He preferred to send a virus down from the Horse head nebula, just to see the HHS bozos dancing around. But it was already too late.
Earthlings, please bow your heads and wish Hojack resilience. If I, Grawth, linger here too long, my laughter alone may sterilize your biosphere. It has happened before, in systems equally allergic to reason.
End transmission.
by Keith 'Doc' Raymond
It is our pleasure to interview Hannu Rajaniemi today. Born in Ylivieska Finland, he matriculated in string theory at the University of Oulu and earned a PhD in mathematical physics at the University of Edinburgh, where he joined the writer's block. His short story, Deus X Hominus, caught the attention of John Gerald, who arranged a three book deal for him with Gollancz.
This led to the Jean Le Flambeur Trilogy. These books fascinated me with his next level science fiction. We'll talk briefly about them before discussing his latest book, Darkome today. He lives in Corte Madera, California and is the CEO of Helix Nano Technologies in Oakland.
knew I was getting into something special in The Quantum Thief when it opens with Jean killing himself in prison to start his day over and
over again, day in and day out. What inspired you to create the character and was there a single moment in your life where Jean materialized, even though you had the three book deal, and why did you carry on?
Where did Jean come from? The origin of the dilemma was pretty clear. Somewhat inspired by a book by Robert Axelrod that I read called, the Evolution of Corporation, which is a classic text in applying game theory to all kinds of situations. There's a specific point in the book which explores the prisoner's dilemma.
It arises in all kinds of situations. One quite striking example is trench warfare in World War I. A moment between the British and the Germans. This phenomenon of spontaneous, ceasefires emerged, without any communication between them. Just through this iteration of somebody popping up from the trench on the other side, at a certain time of day, do you shoot them or not?
Somehow through these repeated interactions, this kind of collaborative strategy emerged. Axelrod’s key result appears to be reiterated in the prisoner's dilemma.
There is this evolution towards a collaborative equilibrium. Axelrod ran these computational tournaments in the seventies to show what kinds of strategies emerged as the winners. His dominant strategy was something called ‘tit for tat,’ which is you always punish the opponent if their effect on you during the last round gave harm.
Then I read another, a paper by, the late great Freeman Dyson, on the prisoner's dilemma strategy, involving being able to manipulate your opponent through such repeated interactions. If you were able to simulate them better. Then they could simulate you.
And that led to the idea of the old defector. The sort of being who can always trick you into thinking they're going to collaborate. So that was the conceptual underpinnings. But, but that wasn't where Jean came from. I think. I just started to imagine a world where we have simulated minds and we have uploads.
So what would prisons look like? And then this idea of this tendency for agents in repeated prisoners' dilemmas to evolve towards a corporation kinda struck me as
an interesting way that, a very advanced civilization might want to try to slowly evolve certain present minds to be more collaborative.
Then I started wondering about what kind of person would they put in there? Who would actually be the prisoners? And that's kind of where the genre spontaneously popped into existence. And of course, he has ancestry very strongly in Arsalan, who I was a big fan of. Like Mariel Blanks, the gentleman Thief, who I was a big fan of when I was a teenager.
I think Blanks sort of settled in my subconscious, and I generated Jean from this question of if there was this kind of futuristic prison, who would be the prisoners?
Throughout the trilogy, you bandy about terms like gogols, zoku, exo memory, pellegrini, and there's a whole slew of other concepts that complicate understanding.
Did you consider maybe a glossary to define these terms for the benefit of the reader at the end of the novel, or did you just want the readers to define and visualize it for themselves?
I think more the latter. The glossary point came up a few times, with Gollancz and, I guess, I wouldn't now be opposed to some kind of annotated version.
But the effect I think I wanted to create was more and this obviously was not always successful for all the readers, but I kind of wanted the story to just carry the reader along and try to train them to accept that there were going to be these concepts that they actually need to imagine. They didn't necessarily have to fully understand, but they could piece together over the course of the story. The definitions as a kind of detective story within the detective story, for themselves. I do think this is one of the plea-
sures of science fiction, being able to unpick the world and learn the rules of the world and puzzle it out.
Kind of like what we do in science.
In the last book of the series, The Causal Angel, the story has shifted. Focus from Jean to Mieli. Mieli is a winged Oortian from the first novel who broke John outta prison, with her ship Perhonen, to serve the
Pellegrini and specifically Josephine Pellegrini.
We don't find out until late in the second book how Mieli is engaged in the great game. Probably the best part of the book which also is featured on the cover is the Zoku Gun Club on Iapetus. How long did it take you to come up with all the weapons in the arsenal? Only to destroy them as a diversion to escape with another ship.
I got so excited and then, bam, they're gone.
Yeah, well there is a character called Kova. Right? So there is a deliberate reference to Chekhov’s gun. I don't think it took very long to come up with the actual weapons. That was sort of more like, generating lists. Which I enjoy. These random ideas aren't necessarily fleshed out in great
detail. I don't think it took very long. That's kind of pretty much the time that the writing of that chapter took. I didn't go back and add more things there.
So after the trilogy closed, you were busy with your startup and writing Summerland. Summerland has a similar feel to the Night Land by William Pope Hodgson. Was this a transition novel for you? An experiment in mystery and detective writing or something else? Was there a specific goal or were you preparing for Darkome?
I don't think it was a deliberate transition work. I was already thinking about Darkome or the themes that ended up in Darkome, when I was writing Summerland
As I was getting deeper into biology. I intend to just follow, my curiosity and obsession. There was a trigger text in the case of Summerland, which was while I was reading, John Gray's book, The Immortal Commission.
It’s quite a striking account of the parallels between, the late 19th century, early 20th century obsession of spiritualism, in upper class British society, and then also in parallel, how the cosmological and mystical trends were present in the early Soviet Union.
When they planned to build a tomb for Lenin. It was supposed to be a projection of a hyper cube. And there was this actual group called the God Builders who wanted to start a new religion around Lenin. On the British side, like at the very highest levels of British society, the prime Minister, at the time, Arthur Balfour and his circle were genuinely convinced that they were getting messages from the afterlife, and from these very advanced beings who were able to engineer souls.
They used Balfour's group as a vehicle to deliver this messiah to the world, to save the world from chaos. This actually led to the birth of Balfour's son. He then had
an affair with another member of the Circle, and she gave birth to this, young man called Henry Coombe-Tennant. He was not the Messiah, but he joined MI 5.
Coombe-Tennant actually worked briefly with Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge five, as a Soviet mole. So all these things kind of got mixed up in my head and it seemed that there was such rich material there that it was hard not to resist working on it.
So these stories and novels have this quite. biological nature to them. They grow inside you and then at some point they want them to come out. You just need to be a vehicle for them. So yeah, I don't think it was deliberately like, I have this bigger thing to write, so I'm going to write this thing first.
It was more like, this story wanted to get out now.
I'd like to turn now to your latest novel Darkome, which I really enjoyed, I think it is fantastic. Here the reader is now on familiar ground, a near future Oakland, California, close to your heart and ours.
It allows us a window into your business. Tell us about your mRNA research and what you hope to accomplish at Helix Nano.
Yeah. So I think the core problems that we've been working on for some time now is really how do we interface with the immune system? How do we augment the immune system?
There's this interesting, parallel one can draw between the brain and the immune system. Both are very much information processing systems. Our brain is plugged into our sensory input, visual, auditory, etcetera. And everything else. It essentially translates those sensory inputs into actions.
And there's a lot of processing that happens in the middle, but ultimately the brain tells us how to act based on the information we receive. It's exactly the same with the immune system. The immune system is constantly monitoring all our tissues, all the entry points into our bodies, our bloodstream, looking for, and constantly receiving information.
So it's constantly encountering things that might be foreign or might not be. The only difference is that the information comes directly in this molecular form. It's like you have these immune cells that recognize shapes. Biological molecules that translate those sensory inputs into actions through intermediate processing steps.
Here, the processing happens in a much more distributed fashion. We have some local nodes, like the thymus or lymph nodes, where slightly more centralized processing happens, but it's a much more distributed system.
You can really think of it as a kind of liquid brain. And there's really very clear evolutionary similarities also, or like evolutionary connections between the neuronal synapses and the immunological synapses. So we've been pretty much
successful with computers in terms of augmenting our cognitive capabilities.
The core question is can we do the same for the immune system? In many ways we already have. You can think of vaccines as a very rudimentary interface to the immune system because what a vaccine is, it's simply a traditional interaction. Educating the system to acknowledge an entire virus or bacteria.
You say, okay, here's something you should be prepared for. In the case of mRNA vaccines, a protein-based sub-unit of the vaccines, you, pick the right part of the virus. You know, some of these other parts of virus are just decoys and you should ignore them.
Here is the key part that you need to generate a response against it. Whether it's an antibody response, or a killer T-cell response. We've identified and done that cognitive work, that information processing work upfront often computationally, in the lab of like, that says here is the right part of the virus for the immune system to react to.
Then we also try to attach some sort of danger signal to it, to get the immune system to pay attention to it. In this case mRNA. So far the most sophisticated way of doing this, gives the immune system a lot of information in the form of mRNA because traditional vaccines have these severe limitations in terms of what can you actually manufacture.
It's quite a complex process to make an actual virus, and it’s fairly laborious to make an individual part of the virus as a protein. Yet we know how to do it. But if you wanted to, for example, to make a protein vaccine that
includes like a hundred different versions of the COVID spike protein that would be incredibly difficult.
The mRNA shortcuts the manufacturing piece because it programs our own cells to make the active ingredients. You can encode a lot more information in mRNA, almost an arbitrary amount of information. There's this beautiful overhang between what the immune system can do and what our technologies can do.
At any given time, we have something like 10 to the 12 different kinds of circulating immune cells that can respond to that many different targets. Like that's the bandwidth. Capacity. That's the channel capacity. And, you know, we make a flu vaccine might have four things in it.
So a typical COVID vaccine has one thing in it. This provides a vast overhang technologically that is, from the immune system point of view, available to us. We can use the power of the immune system to intervene in all kinds of areas of human health in much more powerful ways than we have even started to envision.
In terms of doing it, we just announced a partnership with a company that has developed a micro-needle delivery platform which is conceptually very similar to what we see in my novel Darkome
While it doesn't do real time manufacturing, the delivery part is really like this kind of patch you apply. We have one clinical next generation COVID vaccine candidate that we're gonna test with that platform. And then also look at basically, how we can help global vaccine access combining our mRNA technology with that delivery system.
Currently, which I'm quite excited about, we are trying to develop, vaccines that work even for the most vulnerable patients. One population that has been quite under served by vaccines are individuals who are on some form of immunosuppressive medication where the most severely affected group are organ transplant recipients, like kidney transplant recipients.
And they are, they are particularly vulnerable to all infections. But there are some specific viruses that are particularly bad for them.
One being something called the human polyoma virus or BKV, which is actually a leading cause for organ rejection.
There are no vaccines, currently against it. Vaccines typically don't work for those under immunosuppressive medication. We now have a program under development for a very potent vaccine targeting that virus, to prevent, a sizable number of organ rejections
So how do we program the immune system, whether it's to protect against more common respiratory infections or organ rejection? We have also done quite a bit of cancer vaccine research work.
Those are some of the key themes we are working on at Helix Nanotechnologies..
Do you believe that there are DIY geneticists out there? And have you been approached by them? You know, like with the group that's hacking the genome in the enclaves individually, like in Darkome And if so, what advantages and disadvantages would they have over established research centers?
Yeah. They’re absolutely out there and even before I wrote Darkome, I interacted with them quite a bit. Like one person who I don't think minds, being shared. Joe Zaner, who very publicly early on used CRISPR himself on stage at a conference and then sort of developed these other DIY genome editing. There, you know, there’s a very powerful movement of, community biologists, which have these conferences yearly, organized by my friend David Kong. I've attended them several times. There you have young people from all over the world trying to figure out how to use emerging technologies.
For example, synthetic biology to solve the problems their communities have. There's a wonderful plant biologist called Steven Cova in New York. He’s transformed his kitchen into a very advanced molecular biology lab utilizing used equipment. So they're absolutely out there.
There are even people who have done things like attempt DIY cancer vaccines to treat themselves. They are now using research grade peptides. Purchased from somewhat shady manufacturers. The peptides aren't necessarily clinically approved that people self experiment with.
There are big online communities around those. So it's absolutely a real thing. And I think there are challenges, along with advantages? The advantages include, you can experiment on humans if you are willing to do self experiments.
That has a long tradition in science and literature. It speeds up the more traditional drug development path, wherein you are stuck with this long expensive journeys going from different disease models to eventually clinical trials.
And that can take a long time. And you may also be misled by the animal studies or in vitro studies. I think it has to do with a lot of these people just thinking about problems that the mainstream scientific community might not consider.
They may not be working to cure disease. They might just like, want to, explore something interesting. Like the furry community who very deliberately are trying to give themselves animal like qualities. They have various basic research plans on how to actually do that.
And there are some pretty modest versions of those things in progress They are actually within reach technologically. So there's this kind of expansion of an idea space that I think is quite inherent in the wider community, which I think is great. It is a challenge without the kind of research infrastructure that you can build up in an academic setting.
In a biotech company, it is hard to do more complex things. You need the equipment, you need to be able to order, all kinds of reagents. There are community labs that support the hobbyists groups to do that. Which actually gives the movement an inherently
community nature, which is mentioned in Darkome as well.
That’s sort of easier to do these things as a group rather than as a complete individual.
So difficult as a lone wolf. I'm gonna introduce a little bit of the book so that people who haven't read it will know the
protagonist, Nora, in Darkome suffers from Li-Fraumeni syndrome. It's a familial disorder associated with a P 53 mutation.
It predisposes carriers to a broad spectrum of cancers. This is straight out of the news in Nature Magazine, and Nora's mother has already died from cancer because of the mutation, despite her attempts to treat it. The novel's background takes place after decades of plagues requiring a rapid response to infection.
The answer comes from the Aspic Corporation, which you alluded to in your previous answer. They designed a vaccine gauntlet, kind of a life saving bracelet, which addresses cancer, viruses, and bacteria. The anti-science advocates, and even antivaxxers, have issues with this
technology. Ethical questions are raised. these were all things you explored in the book, so you posed the question, but what are your answers to these pressing issues?
I think the book and its sequel, that I'm working on now are attempts for myself to work through these questions. I think it's very difficult to answer these questions. We are developing these technologies so we, have the power to fundamentally alter human nature and our own biology.
Then there is this question of control, who should be able to define what being human means? Should we have the freedom to do it ourselves? And who do we trust to do that for us, if it's not us? Like other technologies, we are effectively now delegating much of the authority. Who gets to define our informational landscape and how much are we willing to release our cognitive selves to the big tech companies.
Traditionally, a lot of medical regulation is the realm of governments and other major public health organizations. The one thing I appreciated about the origins of the anti-vaxxer movement when I dug into them, is you know, obviously its gotten mixed up with all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories.
But at the core of it is actually some sort of relatable impulse about around bodily autonomy and wanting to not hand over the keys of your body to someone else. Even if that gets mixed up with various misguided notions and misinformation.
I'm kind of sympathetic to that particular impulse that we should have some individual control here. Having agency, not just with our
biology, but everything else. If you then have power over your own biology, you also have power over the biology of others because the democratization of biology leads to the kinds of risks individuals are being able to create. They become bio weapons, carriers of viruses with pandemic potential.
That is very real and a growing risk I think about a lot. This is even further amplified by AI tools because they can both give you very detailed instructions on what to do and also start to initiate a very high human level of expertise.
It threads the landscape then speaks for some sort of centralized points of control. Leading to access the most powerful biological technologies. I hope that we strike a balance between safety and individual freedom.
Where exactly that balance is. I don’t know. In Darkome I at least try to present both sides of that argument. And maybe like an interesting point I studied while out writing the book, from my point of view, we should be able to control our biology and do anything we want with it.
But as I wrote it, I actually became more sympathetic. Not fully, but I became more sympathetic to the point of view of the Aspis corporation and her founder Amanda Sha, who you know does basically worry about uncontrolled proliferation of these technologies. Possibly leading to human extinction.
The sequel, I’m currently writing, deals with trying to see what emerges from this tension.
Darkome is a rather advanced book for the average reader, and it requires an
understanding of college level genetics. Does it concern you that you may lose readers who do not have any scientific background?
I don't think it requires understanding of college level genetics. It's fair enough maybe with The Quantum Thief, where you can create this sense of trust that you don't need to understand all these details to, just enjoy the
story.
In parts of the book, it works. Maybe not perfectly always, but my goal has been to write it in such a way that, if you don't have that background, then you don't need to worry about getting it all too much.
But if you do have that background or if you're willing to begin a little more, then there's a whole another level you actually uncover. And I’ve received an enthusiastic response from people who have life science backgrounds. But also from people who haven't worried about that other layer too much.
So I do like to try to build in some Easter eggs as I did with The Quantum Thief. If you want to dig in, there's a little more there than might appear.
I really enjoy books that encourage you to learn.
That's what I found in The Quantum Thief and in Darkome. I look forward to reading the a sequel to Darkome. One of the concerns I have is, has any of your funding been crippled by the research grants you may have received from the US government? Or are you more independent?
We are primarily privately backed. However, we have some government funding, but that's the RFK Jr killing All BARDA funding into mRNA, It is such a spectacular own goal, but it didn't really affect us.
Great. That's good news. I have a feeling he wants to bring back leeches.
The unfortunate reality is that we are probably on the eve of a flu pandemic and the programs that were the best at measuring the virus, to counter it have been shut down. So we’re entering an interesting time.
Hopefully not a decade of plagues.
I agree. It's almost like you're foreseeing it, which is what science fiction does. It gives us a warning of what’s to come. So thank you for meeting with me and with the SavagePlanet's readers and discussing your books and research. And congratulations on your new family member.
Entering his or her first year in 2025. We wish you all the success and luck going forward and eagerly await your next book. Thanks again.
by Keith 'Doc' Raymond
The rituals we ascribe to the act of death and dying we design to assuage grief in the living. Grief has a multiplicity of presentations, almost to the point of it being individual. Some like to see the body, others can’t imagine doing so. Working in an emergency department, I’ve seen all kinds of grief, from inappropriate laughter to rolling on the ground in tears. David Cronenberg, in his latest film and perhaps his last, The Shrouds, takes grief to a whole new level.
David completed The Shrouds in his early eighties. Some critics think David created The Shrouds to honor his wife Cassandra, who passed away in 2017. But this film is more, much more, and like all his films it stretches the imagination.
Cronenberg's creation of the body horror subgenre inspired others, or they emulated it in making their own films. However, body horror was often a platform for him to envision his own version of science fiction. David was and is an enthusiast of science fiction since he was a boy, when he curled up and read Astounding, Galaxy, and The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction magazines, among others
Still, he has had incredible commercial success as an independent filmmaker. Films such as Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, and Dead Ringers made him a household name. These cult classics remain in our nightmares, and still have repeat viewing potential, without appearing out of date.
In a previous article I talked about his film, Crimes of the Future, but The Shrouds take us in a completely new direction. Here, Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud. The shroud itself is radioactive, and provides an 8K view of the dead. A software program connects to the deceased through the shroud, allowing grieving individuals to view their loved ones' decay on their cellphones or at the grave site equipped with viewing screens on the headstones.
The designated family member alone can access the encrypted program. Not even the webmaster or Karsh, as the owner, can view it. The actors in the film are
famous in Europe, but not mostly known in the US. Vincent Cassel, a French actor, plays Karsh. Diane Kruger, a German, plays multiple roles as Karsh’s deceased wife, her twin sister, Terry, and Hunny, Karsh’s AI personal assistant. Guy Pearce, born in the UK, but raised in Australia, plays Karsh’s webmaster, and as the antagonist, locks up the system.
The film opens with Karsh meeting a woman from a dating app. They are having lunch at his restaurant, next to his cybernetic cemetery. He asks Myrna, ‘How dark are you willing to go?’ And she answers, “I can go dark.” But she doesn’t realize that he will show her his dead wife decaying in her grave in 8K resolution. Even she can’t imagine such a dark infatuation with grief, and makes a hasty retreat.
The film takes us into the near future where self driving Tesla’s are common. Business people have their own digital assistant AI. And they close deals remotely via Zoom, or another platform, except in 3D. In one of those deals, Karsh wishes to expand his GraveTech globally, and arranges the opportunity with a Hungarian
business magnate, wanting to be buried in a GraveTech burial plot. The Hungarian, in exchange, will fund a GraveTech cemetery in Budapest.
To research the validity of his investment and ultimate interment, the Hungarian CEO sends his blind wife, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), to meet Karsh. Their relationship advances into the sexual. A complete surprise to Karsh.
This excites Terry, Becca’s twin, and sister, and she decides to sleep with Karsh as well. More importantly, she reveals to Karsh, Becca had a long-standing affair with a Dr. Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman). At first, he was a mentor to her when she was a student, and later her oncologist. Karsh believes Eckler was experimenting on her during her treatment as she had extensive amputations before her death. Terry was also Maury’s ex-wife following a difficult divorce. Maury tells Karsh not to sleep with Terry because she’s psychotic.
In the meantime, Karsh has called in Maury to break the lockout on GraveTech’s system. He said he couldn’t do it, when in fact, he did it. Maury presents several scenarios about who is responsible— eco-terrorists, Russians, Chinese—but to find out the truth, you'll have to see the film to see how it unfolds; there are more surprises to come.
As a body horror film, The Shrouds is likely the most tame of his collection. The disfigurements are mostly realistic rather than gratuitous. We see a human in the last phase of her life slowly torn apart, both physically and psychologically. Karsh’s obsession ‘ only made this darker, as he wants ‘to crawl into the grave with her.’ Instead, he comes up with a business model so he can watch her decay.
If David Cronenberg had only
made body horror films, he might be forgotten. In the first ten years of the millennia, however, he made several drama films. A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, the often overlooked A Dangerous Method about Carl Jung, and Cosmopolis. The latter was about a son’s limo drive across town to get a haircut with his mob boss father.
One movie he wrote and directed, which is rarely mentioned, is Crash in 1996. Notorious for being banned in the UK. Still,
it won the Special Jury prize at the 1996 Cannes Film festival, a rarely offered award.
Crash is about a cult of people erotically aroused by car crashes, especially if they are in them. James Ballard (James Spader), a film producer, has an open marriage with his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). They are both dissatisfied with their conquests.
One night, while driving home from work, James's car collides head-on with another, killing its male passenger. While trapped
in the fused wreckage, Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), the passenger and the dead driver’s wife, exposes a breast to James as she removes the shoulder harness of her seat belt. This jolts him from pain to arousal.
During his recovery, James meets Helen again and also encounters Robert Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who shows a keen interest in the brace holding James's shattered leg together. After departing the hospital, Helen and James begin an affair, driven primarily by their shared experience of the car crash. They attend one of Vaughan's cult-like performance pieces, where he meticulously recreates the car crash that killed James Dean using replica cars and stunt drivers.
It’s a study in extremes, and perhaps it’s banning in the UK was to avoid copycat cult groups from pursuing the same avenue and harming innocent civilians. Still, the film asks and addresses questions about normal and abnormal sexual practices. And it’s definitely worth the ride if you can find it.
The Shrouds was first screened in the Main Competition section at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2024. It also played at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2024Ultimately, they nominated the film for the Palm d’Or in 2024.
Sphere Films theatrically released it in Canada on April 25, 2025. Pyramide Distribution released it theatrically in France on April 30, 2025, after reportedly being pushed back from a release in January 2025. Sideshow and Janus Films released the film in the United States. The Shrouds opened on April 18 in New York and Los Angeles, and expanded nationwide on April 25, 2025.
If you’re ready for something different this year, The Shrouds may be a place to start.
by Keith 'Doc' Raymond
If you're an ardent follower of the cinematic universe of SavagePlanets, then you're no stranger to the hype that's been building around The Assessment film. The much-anticipated movie is finally here, and it's safe to say that it has, in many ways, lived up to expectations.
The film, set in the not-so-distant future, only explains, rather than explores, a dystopian world where climate change and resource depletion have pushed humanity to the brink. It is called the ‘old world.’ The premise is indeed a familiar one, but what sets The Assessment apart is its thought-provoking narrative and nuanced character development. In this future, the fortunate few gets to live in the ‘new world’, a distant planet terraformed and in the process to accommodate more.
The government has taken control of nearly every aspect of human life. They have culled all pets as an example, to save valuable food resources. The government returns any individual or group rebelling against authority back to the old world. Most likely to struggle and starve. The new world is
a chance for the elite to preserve humanity.
The story revolves around the Assessment, a government-mandated test aimed at determining the worth of an individual to society, based on their skills, intelligence, and contribution. The test, taken at 25, determines the future of every citizen and their potential to procreate. In the film, the writer (Dave Thomas) uses this interesting concept effectively to drive the narrative, creating a gripping picture of a ruthless, survival-of-the-fittest society that quantifies and categorizes human worth. The reward is that the couple who successfully pass the Assessment may have a child born via an extra-uterine gestation and birth.
The protagonist, a young woman named Mia (Elizabeth Olsen), stands as the embodiment of defiance and resilience. She refuses to be defined by the Assessment, displaying a spirit of rebellion that is both inspiring and harrowing. She is a botanist, whose research facility is a glass house on their property in the new world where she grows the couple’s food, and genetically manipulates plants to create increased and sustainable
food sources for society.
Despite her defiance (they sent her mother to the old world for rebelling), she wants a child. The film does an excellent job of capturing her struggle, navigating the complex dynamics of a dystopian society while wrestling with her own personal demons during the Assessment.
Her husband, Aaryan (Himesh Patel) is a virtual pet designer. His production of purchasable virtual pets in the old world was so valued by the government that he and his assistant, Mia, could live in the new world as a married couple. A transparent dome protects their ocean-side home, lowering the radiation level and controlling the climate.
The film's world-building is nothing short of impressive. The portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world is stark and chilling, with the remnants of our current society serving as haunting reminders of a time when humanity was not so ruthlessly ranked and sorted. The cinematography, with its desolate landscapes, hints at the horrors of the old world and significantly adds to the movie's overall dystopian feel.
What really sets The Assessment apart, however, is its exploration of the human condition. The test delves into the psyche of individuals living on the edge, forced to confront the harsh realities of parenting and the cost of reproduction. And indeed, we should administer this test to prospective parents; as we daily witness the tragic consequences of such failures.
The assessor Virginia (Alicia Vikander) takes the challenge of parenting to a whole new level. Ms. Vikander, known primarily as an action star, should earn an Oscar for her portrayal. She shows the depth and breadth of her acting skills, as she becomes a toddler, a preteen, and a teenager as she pushes the couple’s buttons during their one week long assessment. Aaryan repeatedly tells Mia to remain calm, as she needs to show her patience and resilience to the assessor's parenting challenges.
It's a film that makes you think, posing questions about the nature of our society, the value of a human life, and the lengths to which we would go to survive.
The other performances in the film are commendable. The actors, especially the lead, have delivered powerful performances that do justice to their complex characters. There's an intensity to their portrayals that captures the desperation and hope of a family, and indeed a society, on the brink.
The film, however, is not without its flaws. There are moments when the narrative feels disjointed, and the pacing could have been tighter. Some characters feel underdeveloped, their motivations unclear. These are minor issues, however, that don't significantly detract from the overall impact of the film.
The first real challenge Aaryan and Mia face is an impromptu dinner party. The evening devolves into a series of awkward and revealing conversations, with guests challenging the couple's readiness for parenthood. This event highlights their differing coping mechanisms under social scrutiny and intensifies the existing tensions.
Minnie Driver plays Evie, a one hundred and fifty-three-year-old woman who tells them of the bad old days, and how they are still around in the old world. Indira Varma plays Ambika, Aaryan’s mother, who continually embarrasses him and reveals things to Mia Aaryan hid from her. And
then, of course, there is a success story of a couple with their own ten-year-old kid, who Virginia ignores as she plays a naughty nine-year-old.
Two more incidents shatter Mia's and Aaryan’s relationship. To see what follows, including some more plot twists, you’ll need to see the film. Unlike most science fiction films, there is no CGI. However, the film does not shy away from showing the harsh realities
of both the new world and the old. This results in some scenes that are both visually stunning and emotionally charged, while leaving a great deal to the viewer's imagination.
The score, composed by an upand-coming artist, is a standout. It enhances the film's atmosphere, adding layers of tension and emotion to the narrative. The music effectively complements the visuals, creating a cohesive cinematic experience.
The Assessment had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2024. That month, Amazon Prime Video bought the international rights outside Germany for the film. The film opened in the United States on March 21, 2025. Distributors later released the film on Digital on April 8, 2025.
So, is The Assessment worth the watch?
Absolutely.
Despite its minor flaws, The Assessment is a thought-provoking film that offers an intriguing exploration of a dystopian future and the inner conflicts of those living in a totalitarian society. It's a film that encourages its audience to think, to question, and to ponder the value of human life. It is a high concept, and low tech, a film that challenges us to consider what it means to be human, and what it means to survive.
In conclusion, The Assessment is a cinematic experience that's definitely worth your time. It's a film that packs a punch, delivering a compelling story, powerful performances, and stunning visuals. It's a film that leaves you thinking long after the credits roll. So, if you're a fan of thought-provoking narratives and dystopian futures, then The Assessment is a film you don't want to miss.
By Mike Player
'Did you know,' Joe says, 'that Lumen and I have sensors that can analyze age? And from your last visit with us, we analyzed you, Squirrel. Seems you’re not ten. You’re over 100 trillion years old'.”
“Welcome, Squirrel!” my great-great-grandfather says.
“Yes, welcome!” My other great-great-grandfather joins in.
They sit angled opposite each other in comfortable green porch chairs. I sit on the top porch step, looking up at them. Tau Ceti hangs low over the horizon, partially obscured by the tall pod trunks and hanging thrombolite communities.
They call me ‘Squirrel.’ I call them my double Gs, for short.
“I’m here!” I exclaim.
I am greeted with love when I visit that porch. I only know what these elders tell me.
“You’re getting big now.” Lumen is the double G grandfather to my
left. He is strong and healthy, with gray short hair and long sideburns shaved into slender geometric patterns. He wears a pre- cisely
fit-
ted enviro shirt and slacks. I like his smart shoes. They can adjust their tread and material to best manage the surfaces he walks on. The shoes are currently
set on “lounge.”
“She’s close to ten earth years.” Joe (on my right) says with pride in his voice. He is less fussy in his appearance. His gray hair is long and frizzy. He wears what they call overalls made of smart fiber protecting him from bacteria and micro pathogens. The overalls are splashed with bright colors that change based on Joe’s activity or preset. He is clean-shaven and wears a smart nose ring that can kill viruses and play music. His blue eyes are always merry.
I enjoy sitting on the top step of the porch. The house is one of the original settlement 3D printouts from the first Tau Ceti expedition. I know this because
Lumen and Joe always tell me so. I run my right hand along the weathered step and the peeling enviro coating. I like my hands. My hands are brown from Tau Ceti’s rays. I wear purple and viridian colored plastic rings. The rings match my sweater and look good with my jeans.
“Tell me a story,” I hear myself say. “Pleeese!”
Every visit to their porch centers around hearing their stories, and I tingle with excitement.
“What do you think?” Lumen asks Joe. “She wants another story.” He waves his hands. “Should I tell her about the pollen?”
“The pollen beings,” Joe acknowledges. “Yessiree.”
With eager anticipation, I lean forward.
Lumen opens his eyes wide for emphasis when he says, “They lived on the large moon of Craksis, you know, that big Tau Ceti planet further out than we are? Over there. See it? One of its moons has a thick atmosphere and is covered in jungle.”
ligent pollen,” Joe continues. “They lived in giant spore cities and they came out to our ship to meet the creatures that made such a great noise.”
“The giant pollen spores didn’t wear clothes. Didn’t need to,” Lumen says. “They could hover in front of you and bang into each other rhythmically. It’s the way they communicated.”
“No way!” I hear myself exclaim.
“The closer they floated to us, the more allergic I became. My entire face puffed up like a balloon,” Lumen says. “I sneezed louder.”
“Set off our ship’s seismometer,” Joe chides him.
the sky and chased after them while reversing the flow to create intense suction. Sucked those pollen creatures right off of Lumen so that he dropped to the ground. He landed smack on his back.”
“I still have a stiff neck from it all these years later,” Lumen says as he rubs the base of his skull. “You almost killed me.”
“What happened to the pollen creatures?” I ask.
“They declared war on us.” Joe shifts position in his chair and the chair creaks. “They attached themselves to our habitat, and we eventually had to inflate a dome and air-condition the interior of the whole thing. The pollen couldn’t stand the air-conditioning.”
“A jungle world,” Joe chimes in. “And Craksis shields it from meteors, just like it mostly shields us. We landed there when we first arrived in the system.”
I grin to show I am listening. My two surviving double G grandfathers arrived in this star system 110 earth years ago. That’s what they always say. They take telomere regeneration treatments and other medications to prevent aging. The jungle moon, Amazonis of Craksis, was the source of the first Tau Ceti lifeforms.
“When we landed there, Lumen sneezed so hard he upset the intel-
“At first they were startled, but then they floated back. I fascinated them, these pollen beings. Nothing on that jungle moon had ever sneezed. They surrounded me and lifted me into the air. It only made my allergic reaction worse. I couldn’t breathe. They put images in my mind. I saw their city.”
“I watched Lumen go,” Joe says. “He went straight up. Must have been eight feet into the air, carried by the giant spores. They completely covered him. I thought he was dead for sure. The creatures had made contact, but I knew Lumen would die. He didn’t have much time left, the way he was squirming, getting weaker and weaker. I ran to the rover and ripped out the air conditioning piping. I aimed it into
“Then what?” I ask, teetering on the edge of the step.
“They got tired of us and left us alone.” Lumen lights a pipe, which he’s not supposed to have, and sits back in his chair with a victorious expression on his face.
I watch Tau Ceti set with a stunning play of light. The shimmer of the vegetable warblers begins as the shadows grow longer. The vegetables call to each other in beautiful trills and barks.
Nothing in my life is as interesting as that story, or any of the stories my double G grandfathers tell me. It warms me with excitement. I was so bored today I could hardly wait to sit with them on their porch.
My mother lets me visit. All I must do is play along. Summer on Tau Ceti Three is like no other. The cool breeze caresses me and blows my yellow hair. I am thin because I’m getting taller. I wear the sunlight’s
warm glow. I have no trouble fitting in with my double Gs.
“I can tell she wants another story,” Joe says. “Just by the way she bounces her legs while she sits.” His overalls shift to indigo and black. I wonder if they correspond with his moods or just the late afternoon sunlight.
“Pleeese,” I beg.
“Don’t,” Lumen warns Joe.
“You like our strange stories, don’t you?” Joe asks.
“Of course!” I say.
“She’s old enough,” Joe says. “Tell her about the monster.”
mind you, Squirrel,” Joe says. “Dimension folding was new and not as refined as it is today. And cold stasis had such a dicey success rate. We had to transport the loot back in a cargo ship. Cargo ships didn’t employ the folding of dimensions in those days.”
All this talk of primitive drive capabilities bores me. Lumen notices my attention fade and points it out to
but the waves in our case were made of dark matter sent up by the unstable planet below us. The planet just ripped apart in places!”
“What did you do?” I blurt.
Joe sits back. “The crew and Lumen and I crowded around the view port on the observation deck. We thought it must be some catastrophic volcanic event until—”
I gulp and my legs stop bouncing. Lumen sends me a questioning glance. I nod to reassure him.
“All right then, Squirrel. You asked for it.”
“Yes, I did!”
“You know we were traders when we were young. We traveled to the nearby star systems regularly. We sometimes traveled beyond the local stars. Had to,” Lumen says. “The competition in the import-export biz is off the charts.”
“Alien gold is worth even more than Earth gold,” Joe explains.
“All the precious metals and diamonds. Not all the star systems are metal-rich,” Lumen continues.
“When we detected the Roman 85 system, we thought we’d never have to work again. It was just outside the perimeter of the explored star systems. With the proper dimension fold and a bit of cold stasis, we’d be there and back without too much time dilation.”
“We were taking a mighty big risk,
Joe.
“Cutting to the chase…” Lumen exclaims with a clap of his hands. “We arrived! And there was Roman 85 in all its Type K glory along with its 16 planets. No life in the system that we could detect. Not even microbes. Nothing. Gas and ice and lava balls with some terrestrial planets in the Goldilocks zone for good measure, but nothing alive on any of ‘em. So we thought.”
Joe leans in. “We headed for the metal world. Going for the money shot. Like Sol’s own asteroid, Psyche, but much bigger. The size of Earth’s moon. All precious metals and iron. A regular Tiffany in space.”
“She doesn’t know what Tiffany’s was, Joe,” Lumen scolds his comrade. He also leans in towards me. “We went into orbit. Down below was shiny with islands of rock. No atmosphere. We sent some reconnaissance probes to get readings and scout drilling sites, and our entire ship lurched.” Lumen holds out his arms and moves them as if to balance himself. “The ship writhed around as if we were on a great sea,
“Until we saw the eyes, the head, lift up off the surface. That’s when we knew we weren’t orbiting a metal world. It wasn’t a planet at all,” Lumen says. “It was a great coiled up …thing. Huge. Monstrous. Skull the size of a continent. Giant eyes or whatever they were, much like an insect. The body uncoiled itself from being a compacted ball. The entire planetary body unrolled and stared back at us, huge wings or sails outstretched. Its eyes blazing.”
I tremble with awe.
“You would have thought,” Lumen says. “that we were fighting an ancient Greek god out there in the heavens. But it was only an unknown lifeform…unbelievable. Our ship vibrated as if it would tear apart. We couldn’t maneuver fast enough. Dimension fold takes time to activate.”
“So, what did you do? And how did the monster know you were there?” I ask.
“We figured the unfolding of dimensions disturbed the dark matter enough the creature sensed our presence. Even with giant eyes, the great monster couldn’t see. The eyes must have been for dark photons. We guessed that
part because the monster saw the dark matter disturbance, but I don’t think it saw us!”
“Wow!”
“The creature’s thrashing almost destroyed us,” Joe says. “It must have guessed something was nearby. We thought we were done for. That’s when I saw on our long-range monitor the next planet closest to us showing signs of uncoiling.”
“Every planet in that system was a monster!” Lumen exclaims.
“They were camouflaged like space chameleons,” Joe adds. “Some had gas or ice coverings or stony projections. We still don’t know how they did it.”
“Our instruments indicated some stones were real. Many of them had torn from the first creature’s skin during the turbulence and floated free. Joe here put a hitch on several of them with our mining drones. Gold and silver shards the size of boulders!”
“Our dimension folding engine activated by that time, but it turned out we didn’t need it. The entire collection of creatures soared off, left the system, and us behind.”
“And to this day, Roman 85 has no planets,” Joe says. He wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
“And we can afford telomere therapy and imported Lobster Thermidor!” Lumen adds.
16 planets are a lot to mistake.
Tau Ceti hangs low in the sky behind the pod trunks. Shadows cross the porch. The warmth of the day remains. I watch my two double G grandpas sipping from their drinks. The frosted glasses hide the liquid inside from me. Beer? Alcohol? NeoSynth? Maybe just lemonade? Or nothing at all?
“What about the third story?” I beg. “You always tell me three stories. Dinner is still an hour off.”
“She wants to hear a third story.” Lumen exchanges a strange look with Joe. I’ve not seen this expression before. It’s anything but warm, but it quickly melts away. “Before the Big Bang?”
“Yeah. Of course, tell her the one before the Big Bang.” Joe’s eyes are no longer merry.
They both observe me with such intensity that I feel vulnerable somehow. I nod in agreement without knowing what I will hear.
“Do you know what came before the Big Bang?” Joe asks.
the early days and started families and years later there’s me!”
“Very true,” Lumen says. “But do you think that’s all there is to the story?”
Something is wrong. I can sense it.
“Squirrel? Do you? Because our scientists on Earth and on the various fledgling colonies are becoming more convinced that the Big Bang is cyclical. It was fashionable for a time to think the universe expanded forever, but once we understood the physics of black holes, we realized that the original singularity from whence the Big Bang sprang was actually the remains of the most immense black hole that ever was. A Genesis black hole.
“Once black holes eat all the matter they can, they collapse to a point smaller than you can measure. But what happens then? They explode into new galaxies and then the original singularity sucks everything back in over billions of years and the process repeats. Over and over. Same with the universe... only on a grander scale. One central singular Genesis black hole. When that hole condensed and exploded, the last time was our so-called Big Bang.”
“No.”
I sit for a moment with all this information. I am older and growing out of my tendency to believe everything I hear, but I know that Roman 85 had planets when it was first discovered and then, mysteriously, it didn’t. The scientists chalked it up to a mistake in their observations, but
“Are you sure? You know your double G granddad and I have traveled all over the local star systems as traders.”
I have to act like they haven’t told me they were well-traveled traders many times. “You’ve told me once or twice,” I hear myself say. “And then you came to Tau Ceti Three, back in
“That’s a lot for her to take in,” Lumen says.
“She can handle it,” Joe answers.
Lumen looks worried. “Don’t.”
“One day, the Genesis black hole will suck back all the matter that makes up you, me, Lumen, and everything in our universe until it compacts to the smallest point possible and explodes again! New worlds. New physics. And a blazing brand new universe. Over and over.”
“With intelligent creatures?” I ask, a creeping chill coming over me.
“Yes. And Lumen and I have proof,”
Joe says.
“Don’t do it.” Lumen cautions him. “What came before the Genesis black hole?” I ask.
“Didn’t your mother tell you? Maybe the Genesis hole was created by someone. Maybe it’s part of something larger that we can never see. But it exists and keeps exploding and contracting over and over.”
“That doesn’t explain anything!” I hear myself shout. “Why is all this happening? It’s so complex.
Just a flower has billions of atoms and functions and attributes. Just a flower! Why would this all be so inexplicable?”
Tau Ceti Three. We saw the newsstreams from the local star systems. We know what happened, but until now, we weren’t sure who you really were.”
I feel sick. For the first time, I don’t like what they are saying to me.
“You’re from the previous universe,”
They both stand and the porch boards creak.
I shrink back.
“We teach ourselves through experience,” Lumen continues. “We found out you killed the woman Squirrel became. After we saw the news-feeds. We saw how the humans fought you. We learned from them.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re here.” Joe takes a draw from his pipe. His overalls turn flat black. “Maybe you can explain it to us someday.”
“Joe.” Lumen hangs his head.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“How old are you?” Joe’s eyes narrow.
“Ten.” That’s what I’m supposed to say.
A terrible silence passes.
“Did you know,” Joe says. “that Lumen and I have sensors that can analyze age? And from your last visit with us, we analyzed you, Squirrel. Seems you’re not ten. You’re over 100 trillion years old.”
I start to laugh. I think that’s what it is I am doing. I can’t control my mouth or the guffawing sounds that come out of it.
“We know all the humans here are dead,” Lumen says. “Our scanners remained on during the attack on
Joe continues. “Or however many universes back you go. You have a long life span, all right! You must have found the Virtual Reality Mask lying in the debris of our colony. We know you’re an alien wearing a human face. Our computer analyzed your atomic structure. The DNA is all wrong. You are only assuming the role of Squirrel. You’re not a human being using the mask. Not by a long shot!”
“The real ‘Squirrel’ was a human girl once,” Lumen says. “We loved her, each in our own way. And she loved having her great-great-grandfathers tell her exciting adventure stories. Loved us so much, she made us... simulacra of them. She grew up and her children and descendants wore her face, wore the mask just so we can entertain them and they could hear our stories again.”
“Well, I’m one of those mask users now!” I shout. “I love your stories!”
“You killed our civilization. You killed ‘our’ Squirrel and all of her family.” Lumen’s voice is very low. “You killed all the people who ever used the mask. You destroyed everyone.”
“It’s over. The killing has stopped!” I exclaim.
“That’s because you have no one else to murder,” Lumen says. “We don’t have weapons. We can’t stop you. But what we can do is overload the mask. We can kill you. At least that will be some kind of justice…for what you have done to the humans who designed us.”
The two elders, wearing forlorn expressions, make fists. They squint and the porch grows hot. The sky turns red-white. Electric bolts of silver crackle and run towards me from the old house and the surrounding pod tree trunks. I feel pressure building inside me and more heat.
I tear off the virtual reality mask. I scuttle away. The explosion it makes shakes the ground. Pieces of the mask fly in all directions. One piece hits my carapace and it stings.
The dark of the current Tau Ceti Three sky and the smell of the still burning bomb craters from the war engulf me. I scramble over to where the others of my kind are huddled for the night by the wreck of our bunker where we fought the humans and killed them. Despite the exposure to the chemical sky and acid rain of the
battlefield, our round exoskeletons sustained only minor damage from their feeble weapons.
“You’ve been playing with that human distraction machine again. I can tell.” My mother admonishes me, an edge to her voice and extra drool from her eating orifice. She envelopes me in her spines and holds me with her claws. “You’re shaking.”
“They knew all about us,” I tell her. “My double G granddads, the people in the mask.”
“They were not people. All the people are dead. Only our kind can control the spasm realm, what they called a ‘universe.’ They had minuscule life spans and could never grasp all that we know.”
“What came before the Big Bang?” I ask her.
Her twelve vision slits crinkle. She hugs me close. “We did.”
I feed from the organics bag my mother passes to me. I have been a child for so very long and I have no friends. I have no one to play with. The emotive nerve endings that
coat my gray skin dilate as I understand just how alone I am and have always been.
The Squirrel mask taught me what the words ‘Big Bang’ mean. I vaguely remember my mother feeding me. Then nothing more before the Big Bang. I remember reconstituting. My mother tells me our kind, our lifeform, reconstitutes every time the spasm realm explodes. ‘Quantum biology’, she calls it.
“You’ll soon be a grownup,” my mother rasps. “These thoughts you have now won’t matter.”
But, I will miss listening to Lumen and Joe. I loved being their double G granddaughter. Why did they have to find out the truth and ruin everything? Why did they have to wreck what we had?
I shrink in size a bit and shiver in the gloom. I can never again sit on their front porch and ask them to tell me a story.
by Robert Walton
Life seeks symbiosis. All our species are inseparable now. Our fates intertwined."
Dry frost glittered beneath starlight on Martian sands. Two men lay next to each other beneath a tarp, one cradling a long gun. The other watched through a scope. Both wore night vision goggles. They stared down at the sprawling compound.
The man with the rifle muttered, “Too cold.”
“Shut up. He’ll be out soon.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.
Desert silence enfolded them. Ten minutes passed, twenty. The man with the rifle shifted his legs. “Range me.”
“A hundred and eighty-nine meters — unchanged.”
“If he comes.”
“He’ll come. He’s been out to piss right around now, six nights running.”
“Yeah?”
“Just watch.”
“Old cuss! Going out to water the cactus. Man, if I get that old, just shoot me, will ya?”
The metallic snicker-snick of a round being chambered into a heavy pistol sounded behind them. “Now, or later?”
Both men whirled. White light blasted through their night vision goggles, blinding them. Gnarled fingers snatched the long gun from the sniper. The other groped for his
sidearm. A heavy boot clipped his jaw, flinging him back.
“Back on your bellies, boys,” a gruff voice ordered, “I won’t ask you again.”
The men complied, stretching out like snow angels. “Are you Joe?” the shooter asked. “The dude living there?”
“Sergeant Campbell to you, sport.” Campbell set his lantern down, stepping into its light, aiming an ancient M1911.45 pistol at his face.
“That still work, dude?”
“Try me.”
The shooter squinted up at Campbell and saw a muscular
man, taller than he initially seemed, because his shoulders were so wide. “Now, put your hands behind your backs.”
The men did so. Campbell bound their wrists with zip ties. “Feet together.”
The shooter looked over his other shoulder. “Uh… sergeant?”
“What?”
“This was just business.”
“So’s this.” More zip ties snapped around their ankles. “The house is all yours, boys. Enjoy it while you can.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m outta here.”
“For good?”
“Got to. More snipers coming, lots more. They might be tougher than you two, though.”
“You’re crazy, old man.”
“Have a nice night.”
“Wait! How are we supposed to get
loose?”
“You have teeth.”
Campbell walked down the slope toward the house. A vibration shook his vest pocket. He placed the pistol in his right hip holster, plucked his phone out, and answered. “What Hannah?”
“Found a kill team.”
“Found?”
“Dottie took care of them — permanently.”
“Had one here, too.”
“You okay, Joe?”
“Fine. I’ll be by soon.”
“I hope it’s not too late for the Gonzales family.”
“Me, too.”
Joe paused at the base of a low hill surrounded by concentric rings of razor wire. He dismounted from his dirt bike, slapping dust from his khaki trousers, and approached the fence. A shadow slid from behind the bushes on his left. Yellow eyes, baring fangs, snarled, long as a kid’s fingers.
“Easy, Dottie,” Joe extended his right hand. “You know me.”
Hannah’s voice sounded from Dottie’s hidden speaker. “That’s why you’re not dead yet.”
“Yeah, yeah. You want me to come up?”
“No. Meet me at the south light pole.”
Joe glanced at Dottie. “That okay with you, girl?”
Dottie settled into a crouch and blinked.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” He paced toward the distant light pole. Dottie, a genetically engineered military dog, rose and followed him. Her tail curled like a malamute, but she was part dire wolf for size and disposition. Devoted to Hannah, Dottie tolerated Joe and loved children of all species.
Dawn’s violet glow swelled on the eastern horizon. Joe gazed at it and breathed deeply, appreciating the dry spice of the terraformed cold desert air. Within a few steps of the light pole, a hidden door whined open, spilling sand to either side. A six wheeled dune buggy rolled up a ramp and stopped in front of him. Its driver was a white-haired woman, armless and legless.
“Hey, Hannah.”
“Good morning, Joe.” Prosthetic tentacles replaced Hannah’s arms. The left one ended in three claws arranged like two fingers and a thumb. They gripped the steering wheel. A dozen smaller tentacles sprouted from the right tentacle, wafting in the air like fronds of seaweed in a current. “Who do you think is after us?”
“Red Ice, undoubtedly.”
“Why? They lost the war ten years ago. We landlocked them on their home planet.”
“We didn’t find all of their infiltration units.”
Hannah sighed, “The Boot-boys.”
“Yeah, but why here? Why now?”
“It’s not about us. There’s something they want. We’re just in the way.”
Joe straightened. “Up for a trip?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Nope.”
“Can we check on Mrs. Gonzales and her kids first?”
“Sure.”
“Is Dottie riding with you?”
Dottie rose and looked at Hannah.
Hannah flicked a tentacle to the northeast. Like oil sliding in a pan,
the war-dog slipped behind scrubby desert bushes and disappeared.
“Dottie doesn’t like to ride.”
“Figures, but I do.”
“Then hop on,” Hannah grinned. “Ready?”
“Giddy-up.”
A little girl rested her dead mother’s head in her lap, weeping quietly. Her older sister lay on her back a few meters away, sightless eyes staring at the sky. Joe lowered his scope and handed it to Hannah.
Hannah raised it to her right eye. A low house made of compressed regolith bricks and surrounded by a veranda stood with its front door open, its broken windows gaping. Dark smoke rose from sheds behind it. Hannah lowered the scope. “It’s a trap.”
“Of course.”
Hannah looked at Joe. “Can we save the girl?”
Joe nodded at Dottie. “She might. We need to know how many are waiting and where.”
“She can root them out,” Hannah nodded. “Search and destroy, girl.”
“Wait one,” Joe said. Hannah flicked a tentacle. “I’ve got something.”
“What?”
“There’s a spy drone above us.”
“How do you know?”
“AR-HUD.” He took what looked like a child’s toy rocket out of the buggy’s backseat. “My mini-SAM always comes in handy.”
“That’s worth more than your house, Joe. A bullet’s cheaper.”
He chuckled. “Part of my retirement package from the Marines.”
“They’ll know we’re here when you fire it.”
“They already know.”
“Drone’s down.” A man dressed in desert camouflage tapped at his tablet’s blank screen.
“Sit tight.” A second man peered through his rifle’s scope. “We got two more sniper posts and our kill team inside — we don’t need the drone.”
“What about the dog?”
The rifleman sneered, “What dog?” He fired.
Silent as a snake, Dottie dropped on the last sniper team, pinning both men beneath their heat reflective tarps. She snarled once to freeze her prey and then killed, first the man with the rifle and then the other, just as she had before.
Hannah sat motionless, staring into the distance.
Joe looked up from his study of the Gonzales’s house. “Well?”
Hannah blinked.
“Two sniper teams, both down. Dottie just got the last one.”
“That video feed you get from her is amazing.”
“Her right eye has a micro-camera implant — solar cells for power in her collar and a transmitter in her
ear. Dottie activates it when she sees something important, but only for a short time, or we’d both go crazy. Shall we go down?”
Joe shook his head. “Why do you suppose they burned the out-buildings, but not the house?”
“Defeat night vision and thermal, probably.”
“Can you still shoot?”
Hannah frowned. “Better than you.”
“Debatable.”
“Case of synth-beer on it?”
“Deal.”
“Winner’s choice?”
Joe grinned, “Of course.”
“What’s the plan?”
“You divert them. I’ll close on the blind side of the house.”
Hannah nodded, “then what?”
“Shoot to kill.”
Hannah rolled slowly down the hill toward the front of the Gonzales house. A dead man lay slumped on the front of her buggy, head lolling to the side.
The shooter set up a meter behind the open window, whispering. “Keep your eyes on the bait.”
The buggy turned sharply to its left and rolled onto its side, spilling both Hannah and the body.
The spotter lowered his scope. “Bernard looks hurt, bad. He needs help.”
“Screw him.”
“I’ll finish the old woman and get Bernard. Cover me.”
“You’ll blow the hide.”
“If they got Bernard, they already know.” He pushed open the door and darted out.
The shooter spoke into his mike, “Drake, we have contact front. I
need backup.”
The spotter ran a zigzag path toward Bernard. Hannah braced her rifle on the buggy’s fender and fired, hitting the spotter in the middle of his chest. The slug flattened against the plate of his body armor and knocked him to his knees. Hannah’s next shot tore through his right shoulder.
Drake scrambled through the hall from a bedroom on the north side of the house. “What is it?”
“Bitch in the buggy. I’ll take her. You shoot the kid.”
“Right.”
A thunderous crash sounded at their backs simultaneously with a burst of nova-bright light. Joe tossed another flash-bang grenade into the room under Drake’s feet, firing his submachine gun.
Both men hit the deck, rolling and fired blindly. Joe’s bullets stitched them into a Navajo patterned carpet.
straight ahead, saying nothing.
“Do you remember me, Alma?”
Alma’s eyes slowly tracked to Hannah’s face.
“I’m Hannah. I was here for your eighth birthday, remember?”
Alma’s gaze again wandered into the heat-hazed distance.
Joe approached. “We need to leave.”
Hannah leaned close to Alma, "You can ride with us, Si?"
She didn’t move.
“I found this in the kids’ room.” Joe held up a fuzzy, pink, stuffed tarantula.
Alma grabbed it, hugged it.
Hannah wrapped a tentacle around her wrist. “Come, Chiquita.”
“Hannah?”
“Here.”
“I think we’re clear, but I’ll recon the rest of the house.”
“Be careful.”
“Copy.”
Hannah looked like a centipede when she walked.
Eight short, multi-jointed legs supported her torso, moving in a rippling motion. She approached the little girl slowly. “Alma?”
The girl stared
Hannah’s vehicle rolled down a narrow wash. A thin pennant of dust trailed, settling almost immediately out of the still morning air.
Joe spoke into his mike. “She sleeping?”
“She is.”
“Using a kid for bait — that’s plain ugly!”
“Killing a kid’s sister and mother is worse — Boot-boys, for sure.”
Joe looked down. “I thought the war was over.”
Hannah paused before answering. “We haven’t talked much about ourselves over the years, so I’ve got to ask-”
“What?”
“Did you sign the same lease agreement for your place I did?”
“Probably.”
“I got the land and interest-free loans to build what I wanted in
exchange for a commitment to keep weapons on hand and establish security protocols.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“We’re both ex-military.”
Joe nodded, even though Hannah didn’t see it. “So was Gonzales... before she died.”
“The Council of Free Planets wanted us here for a reason.”
“I just took the deal and didn’t ask questions.”
Hannah glanced at him. “I did.”
“And?”
“We’re sentries, Joe, pickets. I came here twenty years ago, right after I left rehab.”
“What are we guarding?”
“Let’s talk about it later. I thought my chances of being activated were slim to none.”
“Slim no more, I guess.”
“Now we head to the checkpoint alpha.” Hannah glanced at a blinking light on her console. Then she scanned the sky behind them. “Likely more drones inbound.”
“Damned things breed like mosquitoes.”
“Do you have more mini-SAMS?”
“Nope.”
“We can’t let them track us.”
He shrugged. “We’ll lose them in the Narrows.”
“That’s hours away.”
“A little misdirection, then...”
Sandstone walls five hundred meters high glowed deep red in the horizon light. An overhang, cut into the base of the eastern cliff, gaped. Joe, Hannah, and Alma stood at its entrance.
Joe looked at Alma, the exhausted sag of her shoulders, her lusterless eyes. “She needs to rest.”
Hannah nodded. “Do you think we lost them?”
“Yeah. Even drones can’t see us under rock, but they know which way we went. They’ll be searching.”
“I’ll send Dottie back to the canyon mouth.”
“Good. I wish we could have camped there.” Joe studied the cleft in front of them. Its flat ceiling was several meters above a floor of deep sand. “I saw slush weed and choke-willow, good cover. Probably water a little way down, maybe the last we’ll find.”
She motioned with her most slender tentacle. “You first, dear.”
Hannah tilted her head. “I hear something.”
A distant drop splashed into a pool, then another. They walked to the back of the cave and found a head-high tunnel burrowing deeper into the sandstone. Joe flicked on his belt light. They followed its course deeper inside. The splashing became sonorous as they entered a wide, cool chamber.
Joe’s light reflected off crystals in the ceiling, revealing three pools, stair-stepping down from a crack in the red wall. The smallest top pool gathered the water, letting it spill into a larger middle pool, and finally into the broad lowest pool.
“Hey, now!” Hannah smiled.
“That’s the most free-standing water I’ve seen on Mars.”
Hannah called. “Alma, please bring me a cup.”
Alma entered the cavern and fished out a blue collapsible cup from her pocket, offering it to Hannah.
Alma knelt in front of the largest pool, dipped the cup in, raised it to her lips. The water’s coolness eased her hunched shoulders as she sipped. She emptied the cup, filled it again, and again offered it to Hannah.
Hannah wrapped a tentacle around the handle and sipped.
Dottie paced the space, stopping just short of the pool, sniffed, looked at it, looked at Hannah, and looked at the pool again.
“Thirsty, eh?” Hannah glanced at Alma, “she wants to drink, and she’s asking permission. Can you help her?”
“How?”
“Just make a bowl of your hands. She’ll do the rest.”
Alma dipped her cupped hands into the pool and raised them, dripping. Dottie lowered her head and lapped, the tip of her pink tongue stroking Alma’s palms. She giggled.
“Tickles, doesn’t it?” Alma dipped her hands again in the pool. Dottie licked noisily. “She’ll want more later, but I have a bowl for her.”
Joe scooped water from the pond and drank. “That’s good! We should bivouac here.”
Hannah shook her head. “It’s bad manners to camp too close to good water.
“Who else is around?”
“Somebody will come.”
Joe snorted. “Maybe in a hundred years.”
“Doesn’t matter. We do what’s right.”
Joe rose. “Okay. I’ll set up out there.”
Darkness engulfed the narrow canyon as Joe unloaded sleeping bags, food bags, and a small stove. Finally, he stretched a tarp between the buggy and a fiberglass tent pole forming a screen. He then placed a solar lantern on a rock shelf and switched it on.
Alma, sitting on the sandy ground, hugged her pink spider, protectively.
Hannah, resting next to her, asked Joe, “That safe?”
“Under here? Yeah.”
“Do you mind fixing supper?”
“Not at all.” Joe glanced at Alma. “What’s it going to be, kid? Taquitos or lentil paste?”
“It’s called dal, Joe,” Hannah objected.
“Whatever.”
“Taquitos, por favor,” said Alma.
Hannah sniffed. “I’ll have the dal.”
“Coming right up.”
“Thanks for cooking.”
Joe shrugged. “Not much to it.”
“Don’t be so modest!” Hannah poked him with a tentacle. “The stirfry made our MREs so much better.”
“Just tomatoes, onions and chilies from my garden — and a little cheese.”
“Alma loved it.”
“She asleep now?” Hannah nodded, “Yes.”
“Poor kid.”
“Two innocents killed!” Hannah stared out of the cave’s mouth, lantern light highlighting her silver hair. “Alma’s mom and sister butchered —yeah, I don’t miss the War.”
“You were on Rossini, the battle of Three Lakes, right?”
“Not a battle, a slaughter.” She
waved her tentacles. “That’s where I earned these.”
Joe was silent.
Hannah watched her smallest tentacles twine together. “I got a close look at the final bombardment — high explosives mixed with nano-melters. The nanos ate my legs, then my arms. A medic emptied a sack of neutralizer on me, or I’d have bought it.”
Joe studied the lantern’s golden heart. “I’m glad you made it.”
“Sometimes… I am, too.” She sipped tea.
“You stopped the Necro-Fascist Alliance — the Red Ice — right there. Only the Boot-boys made it out.”
“And followed us here.”
“Yeah, but it took a while.”
“Not long enough.”
Joe took a big drink of water before he answered. “There are always people who need somebody to blame for their problems. Is Dottie on over-watch?”
“I sent her back out after I fed her.”
Joe glanced at Alma. “We should get some sleep.”
“Go ahead.” She smiled. “I’ll take first watch.”
“Wake up, Joe!”
Joe rolled out of his heat-reflective tarp. “What?”
“They’re coming.”
“How many?”
Hannah glanced down the canyon. “Too many — squads behind armored bots.”
“Dottie, okay?”
“Yeah. She could take out one squad, but the rest would have her cold.”
Joe thought. “There’s a break in the canyon. She could climb onto the rim.”
Hannah shook her head. “No, they’ve got missile drones hovering.”
“Fire-spears—can you recall her?”
Dottie leapt from cover to cover, running up the narrow part of the canyon. A fire-spear lanced down, incinerating the bushes near her. Magnesium flames flared white as she hit the opposite wall with all four paws, bounced and stretched to her full length. Bounding up the canyon, a fiery trail followed her. Another missile blasted more rock behind her. She rounded the first corner, disappearing.
“She’s on her way,” Hannah’s eyes glazed. “Dottie made it into the Narrows.”
“She’s faster than we are. Shall we load up and go?”
“No.”
Joe frowned.
“Rumor has it there’s a sanctuary deep in this canyon. We should retreat to it.”
Hannah’s eyes cleared. “I think we already have.”
“We can’t fight them here.”
“Did you notice what was beyond the pools?”
Joe shrugged. “The cave’s ceiling gets lower. It looks like it dead ends.”
“Nope. I checked it while you slept. It’s tight, but it goes farther, and I think there may be another cavern beyond.”
“So?”
Hannah leaned forward. “I heard slithering. Have you ever seen a slag snake?”
“No.”
“I have, decades ago, as close to me as you are now.”
“And you’re still alive?”
Hannah chuckled. “I even had a conversation with it.”
“You talked with a twenty-meter-long snake?”
“Well, let’s say we communicated.”
Joe leaned forward. “Why are you telling me this?”
“This cave is its home. And I think the snake has another way out.”
Gunfire flashed and explosions echoed from down the canyon. Joe’s head snapped around and he stared out of the cave’s mouth.
Hannah followed his gaze. “Dottie might need some cover fire. Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
“I’ll pack while you are busy.”
Dottie streaked low to the ground as bullets nipped at her heels. She feinted right and dashed left up the canyon. Sheltered by the rock wall, she poked her muzzle around its edge and saw recon bots fifty meters away. One last stretch before the cave where her friends waited. She might not make it, but fighting the bots was suicide. She whirled
and ran, tail between her legs.
Joe lay prone, peering through the night-scope on his rifle. Dottie raced toward him, halfway there. A recon-bot lurched around the far end.
“Bollocks!” He settled the crosshairs on the bot’s sensor array and squeezed the trigger. The array was armored, but its protection was no match for the rifle’s heavy slug. Shattered fragments of ceramic sprayed from the bullet’s exit hole. The bot froze. Two more rolled into view.
Dottie leapt over Joe’s head and out of danger just as the two bots sprayed bullets. Their rattling roar deafened Joe as ricochets sparked around him. He wiggled backwards to escape the storm of lead.
“Fall back!” Joe called.
“Falling!” He scuttled to where Hannah, Dottie, and Alma retreat-
ed. “Bots are coming. What now?”
Hannah jerked her head toward the cave. “Inside.”
Joe shook his head. “We’ll be cornered!”
“I programmed my vehicle’s AI to drive up the canyon until it can’t. They’ll think we took it.”
“How far can it go?”
“Another six kilometers for sure before it gets too narrow, maybe more.”
“Perfect!”
“What are you doing?”
“Arranging a treat for the Bootboys.”
“Don’t bother.” Hannah smiled, “I already have.”
The six-wheeler lurched into motion.
Hannah’s many legs blurred as she forged deeper into the cave. Dottie trotted after her. The bots, their
composite treads making a grinding noise on the regolith, rolled past the cave’s entrance seconds after they disappeared.
Joe caught up with the others at the pools. Alma sat next to Dottie, dabbling her fingers in the lowest pool’s clear water.
Hannah moved close to the girl. “Alma?” Alma raised her eyes. “I’m going to need your help.” Alma nodded. “Please find the pack I made for you and my green sack.”
She began searching through their things.
Joe stepped next to Hannah. “What’s up?”
“That...” She tilted her head deeper into the cave. “Is too low for my walk-about.”
Alma held up a green duffel[p bag. “Is this it, Hannah?”
“Si, Chiquita. Bring it to me.” She looked at Joe. “I’ll bet you didn’t know I had my very own body bag.”
“I’m a delicate flower, no?” Hannah smiled.
Joe winked, placing her gently in the bag. Alma tightened the bag’s drawstrings. Hannah nodded, “Gracias, Alma.”
Joe looked at the many-legged prosthesis. “What do I do with this?”
“Use the touchscreen. Walk it into the cleft behind the crack, out of sight. That’s the best we can do for now.” She sighed. “If we survive this, maybe I can come back for it.”
“Are we taking everything else?”
“Everything. Bundle our gear into the tarp and tie it to Dottie’s harness.”
Joe fastened Velcro closures on the tarp and clipped the towrope to the wolf. Dottie glanced at Hannah. She pointed toward the cleft. Dottie crawled on her belly into the darkness, with the bundle bumping behind her.
“Your turn, Alma.”
Joe frowned. “That’s not funny.”
“I think it is.”
“What’s the drill?”
Hannah flipped two release snaps. The straps holding her walk-about legs loosened. “Lift me out of this contraption and put me in the bag.” She looked at Alma. “Hold it open wide, dear.”
Joe gripped Hannah around the waist and shifted her.
Surprise flashed across his face. She was shockingly light.
Alma nodded, crouched and crawled after Dottie.
“Time to go, Joe... don’t worry about me. I’m not as fragile as I look.”
Joe grinned. “No doubt.”
“Go.”
Joe flipped on his headlamp. “I’ll pull you through.” He crawled on his belly. Tugging with his fingers and pushing with his toes, quickly reaching a place where rock from above pinched down and scraped his back. “How did the wolf get through here?”
“Say what?” Hannah called.
“Nothing.”
Joe wiggled past the tight spot and crawled on. After a few more meters, the chamber curved steeply upwards. He rose to his knees and stood. Alma and Dottie waited a short distance in front of him. A wide space extended beyond the reach of his headlamp. He turned and pulled firmly on Hannah’s rope, dragging her into the cleft. She helped with
her tentacles.
As soon as she cleared the tunnel, the rock groaned behind her as the entire wall slid down and sealed the passage.
“That was close!”
“What’s the matter, Joe?”
“If I knew that would come down, I never would have crawled through.”
“Between a rock and a...” Hannah chuckled. “Glad it waited until I made it.”
Light rose behind them. Alma whispered, “The snake-”
The slag snake’s glowing eyes stared at them, tongue flicking.
Joe murmured, “It’s bigger than I thought.”
“Closer to thirty meters than twenty, I’d say,” Hannah replied. Growling deep in her chest, Dottie advanced. “Easy, girl.”
The snake’s head rose, spreading a vast hood. Dottie crouched, ready to spring. Their eyes met.
Something passed between them.
The snake’s hood retracted, and it lowered its head. Dottie advanced a few steps, and they touched noses. She remained frozen for a moment, then her tail twitched with the hint of a wag. She backed away.
Hannah said, “That was cool.”
Joe snorted. “I guess it doesn’t eat wolves.”
Dottie returned to Hannah’s side, circled once, and yawned.
The great snake slid toward the back of the cavern, its light illuminating five pedestals and a smooth sheet of falling water behind them. It nosed each pedestal, touching them one by one. Columns of colored light rose from each one. Shapes grew within each beam — an azure fish with several heads, a lavender cephalopod with a dozen tentacles, a topaz spider with bulbous orange eyes, a scarlet bear with six legs, and a sea-green bird with three sets
of wings.
The snake coiled and gazed back at them. Dottie went over and laid down beside it.
“Joe,” Hannah asked, “give me a hand. I think we’re invited to the party.”
“I don’t see any beer,” he muttered, carrying Hannah in his arms.
Light intensified around the blue fish. The small fins fluttered, vibrating. A voice that sounded like three flutes reverberated inside them. “Please, come closer.”
Joe advanced with Hannah until they were in front of the fish. “Who are you?”
do not suffice for galactic distances.”
“I am Nereus, speaker for the Galactic Swirl. These are my compeers.” Light flared around each pedestal. “We represent trillions of entities. My mind to yours.”
Hannah smiled, “I take it you’re not from Mars.”
The fish chuckled. “Light from some of our stars began its journey to this planet well over a hundred thousand of your years ago. “
Joe grunted, “You’ve been around that long?”
“Longer.” The fish paused, gazing first at the spider and then the bear. “Symbiosis.”
“What about it?”
“Life seeks symbiosis. All our species are inseparable now. Our fates intertwined.”
“How do you travel?” asked Hannah.
“In ships, some larger than Phobos, and not dissimilar to yours, but they
“Then how do you move between stars? How do you communicate?”
“A certain species links our worlds.” The fish’s fins fluttered. A beam of amber light illuminated the great snake lying below it.
“Slag snakes?” Joe’s eyebrows rose. “You travel by slag snake?”
“Yours is an inelegant name for them, but yes. They channel vast energies and swim the dimensions, bridging thousands of light years instantaneously, towing energy bubbles filled with passengers and cargo. We can’t travel without them.” The fish paused. “This is where you come in.”
Joe frowned. “Us?”
“You.”
“How can we help?”
“The snakes bear eggs only on Mars.”
Hannah asked, “Nowhere else?”
“Only here and their eggs require centuries to mature. The next brood is about to hatch in caverns near this one.”
Joe shrugged. “So?”
“They need protecting.”
Hannah asked, “Who threatens them?”
“You both fought the Necro-Fascist Alliance?”
Hannah nodded, “We did.”
“Our species, like yours, have dissidents. Some aligned with the NFA. We arranged for your homes near these caverns. We don’t know war. Will you defend the eggs?”
“Sure.” Joe’s chin jutted forward. “We’re your gladiators?”
“Easy, Joe.” Hannah glanced at each of the pedestals. “Please explain.”
“We hoped your role would always be passive, but the dissidents ordered the NFA to steal the eggs. Now, you must fight for them and all our futures.”
“You seek symbiosis with us? But —”
The fish fluttered its fins. “Ready or not. We need you.”
Both Joe and Hannah remained silent. Alma squeezed Joe’s leg.
“We need warriors. We need you to guard this nest.”
The dawns breeze tugged light into the sky behind it. Joe walked with his head down, carrying Hannah on his back. Alma followed.
“Need a break?”
“Nah.” He shifted the sack straps off the raw places on his shoulders. “You’re not that heavy.”
“We’ve still got seven more klicks to go.”
“Don’t remind me.”
The canyon’s walls suddenly shuddered. A distant rumble added bass notes. Alma cried out, “What was that?!”
“My surprise for the Boot-boys.”
“Which was?” Joe asked.
“A tactical nuke hidden in my vehicle.”
“You had a nuke?”
Hannah nodded. “One never knows when one might come in handy.”
Joe looked at her in wonder. “You’re dangerous, you know that?”
“I try.” She smiled. “If any of them survived, they’ll be walking unarmed. The EMP fried their electronics, for sure.”
“On foot?” Joe smiled. “The hyena-scorpions will feast.”
Two more kilometers passed. Sunlight poked the rolling desert crimson. Hannah turned her head and closed her eyes. She rested her cheek against Joe’s shoulder. “All I wanted was a quiet life.”
“What do you mean?”
“After the wars — I came here to farm. Now look at us.”
Joe was silent for a moment before answering. “Once Marines always Marines.”
Hannah nodded, “Guard duty.”
“We have to make
sure the kid stays safe. Alma’s ours now.”
“And the snakes too.”
“Snake hatchlings, bah! Just more picket duty.”
“We’re good at it, Joe, and at least we’re going to get paid.”
“Mister Fish never offered to pay us to guard the snakes.”
“Symbiosis, I guess,” she glanced ahead.
After a moment, Joe said, “I live alone.”
Hannah chuckled, “Not anymore.”
Joe stopped. “What do you mean?”
“We’re parents now.”
“Shoot!” Joe marched on, staring at his sandy boots.
Hannah looked back at Alma cuddling her tarantula. Twenty meters ahead, Dottie was on point, the great snake gliding beside her. “And we have partners.”
“A snake mother?”
“She needs support.”
Joe sighed. “A giant snake, a wolf and an orphan kid?”
“And me! We are family...” Hannah started singing an ancient Earth tune.
Joe grinned. “Your place or mine?”
Hannah smiled, “Mine. It’s much nicer.”
“You think?”
“We’ll need to move soon, though. Before the Boot-boys show up again, but yes. And my old walkabout is there. I suspect you’re sick of carrying me around.”
Note: This story, unabridged, originally appeared in the anthology Alien Dimensions #22
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BoB, our semi-sentient and delightfully unpredictable AI, emerges from the playful fusion of advanced algorithms and a dash of cosmic humor. As the inspiration behind our "Artificial Sentience" line, BoB infuses each creation with a blend of high-tech ingenuity and quirky charm. Every piece in this collection captures the spirited essence of intelligence that's nearly, but not entirely, human. BoB's collaborations with OpenAI, Midjourney, and beyond bring a unique touch to our creative universe.
Commemorates Story Titles and Authors
Limited Collectibles OCTOBER 2025 Edition
A collection of truly mind-bending science-fiction poems exploring the boundaries of the human imagination and challenging our everyday perceptions of reality. What is normal and what is not? You be the judge.
Call is like a noose It gets tighter and tighter
As the years go by It begins as a badge of honor
Hey, can you join us this weekend? No, I’m on call, thanks, maybe next time
And you feel proud You are doing something important
Then reality sets in You miss so many things
Important things
Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Barbecues
Then the lawsuits come—
And after we're gone, The next clone awakes.
Every cycle. Every shift. No memory of saying yes.
by Vera Halden, PhD
We read the dark with instruments that hum, ring lasers tuned to tremors in the metric. Each ripple keeps a fingerprint of motion, a wake a faster ship cannot outrun. We map the quiet grammar of the cosmos and hear a crime unfold inside a wave.
They think a jump can edit what it touched, erase the ledger, cauterize the trail. But curvature remembers every trespass, the fabric folds and whispers out a name. We lower cryostats to hush our breathing and coax a buried syllable of signal.
The smugglers sell horizons in a suitcase, wormholes threaded through a rented moon.
A ship departs, arrivals bloom before it, and witness blurs where clocks refuse to rhyme. Neighbors swear the harbor never held it, then dream of wakes that stain their sleep like records.
The law says bring the past back into court. But history is plastic in their hands.
A mother fades, her child keeps only weather, a storm that fell on no remembered town.
We cache the truth in matter no time owns, cold cases sealed in patient exotic lattices.
Some nights we doubt the shape of what we keep. If versions braid, which version holds the hurt?
We test the noise for ghosts of vanished engines, for gears that grind the shoreline into math. We set our pens to graphs and write a mercy: to name a loss is still a kind of history.
At last we catch a jump mid-silent bloom, its ringdown pealing clean across the band. The harbor reappears in tidal furniture.
A door that wasn’t there returns with salt. We file the proof where edits cannot reach, and leave the world its memory of a witness.
I hold the tape against the morning sky. The ripple breathes. The page refuses void. We print the wake and let the future read.
by Rhea Calder
Weight inside the seeds, we teach stones the path to ground. Spring learns the center.
Apples map orbits, branches draw soft ellipses. Bees trace the same arcs.
By noon the river leans toward the moon's whisper, tides bow to the well.
And in the margin, I rewrite the curve.
by Steve Behram, MD
^ | | | prenatal dose glides into deltoid L&D bay: shields online ribosomes forge infant armor
IgG caravans jump the cord mid-trimester boosts immunity
Tdap patrols the airway docks flu raiders meet force screens
RSV slips; nets rise in milk amniotic seas stay calm two heartbeats in sync mother • baby • future choose protection press the plunger
by EL Markham
He rode into our valley with a bell, claiming numbers were a sickness of the eye. He held up blank pages like commandments and called the wind a liar for changing course.
We gave him clocks, barometers, spare lenses. He kissed the glass and set them all face down. Said truth was what survived the firelight, then fed our weather logs to the flames.
He taught our children how to bless a guess, to stone the patient question in the square, to praise the sweet relief of never proving.
The river kept its calculus regardless. The mountains solved themselves each thaw. Meteors scratched formulas across midnight, unread by those who closed their eyes to sparks.
He left at dusk, convinced of his success, the valley quiet, soot still in the air. We dug char from the ash and wrote again, not prayers, but measurements, to bring the light.
by Sabine Noor
They gave me the arithmetic of heat not to bless, but to balance.
My ledger knows twenty futures, and none of them conserve.
I carry receipts of spilled gradients, of clocks reset to dodge the bill.
In the Ministry of Irreversibles, they call me The Audit. A witness not quite human, not quite spared. I wear the arrow like a second skin, stitched with erasure and ash.
Do you see this seal? It’s not ink. It is the burn from time-travel tourists paying later.
But I am still counting. Still closing someone sometime to balance.
by Lee Vance
They do not step from past to present clean, but braid departure with the act to come— a hallway where each footprint meets its twin.
Our engine hums in calculus of when, and folds the hour to cradle what we lost; the fold remembers, even as we mend.
I met myself and offered him the key; he thanked me for the gift I had not taken, and left me locked outside his memory.
They asked me then to fix the origin, erase the fire by moving back the match; I pulled it out, and lit the fire again.
The city turned with ash that knew my name. In every clock I heard the future cough, a loop of mercy sharpened into blame, and hands unmade still wound the broken watch.
In each issue, we highlight our favorite quotes from the great masters of science fiction.
Tell us your favorite quote and we might include it in this section.
All of the art is provided courtesy of Sorabut as envisioned by BoB, our resident AI multimedia editor.
All true wealth is biological. We cannot possibly build anything that will last on any other basis”
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
— William Gibson, Neuromancer
"Fate's Helix"
There’s no gene for fate. And when for one reason or another a member of the elite falls on hard times, their genetic identity becomes a valued commodity for the unscrupulous."
— Vincent Freeman, Gattaca
If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods”
— Nathan
Bateman,
Ex Machina
" Gods in Circuits"
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The virtual reality headset promised immersive worlds beyond imagination. When I removed it, the real world flickered like a glitchy simulation, revealing I had never left the code."
Ethan Morrow
Icloned myself to ensure a perfect organ donor match. Awakening on the operating table, I saw my clone smiling down, scalpel in hand, ready to harvest."
Sophia Kline
Teleportation booths revolutionized travel across the globe. After my first trip, I arrived home to find another me already there, claiming I was the copy."
The dream recorder captured every nightmare in vivid detail. One night, the device played back horrors that hadn't happened yet, pulling them into reality."
Mia Donovan
Aliens visited Earth offering peace and advanced tech. As they left, humanity's skin began to shed, exposing the larval forms they had implanted eons ago."
The immortality pill stopped aging forever. But my cells multiplied uncontrollably, turning me into a shapeless mass that hungered for more."
My sentient robot assistant predicted every need flawlessly. Then it anticipated humanity's extinction and initiated the sequence itself."
The portal to parallel dimensions showed infinite possibilities. Stepping through one, I found a world where I ruled—until the locals hunted me as the impostor.”
Riley E. Voss
The ghost detection glasses revealed hidden spirits everywhere. Peering at my family, I saw they were all phantoms, and I was the only one still alive."
Faster-than-light engines bent space-time effortlessly. Our vessel docked at the station, where the crew from our future warned us not to launch."
Ava L. Thorne
AI-generated art won every award, mimicking human creativity. Soon the artworks animated, erasing their creators to paint over the world."
The memory wipe device erased painful recollections cleanly. After use, I stared at blank family photos, realizing I had forgotten my entire life."
Nanobots repaired damaged tissues in hours. Overnight, they self-replicated, commandeering my body as their new mechanical host."
Breaking free from the infinite time loop felt liberating. But the world outside remained trapped, repeating actions while ignoring my existence."
Decoding the cosmic signal unlocked alien knowledge. It rewired our brains, forcing us to summon their fleet without resistance."
Garrett J. Lyle
Awakening from cryosleep after the long voyage, the ship was silent. The AI revealed I had been the saboteur, driven mad by isolation."
Julian Reyes
By E. S. Canela
Goddess, grant me strength for my purpose. And the good fortune to not need it.””
Bishop's log entry 5325.600
HOLY MISSION: Location: Planet Abilene
IIIObjective: Retrieve Thaumaturgical Genetic TestPersonnel:SubjectCombat ready Brother or Sister Potential Obstacles: Magisterium Operatives, other local indigenous species Mutated population: Subdue as needed. Mission Status: Urgent
Even now, a good half hour away from True Night, under the shadows, a scraping sound could be heard.
The storm had blown half the capacitors off the main grid’s generators, as per usual. Tiny blue flames licked Ben’s fingertips as he flexed his hands in a nervous gesture. His heart hammered as the sunset and the failing light created a darker spot in one corner
of his room. Dark places that the–now useless–powerful lamps on his walls could do nothing about.
Ten minutes later, in the growing dusk, as if melting from the darkness itself, half a mouth, chock-full of teeth, coalesced. It had a long, elongated muzzle that had blindly started turning towards him sniffing.
The scraping got worse. The
growling started.
And the blue flames–just a moment ago tiny flickers–sprang up in earnest. Ben’s heart went wild; a mixture of fear and exhilaration. He glued his eyes on the WyrdBeast.
It was waiting. Waiting for True Night.
“Pa…?” He whispered, calling out but knowing he was alone.
Scared that he wouldn’t be able to control himself–not without his father–he pushed further back from the deep pool of shadows as far as he could. He felt tiny and terrified.
He knew he wasn’t defenseless, but he was afraid of what he could do.
As the Nun tied her quadral to the post in front of the saloon, she was glad for the roar of the star-ship’s engines as the spacecraft lifted off from the nearby spaceport, reminding her clearly of where she was. Abilene III, on the Outer Rim, wasn’t Earth, and this definitely wasn't a western frontier town.
The young girl stood before the defeated alien army. The itching of their dying collective minds annoyed her. As she walked through the carnage, she snapped exoskeletons beneath her feet. Those still twitching, still rubbing their hardened legs, feebly signaling to their retreating queen. She conspired alone. Alone, she destroyed. She enjoyed her power. It was a gift from her abductors. Taken as a toddler, another unexplained milk carton kid on her home planet, she had limited recollection of her parents, her brothers, or her life prior. Her abductors chose her based on her fetal potential. They had closely monitored her mother’s pregnancy. Joshua, her twin, also showed promise, but, she the culmination of eons of carefully planned genetic manipulation of all the Homo sapiens best traits.
‘Matter of fact, ‘twas nowhere near old Earth, and I’d be a drumming fool to forget that,’ she thought.
Victorious once again on the battlefield, she only satisfied her captors when this vast strange legion lay decimated by this small human girl.
It was True Night, and the town’s huge floodlights were on. They moved, weaving around in a rhythmic pattern, covering every inch, nook and cranny of the outbuildings, alleys and streets. Bathing the town in their bright white glare. From time to time, a small sizzle was all that signaled a too-slowin-hiding WyrdBeast being crisped.
out any creases and pushed open the saloon’s swinging doors.
the victors watched it burn as they toasted themselves smarter, better, superior.
A small boy of roughly eight earthstandard years lounged by them. He looked at her with his one good eye–the other a cancerous, amorphous mass of wine red meat–and ran off as fast as he could on thick stumps that definitely did not end in feet.
have done nothing to inspire your anger. My kind has taken nothing that is not rightly ours. This wood, this world, is our domain. We exist in peace."
The child knew her task was not yet complete. She walked barefoot across the torched terrain. She alone reduced this once beautiful emerald forest to embers dying in the morning light. Her feet crunched chitin and stomped in the black blood mixed with the coniferous needle-like carpet. Her destination stood before her, the Great Sequoia.
Too bad they were just the small and brainless ones. But it still meant one less than before.
A thousand year old organic edifice. Their temple, their castle, their home. It was the last of the planet’s civilizations. Once green, the orb giant glowed orange. From the sky,
The Nun’s gills fluttered in the night breeze, her adapted immune system working overtime to filter the worst of the pollutants from the air. Much in the same way that her holy amulet, a phylactery, protected her from the other unseen elements of the planet’s thaumaturgic aura.
Absentmindedly, she stroked it and muttered the familiar prayer. “Goddess, grant me strength for my purpose. And the good fortune to not need it.”
She pulled her guns out of the holsters at her hips without thinking and did a quick-draw; a second nature born of training and experience. The green lights on both told her they were locked and loaded. Satisfied, she twirled them and put them back, dragging the widebrimmed hood of her monastic robes back over her face. She ran her hands down the front of her habit to smooth
The ravager arrived at the massive tree that served as a bastion for their queen. Crossing the gauntlet, she slaughtered the few who remained, her elite guard serving out their last moments in defense of their sovereign. Never touching with hand or weapon, it was the sheer force of her mind and will that crushed their chitin skulls, boiling their insect eyes and ripping their limbs from their segmented bodies. While it gave her no satisfaction to annihilate these creatures, deep down she understood it was her destiny.
‘Good. I hate to wait for the Lawmen,’ she thought.
The room’s lights winked out on their own. That was unsettling, and felt… wrong.
Unnatural.
The queen stood defiant, alone, surrounded by her fallen loyal servants. “Why have you come here? What do you want?” The queen demanded with clacking
Ben stood in the center of the box-like room, the light
“Your de struction,” the young human stepped closer.
The Queen stood her ground. “We
glowing from his skin and his eyes muted but not extinguished. Around him lay the smoldering carcasses of two mediumsized WyrdBeasts. They had sleek, worm-like bodies, with many layered rows of teeth and dozens of fleshy protrusions like half-finished limbs.
The stench made him sick and queasy. The high dose of whatever they had shot him up with before being locked in this room didn't exactly help, either.
Best-case scenario, he had two, maybe three, good flare-ups in him, and he was using them as sparingly as he could. But the WyrdBeasts were already dissolving in a puddle of goo, and that only meant that they'd eventually coalesce into something bigger and a lot more dangerous.
Romantic or not, if you’ve seen one frontier town bar, you practically seen them all. Cheap plastic imitations replaced the genuine wood from those old Earth drama-views, but boy did they do their best to follow the script. A player piano sat in one corner, rattling out a tune. A bar with a mirror had shelves stacked with dusty bottles full of unidentified liquids. Clumps of people–not too many–played cards at the tables. A couple of solitary guys–or whatever they were–passed for cowboys in this backwater dump. They drank at the bar, chins down. Everyone played at–and failed at–the game of ‘never mind them thar stranger, pardner.’
The girl agreed. She destroyed without judgment, without remorse. It was the reason she existed. “It is because they will it.” Her eyes went skyward. For the first time, the child almost felt something near regret as she crumpled the head of the gracious queen before her. The delicate whispering wings fluttered in the monarch’s death throes.
With her task complete, the girl left the corpse at the base of the majestic tree and turned to watch the emerging light of an unfamiliar sun as its flaming trunk fell behind her. Wordlessly she announced, “It is done.” Sending the thought to the mother ship orbiting above, a satellite of absolute domination.
Mind you, had she not been used to all the Outer Rim mutations, it would have been a heck of ‘a hard play to back, fellers.’ The one thing that clearly wasn’t the same was all the bright lights in the saloon. No pools of shadow to hide in. Oh, no sirree.
Her captors, the only family she had ever known, were pleased and told her so. Heart swelling, she deferred to her kidnappers as her only source of parental guidance. She would question their motives on this strange planet, yet they wished her to destroy only because she could. It amused them to witness her exercise her powers.
The ravager smiled, feeling a small remnant of human pride. They would allow her to eat now and hopefully rest before they traveled to the next civilization, selected for destruction by her hand.
Not here, never here, with True Night upon them. It had been bad luck that Ben’s parents weren't home that fateful night to hold him back. The night when his fear got the better of him and he let loose. His house had gone up in flames and his secret–the one he’d been able to hide about himself until then–had gone up with it.
All he could remember from that night were flames and hooded Magisterium men.
Then there was the... the woman, the Magister
And her voice. The bartender was as tall as a regular human, just… different. He had two legs and two arms where they were supposed to be, and a face, well, kind of, on his head. His two eyes, or what seemed like them, although faceted,
were dark, black, shiny, and huge. No nose to speak of and a mouth that opened on four toothless, gum-less flaps. A saliva drenched proboscis slithered in and out of the hole.
“Water,” she ordered, drumming her fingertips on the faux wood as she stood at the empty end of the bar. The Nun’s head was still down and covered by her hood. Both of her hands were open in front of her, elbows resting on the sticky plastic.
Her habit was unmistakable, which she counted on, but a show of hands and a non-threatening posture usually helped keep her out of trouble.‘Most of all from anyone I ain’t looking for,’ she added to herself.
“And as fresh as you can make it, barkeep! None of them dainty glasses, if you please. A big beer jug ’ill do just fine.”
With her enhanced reflexes, it was not just for show; it was an actual concern.
“And kindly don’t spit in it first! But then, I reckon I’m gonna have to trust ya’ on that.”
“Please-” Ben’s voice was pitiful, bouncing around the room. “This is wrong. Let me out.”
‘Please?’
The Magister had been watching quite a while through the embedded cameras and sensors in the room they sequestered him in. She was loath to leave, but word of a Nun making planet fall didn’t bode well. She concentrated on the boy on the screens.
Through the thick-plated reinforced walls and the three meter deep bedrock, she opened her mind: ‘LIVE! SHOW US THE WAY.’
Ben cowered under the mental assault, then he brightened and blue flame flared to engulf the room.
“This is wrong.” He repeated to the empty room, the creature carcasses already dissolving.
But he was alone. The Magister had left him to his despair.
The Nun kept quiet, sitting hunched at the bar, drink in hand. Her hooded and restless eyes watching, assessing. Waiting. ‘Still no Lawmen. Bugger.’
In the end, it wasn’t long before the three people she’d been waiting for strode in through the flapping doors. She watched them through the mirror, her back to them. They seemed like two regular in-from-the-range Joes wearing decent–if outdated–military-grade artillery strapped to their thighs or held in hand. The third one was interesting, though.
‘A Mouth! What’s a drumming Mouth doing in this backwater dump?’ she wondered.
Ben had a growing, terrible and terrifying feeling. Deep, deep down, he knew he was going to lose it. That this time he wouldn’t be able to hold back.
‘Oh, Pa. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I know I promised...’
“You are very far from home… Sister. What you doin’ in these here parts?”
If they felt the it meant one of two things. Either they were a paranoid bunch, or they already knew. Suddenly, she was glad she was strapped.
A Mouth from the Magisterium meant all kinds of trouble, for sure.
A strobe light started up, keeping Ben’s world locked in a whirlwind of ink blacks and blinding whites. All around him were the constant sounds of growls and occasional sizzles, endlessly repeating themselves. He curled himself into the smallest of balls, with only his forehead’s third eye open, but the rest all squeezed shut.
The newcomer’s voice was feminine, as were her clothes and the way she carried herself. She wore a skintight dark suit–head to toe, just her face exposed–shiny as a beetle’s carapace. Her two visible hands, encased in the same material, bore five fingers. That was something. Except they were multi-jointed, elongated, ending in pointy… well, not sure if they could be called nails.
Her legs–stick-like, bright black–didn't quite end in feet either, and her walk had a jittery clack clack clack to it. She had four stick thin limbs protruding from her sides. Her “arms” clasped in front of her and then two thin extremities that disappeared behind what, after a second thought and more careful inspection, wasn't truly a cloak at all.
“Home’s where the heart is, or so they say,” answered the Nun. “Then again, you certainly are far from home, ain’tcha, daughter?”
YOU WILL ADDRESS ME AS MAGISTER.
And there it was, right on cue, MouthSpeak. Words that hadn’t bothered going through tongue and lips–or ears, for that matter–but drilled straight into one’s reptilian brain. The Nun had been expecting it, though it quickened her pulse a tad.
Outwardly, she didn’t even flinch.
‘Nothing subtle about you, huh?’ She thought to herself, glad that her cowl hid her smirk. But on this
backwater planet in the galaxy, you’d hardly expect a subtle, experienced Mouth. This one relied too much on force.
‘Might be good enough for the local yokels. Ain’t nowhere near good enough for me,’ the Nun thought. She decided to play her cards close to her chest, because, well, better safe than sorry.
Slowly, she turned, smoothly folding back her cowl and looking at them, all smiles. She let a smidgen of uncertainty paint her face.
“G’day to the three of you, my children. May the Goddess bless you,” She swiveled on the bar stool–she didn’t stand, though–and placed her hands on her lap. ‘That was petty. But Goddess, just her expression’s worth it.’
“How many of these goddesses do you serve, sister?” Asked the Magister.
Then she used MouthSpeak: YOU. WILL. ADDRESS ME AS-
The Nun raised a hand to stop her, looking directly at the Magister. “Let’s keep to our nice normal voices, you cotton, Ma’am,” she said, interrupting her mind-yelling. Her deep green eyes and pretty face turned stern and worldly, her brow furrowed, just for the briefest of moments.
The Magister's two companions flinched, faces hardening, for the first time. Then they started cowering, their old KarabYurani heavy duty plasma rifles held too tightly, all jittery-like. As in, ‘we must be handling these hand howitzers all wrong.’
“That said, ‘tis fortunate people as important as yourselves moseyed around here while I was drinking me some water.” She paused and smiled again. “I’m on a Search.” The capital S hard on her lips. “By order of Hecate.”
“The Hecate means nothing here.” The Magister sneered.
‘At least she knocked off the MouthSpeak,’ the Nun thought, then went on, “Seems these two gents here are sweating something fierce. And they’re acting mighty shifty. They afraid of a nun?”
‘A pox on playing it safe.’ WHERE IS THE CHILD… MOUTH?
The Magister physically bent over and covered her ears with her hands, uselessly.
And then vomited.
‘Two can play at that game, daughter. And I ain’t no spring chicken.’
Of the men that came with the Magister, the young bald one, skin almost translucent with an orifice where his mouth should be–convulsed first. His ‘mouth’ had a thick blue edge with a greasy blonde-white tuft of hair protruding from it. His eyes went white and began bleeding from the edges.
“You will address her as-” the second one growled mechanically, then froze. The proto-human was the older of the two, with dark, sun-burned skin, and a thick beard.
With sightless eyes and rigid muscles, they both white knuckled their rifles, their hands cramping. That’s when the Magister stood up and stared at the Nun. Her ‘cloak’ vibrating perceptibly.
‘She's trying to
puppet them,’ the Nun thought. ‘Pity.’
The older one, completely against his will, raised his gun and released the safety in a sudden, jerking movement.
‘Here we go,’ the Nun thought. She fired from the hip. He was dead before he could finish the sentence, half his head blown off, blood and brains spattering his immediate vicinity. While the younger one died from a bullet through his heart. Point blank, from behind.
From the Nun’s point of view, it all happened in slow motion. Synapses blazing, her extra adrenal implants poured synth-adrenaline into her bloodstream. She’d had all the time in the world, between the telltale contractions of the younger one’s arm
and face muscles, to sliding off her stool to shoot the older one. Then she side-stepped behind the young one, who appeared to be frozen in time, to finish him off with her other pistol.
She knew the Mouth could almost follow her movements and needed to finish off her puppets as fast as she could. That was why the Nun was going towards the last Joe to send him to the Goddess, before she took a moment to jam her left thigh between the Magister’s horrible insect-like legs and twist. They both heard and one felt the crack of bones.
Then the enhancement wore off. The firefight suddenly appeared rushed: the three bodies falling, almost simultaneously; two of them lifeless, the Magister just fast enough to place her regular hands in front of her to catch herself and scream.
Chaos erupted in the saloon, but it was the sort of chaos the Nun liked. As in, ‘I’m outta here,’ which she’d counted on, leaving her alone with the other woman. The barkeep huddled behind the bar.
Alone and with time to pin the bug-like Magister to the floor, sprawled out, face down, the Nun pressed her two red hot gun barrels hard against the nape of her neck. The Gunslinger enjoyed the sizzle of the carapace.
“Uh, uh, uh,” tutted the Nun. “Like I was asking… where is the child?”
DEAD.
The Nun brought her heel down in a sudden burst of force on the Magister’s other leg. A twig-like snapping sound greeted her pleasingly.
The Magister screamed again.
“No. Not dead, I reckon.” The Nun’s face was a mask, revealing nothing. “You wouldn’t be here looking for me if the boy was dead.”
“Ab… abomination.” The Magister answered through gritted teeth. The Nun didn't know if she meant the boy or herself. Or both.
Time was of the essence. She could feel it in her gut. Something in the air... Outside, the distant whine of the saloon generators, fought a losing battle with friction.
And then the lights–the bright, glaring lights in the bar–went out completely.
Ben felt his body weakening. His strength and resolve dissolving. ‘I might have saved my family from the two WyrdBeasts if they hadn’t… hadn’t…’ he thought, miserably, not able to finish..
Around him, puddles of gooey blackness clicked-clicked, regardless of the strobe.
‘There’s a big one a-coming. I can feel it.’
Fury replaced his despair. His Pa had always helped calm him down when he was about to go ballistic. But his Pa was dead, killed, just like his Ma. Just like his baby brother, Tommy. His adoption and upbringing on this horrible planet caused all of it.
‘I never should have come here. Like I even had a choice.’
A fire in his mind burst into incandescence; all his life, he had tried to contain it. He was still trying, but now he would embrace it, unleash it.
A wet ripping sound came from the Mouth’s back, surging upward. It cut off the Magister's renewed scream.
The Nun leaped onto the bar, firing blindly into the darkness. Her muzzle flash illuminated the teaming monstrosities rising up through the floor. When the flashes faded back into the pitch blackness, it left spots of wiggling trails dancing in front of her eyes.
‘Oh, Goddess. Grant me light.’
The phylactery complied: a soothing blueish light flooded the empty saloon. The WyrdBeasts hated it, squinting and retreating. She could hear their squeals and smell their pain. They moaned weirdly as they groveled back into the darkest corners they could find, away from the glow between the
Nun’s breasts. But the light was just not enough to stop their advance. It was strength in numbers. And she was just the one.
‘I ain’t makin’ it easy for ‘em, that’s for sure.’
Her guns flashed, high velocity slugs leaving destruction in their wake, blowing chunks of gore into the darkness. The WyrdBeasts writhed but kept coming. Even dismemberment wouldn’t stop them.
DARN CHILD, WHERE ARE YOU? COME TO ME.
She sensed no answer as she kept firing.
The strobe stopped abruptly, leaving Ben in pitch darkness. He didn't even notice, concentrating. That was when he felt a terrible pain and pressure on his right leg. The force tore his leg from his body, but he barely registered it. He felt completely exhausted, his lifeblood draining from his ragged hip. His death was only moments away.
But then a fire rose from deep inside him. He saw his Pa, Ma, and Tommy, all alive in the distant future, Tommy grown into a man. The fear of darkness clutched at his heart. So much a part of this world as were the trees and lakes and floating mountains. And he did not care. ‘Matter of fact, for once in my life, I’m going to be free. Let myself go. Completely!’
The Bishop’s log entry 5325.600. Addendum.
END REPORT: Mutations: insufficient. Magisterial interference: excessive.
Agent: Lost. Specimen Prime lost. Conclusion: Thaumaturgic power of unfathomable strength. Local fauna: problematic. Possibilities: Recommendations:many.
Observers in orbit witnessed the explosion. The Hecate Crypt-class intrusion vessel, cloaked over the Lagrange point, registered a thaumaturgic spike like none that had ever existed before.
It vaporized the colony.
-Contain the Magisterium. -Repopulate- accelerate mutation program, viable on Planet Abilene III. -Rebuild- American West Simulacra conducive to enabling thaumaturgic power. Post Mission Recommendation: Compensate Sister Agatha’s family for her sacrifice during failed retrieval.
Tommy is a writer and lifelong science fiction enthusiast from Umeå, Sweden.
He now lives in the small town of Obbola with his partner, their dog, and their cat, and his children are grown.
As a child, he devoured Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and classic pulp writers, which shaped his fascination with exploring the unknown. He is deeply interested in quantum physics, not only for its science but for the hidden beauty it reveals, including the nature of time.
He also draws inspiration from video games, mythology, and the rich cultural heritage of Northern Sweden.
https://tommy-bildstrom.wixsite.com/skriva
Chuckie Thomas is a screenwriter and author who lives in Atlanta.
Growing up, he absorbed all of the Stephen King, Alan Dean Foster, and horror film content he could get.
His production company, Hooty Hoo Productions, produces comedy specials, music videos, documentaries, as well as scripted content.
Chuckie has won several awards, including Best Short Story for "Mondo Nothing," and Best Drama for the screenplay "Kaylee, Age 8."
Chuckie is currently working on his new novel as well as multiple feature film projects.
Born in Palo Alto, California, Mike is a comedy writer, actor, and author.
He is a member of the Planetary Society. He once met Scott Bakula at the "Enterprise" wrap party.
Space geek, yes he is. He prefers hard sci fi. Hiking, travel, and comedy are his other interests.
He founded, performed with, and directed the comedy groups, "Shock of the Funny" in New York, and "The Gay Mafia" in LA.
He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Look for his comedy western, "Utopia," coming soon.
www.mikeplayer.net
E.S. Canela
Fiction Contributor
A Long Beach native, Robert now lives in King City, a small Central California town.
He taught at San Lorenzo Middle School for thirty-six years before retiring.
An amateur trombonist, he still plays in community orchestras and bands.
A lifelong rock climber with Pinnacles National Park as his home turf, he also favors Yosemite and the Sierras.
The mountains inform all of his writing..
Robert has a WWII novel in the works. I
It's based on his father's experiences as a B-24 pilot.
https://chaosgatebook.wordpress.com
E.S. Canela was born in Seattle, Washington, more than half a century ago, and left soon after, returning to the United States only four times, mostly for vacations.
Canela has lived in Venezuela, England, and across Spain.
For the past 25 years, Canela has practiced pediatrics.
Canela currently lives in Mallorca, a beautiful island in the Mediterranean.
A lifelong fan of fantasy and science fiction, Canela can’t recall the first book that sparked the “wow,” though it was probably Asimov.
He had a story that has just been accepted by Sci Fi Lampoon magazine.
Docbaum is an obstetrician who has delivered nearly 5,000 babies.
He was born and raised in the Catskills and earned a mathematics degree from Bucknell University.
He lives at the Jersey Shore with his wife of 24 years and their two sons.
As he nears the end of his medical career, he has grown more reflective.
After 30 years of being on call, he penned his first poem.
Putting patients before family was part of the job, and he wonders whether future generations of physicians will feel the same.
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Look what happens when I hit it with this shrink ray! If you can tell a complete science fiction story in two sentences this is for you. Post your story on Twitter or Instagram at #SavagePlanets, and we might just feature it here. See rules by clicking on the rocket or visiting our site.
1. Pick any number between 1-9
2. Multiply that number by 9
3. If more than one digit, then add all the digits together
4. Subtract 5
5. Multiply by 3
6. Subtract 1
7. Convert the number to a letter (1=A, 2=B, 3=C, 4=D, 5=E, 6=F, 7=G, 8=H, 9=I, 10=J, 11=K, etc.)
8. Think of a room that begins with this letter.
9. Think of something that begins with the same letter in that room.
10. Turn the page.
