Future Humans Anthology

Future Humans

20th anniversary anthology | for STS@Harvard

Program on SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY

HARVARD Kennedy School

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Director’s Note 4 by Sheila Jasanoff Editors’ Notes 4 by Michael Evans and Aishani Aatresh Something Deep Down Speaks Up 5 by Dennis Kunichoff What Are Friends For 7 by Rebecca Xi Islands 14 by Justin Werfel Responsibilities 24 by Katrina Armistead Circadian Death 28 by Ethan Hsiao Eye Freckle 29 by Ethan Hsiao The Historical Preservation Society 30 by Nathan Caputo Overwritten 37 by Suzanne Smith

The Last Anthropologist 45 by Karl Dudman

The Circle of Life 55 by Michael Evans Strike of the Gavel 62 by Mira Jiang Footprint (A Makeshift Legend) 66 by Kelsey Chen MyMuse 76 by Austin Clyde Night and Day 85 by Catherine Yeo No More Worlds to Conquer 88 by Aidan Scully What’s in a Name 95 by Arjun Nageswaran To Understand 101 by Aarya A. Kaushik Cycle of Dreams 102 by Cole French

ARTWORK

* denotes original artwork for this anthology

David 6 by Amanda Duckworth Tides Over Chess* 14 by Bella Nesti Tangerines 28 by Amanda Duckworth Untitled (oil on canvas) 29 by Obie Amudo Sea of Shapes 34 by Chris Barber John Harvard’s Foot 42 by Makoto Takahashi North Carolina 45-54, 102 by Karl Dudman Turtles All the Way Down 55 by Michael Evans and Aishani Aatresh

Oracle Bones (Silkscreen) 66-71 by Kelsey Chen Bathroom Light Love 85 by Ellie Fithian Domain Warp 89 by Chris Barber Black Hole and Anxious 94 by Chris Barber Paper Towns 97 by Chris Barber The Future is Grayscaled* 100 by Olivia Foster Rhoades Sky 102 by Amanda Duckworth Urban Sacred | Somerville, MA 103 by Hilton Simmet

CONTRIBUTORS

Obielumani Amudo graduated from Harvard College in May 2022 with a degree in Statistics, focusing on Quantitative Finance. Katrina Armistead is a 2022 graduate of the Master in Design Engineering program from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Chris Barber is a junior in Pforzheimer studying Applied Mathematics. Nick Caputo is a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. Kelsey Chen is in the frst year of her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford and graduated in May 2022 from Harvard College with a degree in Social Studies and History of Art & Architecture and a secondary in Art, Film, and Vi sual Studies. Austin Clyde is an assistant computational scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science; he was an STS Fellow in 2021-2022. Amanda Duckworth is a junior in Cabot studying Applied Math with a focus in Psychology. Karl Dudman is an STS Fellow and a Ph.D. Anthropology candidate at the University of Oxford; as both a researcher and writer, he explores diverse environmental knowledges; the worlds they build, and the futures they hope for. Michael Evans is a junior in Dunster concentrating in history and science and creating scif novels. Ellie Fithian is a freshman in Stoughton with (loose) plans to concentrate in integrative biology or psychology. Cole French is a senior in Adams studying Computer Science, with a focus on the future of machine learning; in his free time, he enjoys playing chess and tennis and writing poetry and satire. Ethan Hsiao is a frst-year in Weld studying Molecular & Cellular Biology and Government. Mira Jiang is a frst year in Grays who is interested in concentrating in neuroscience and English. Aarya A. Kaushik is a junior in Dunster studying English and Music, with a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy. Dennis Kunichoff is a data analyst by trade, advocate for public health and the environment at heart, and aspiring poet and musician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Arjun Nageswaran is a sophomore in Quincy planning on concentrating in applied math. Bella Nesti is a junior in Leverett concentrating in Engineering Sciences. Florence and Magnolia Rea are thinking about their new trampoline and waiting to show it to uncle Hilton. Olivia Foster Rhoades is an artist who moonlights as a Ph.D. candidate in Genetics and Secondary Field student in STS. Aidan Scully is a sophomore in Adams concentrating in Clas sics and Comparative Religion. Hilton Simmet is an STS Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy on the Science, Technology and Policy Studies track. Suzanne Smith is a Lecturer on Engineering Sciences in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Makoto Takahashi is a Fulbright-Lloyd’s Fellow at the STS Program and a Lecturer at the Munich Centre for Technology in Society, TU Munich. Justin Werfel is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer on Engineering Sciences in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Rebecca Xi recently graduated Harvard College with a degree in Applied Math & Economics and is now taking a year to traipse around the world and do a bit of writing before she begins working as a management consultant in New York. Catherine Yeo is a senior studying Computer Science with a secondary in English; she authored the nonfction book The Creator Revolution and spends her time writing both code and stories.

EDITORIAL TEAM

Editor-in-Chief

Aishani Aatresh Co-Editor Michael Evans Assistant Editor Makoto Takahashi

Editorial Support

Nicole West Bassoff, Lou Lennad, Pariroo Rattan, Hilton Simmet

Co-Designers

Aishani Aatresh and Hilton Simmet

Director

Sheila Jasanoff

Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies

Faculty Selection Committee

James Engell

Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature Jill Lepore

David Woods Kemper ‘41 Professor of American History Antoine Picon G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology

Keith Raffel

Associate, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Writer-in-Residence, Mather House

With Generous Support From

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Center for Public Service & Engaged Scholarship, and John & Elizabeth McQuillan

Director’s Note

How are human futures made and what’s in store for future humans? This anthology helps us reach for answers through inspired acts of imagination by Harvard students, fellows, and staff who wanted to help commemorate 20 years of the Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS) at this university. The twenty works of original fction, poetry and art collected here – one for each year of the Program’s existence – brilliantly capture the values the STS Program seeks to nurture: creativity, excellence, inclusivity, collaboration, and above all the conviction that science and the humanities are part of one culture, our culture, the work of humans inhab iting the same Earth sharing many of the same aspirations, dreams and nightmares. We know ourselves and fashion ourselves just as surely through writing, art and poetry as we do through work in laboratories, feld sites or clinics. This anthology bears vivid witness.

As STS Program director, I’ve been privileged to see an idea that emerged from almost nowhere take root and blossom into an extraordinary collective enterprise through the leadership of the anthology’s student editors, authors and illustrators. A skeptic at frst, I quickly became a believer. Harvard students truly can deliver almost anything they put their minds to, at least when given space to envision and resources to translate thought into action. Special thanks are due to Aishani Aatresh (editor-in-chief), Michael Evans (co-editor), Makoto Takahashi (assistant editor), and Hilton Simmet (co-designer), as well as to our faculty judges James Engell, Jill Lep ore, Antoine Picon, and Keith Raffel. I now have the pleasure of introducing the fruits of their love and labor to the wider audiences the STS Program was designed to serve.

Sheila Jasanoff

Editors’ Notes

In a world where our perception of reality feels ever blurrier, faster, and more disjointed, stories perform an essential task: helping us make maps of meaning to guide our lives. The stakes could not be higher when thinking about what principles, visions, and ideas of the good will guide us into collective futures. The works of speculative art, stories, and poems in the Fu ture Humans Anthology blur the lines between “the fctional” and “the real.” As readers we are transported to worlds that feel unfamiliar, yet all too true to the experiences we know from our lives outside of the pages. I’m endlessly grateful to the creatives who have created these collective imaginations of potential futures — for inspiring me and us all to construct and imagine stories grounded in the worlds of past, present, and tomorrow.

Michael Evans

There is something profoundly meditative about reading. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve plopping down to read on a picnic blanket in our backyard on a sunny afternoon, book in hand with my sister usually beside me reading a book of her own. Looking back, the tapestries these moments wove together — weaving and reweaving me together, worlds together — fundamentally rejected the idea of reading as an escape from “reality” in quite a for mative way, putting ways of knowing and being into relief. I could not be prouder that Future Humans embodies this exact spirit. By speculating on possibilities for future humans, this anthology points to how human pasts, presents, and futures may be made. It may start with meditating on what we hold dear, drawing on resonantly shared sensibilities made by and making of interstitial connections, and re-membering the collective by collectively remembering. I hope you enjoy the anthology just as much as we have putting it together.

Aishani Aatresh

Something Deep Down Speaks Up by Dennis Kunichoff

From a distance the tree seems changeless.

A static giant – unfazed by the world around. It was an idea we told ourselves about life. But that was a lie and could not hide. We knew because we could feel it.

So when the Earth cried, in those dark days, we realized how connected we were to it. In the turmoil, it felt easier to notice how the morning glory fower yawns wide with the rising sun, how the river fows in a mass like runners in a marathon.

Or when the heat waves destroyed the crops and the land and the water –it felt like ghosts visiting this world leaving their fatal mark on everything they touched, including us.

---

The truth hit like a smile climbing the face while locking eyes with an old friend.

We dropped the lie, piece by piece, the way trees drop their leaves in the fall.

And we came closer to each other. And we came closer to the trees. And as the Earth cried, in those dark days, so did we.

Even the rocks, quiet as they seem, began to speak as we learned to listen. It was a new idea we began to tell ourselves (and an old idea that had returned).

To witness the tree dance – full motion –with the soil, and the grass, and the plants, and the moss, and the fowers, and their pollen, and the mushrooms, and their spores, the insects, and the animals, and the birds, and everything alive.

For us, to dance with Earth, as earth, and laugh.

That was the truth which we no longer hid.

We knew because we could feel it.

David by Amanda Duckworth

What Are Friends For by Rebecca Xi

Adrowsy sniffe, failing for the phone.“Hrm. Hello?” “...Dad?”

“‘stine? What’s up?”

Silence.

“Christine, baby?”

“I’m here.”

Sitting up. “Are you alright?”

“I -” A voice crack, then a distinct sob. “I’m on the 495, I’m in the car, I’m parked on the side and I don’t know where to go -”

“Chris, honey, slow down. What happened?”

Another silence, and then: “I left him, Dad. I left him. I - I. God. I - left.”

*****

The fourth time she chickens out of a sec ond date, she sits herself down and makes an appointment with Aeson, Inc. because god damnit, it’s been months and she would like to move on.

The man at the front desk has a man-bun, painted nails, and a nose piercing. His name tag reads “Quinn.” “Heya! Welcome to Aeson. How can I help you today?”

“Hi, uh, I’ve got an eleven o’clock appoint ment? Name is Christine.” She pauses. “Last name -”

“Found ya.” Nails click on the keyboard. “Says here that you’d like to adopt an Aeson Companion for traumatic memory treatment. Confrm?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

She goes through the necessary documentation on the iPad Quinn hands her, handing it back across the counter in less than fve min utes.

“Alrighty then.” A pause as he clicks the mouse. “What age and or maturity level

would you like the companion to assume?”

“What do you mean?”

Quinn looks up at her. “Age and maturity level will dictate the companion’s vocabulary, tone of voice, caretaker ability, et cetera. Ba sically it depends on what kinda personality you want. Lotsa people want a maternal fgure, others want someone closer to their own age.”

She frowns. “Maybe the latter? I want - I’d like a friend.”

“You got it.”

A few more questions later, Quinn hands her an actual paper pamphlet, and then she’s making an appointment to return for surgery and scans next Tuesday.

“So, you’re gonna get an Aeson Companion, huh? I hope it goes well.”

“Thanks.” She sips at her sangria. “I am a lit tle nervous. I mean, it’s surgery.”

Across the restaurant table from her, Em spears at her goat cheese salad. “I’m sure you have nothing to worry about. So many people have companions now. My coworker Angie got one a few months ago to deal with her child hood trauma, just - really shitty parents, and now she doesn’t have to think about them or feel all the resentment she usually does, it was eating her inside out.”

“They really work for everything, huh?”

“I mean, it makes sense if you think about it.” Em drains her sangria, then waves at the waiter. “It’s all just brain waves and hormones, at the end of the day.You’ll be just fne, Chris, I promise. You’re so strong, you’ll be fne.”

Chris inexplicably tears up a little. “Em, II couldn’t have done this without you. You

know, Dad was so nervous about me moving into the city after all that, and it’s thanks to you he doesn’t have anything to worry about.” She dips her head, blinking at her half-eaten toast. “You’re a lifesaver.”

Em puts a hand over hers. “Aw, Chrissy. C’mon, it was literally the least I could do. What are friends for?”

“What exactly are you putting in me?” She’d strictly avoided the pamphlet, leaving it untouched on the counter all weekend.

The nurse administering the anesthesia doesn’t call her out on the poorly timed question, thank God.“Hm, so.We call it a chip. Really it’s a set of microelectrode arrays we implant on the surface of the brain that detect hippo campal and amygdala activity, plus a microchip to interface with the headset we’ll give you. That’s where your companion will reside, so to speak. He - or she, or they, depending on what you selected - will monitor the record ed activity and send back signals automatically or on your command. It’ll all be your choice.”

“Okay,” she says, and then she’s going under, and when she wakes up she’s told to take Ty lenol until the headache wears off. They take her into a recovery room where they take a bunch of MRIs, and then a woman in a cardigan teaches her how to use the headset that she’ll wear like a headband, with a nifty little grain-sized speaker set directly over her ear. The woman reminds here one more time that she has full autonomy over what she wants the companion to do for her at any given point in time.

She takes it home and leaves it in its box on the kitchen table.

She has a nightmare that night. It’s worse than usual, and she cries herself awake, curled into a ball, sweating amidst the sheets.

The next morning she makes herself a cup of coffee, puts the headset on, and walks care fully through the steps for initial power on and calibration.

After the fnal step, there’s a few beeps, then a very soft whirring sound. It can’t possibly be the headset actually loading, she thinks, like an old desktop servos - this tech is so downsized and streamlined that she quickly realizes it must be an intentionally programmed noise, like a waiting tone or something, please hold.

Then a voice is speaking, and she jumps.

“Hello. It’s very nice to meet you. My name is Elias.”

“Hi, wow, this is weird. I’m Christine.”

“Hello, Christine. Please give me a few min utes to process the preset scans and calibrate myself to your current neural state.”

She sits stock still for a minute or so. “Hey, Elias, can I drink my coffee while you - do your thing?” A soft whir, then “Yes.”

“Cool.”

Elias has a soft, soothing male voice that’s very warm and calm and proper. It reminds her a little of Alfred in the latest Batman mov ie. Quinn at the front desk had asked her if she was sure she wanted a male voice, given her circumstances, and she’s glad that her spurof-the-moment decision to be a little braver hasn’t come back to bite.

“Alright, I’m done. Do you have any ques tions you would like answered, Christine?”

“Oh, uh. How does this work? I mean, they explained it to me, but do I like, tell you when I’m remembering something I don’t want to remember, or will you - take care of that automatically?”

He whirs. “That’s a good question, Christine. You have full autonomy over what you would like me to do. Based on physical in dicators, I can somewhat predict when you are about to recall a negative memory, which means that I can respond in such a way as to

prevent that recollection altogether or wait for your command, if you prefer.”

“I see.”

“Do you want a demonstration?”

“Sure.”

“Alright. Please rest assured any distress is only temporary. Now, please think about the worst thing your ex-boyfriend ever did to you.”

She frowns, unhappy, and just sits there for a while, mind blank. But then it comes out of nowhere, the memory, because apparently she’d processed things enough to know which one would constitute the worst - and oh God, she can’t believe she stayed for that long, but she’d loved him despite this and she, she -

“Now,” calm in her ear, “tell me to make it better.”

“Make me feel better,” she says quickly, breathing hard, and then she’s sinking into the warm wash of a hazy summer day long ago, salty ocean air in her nostrils, stomach full of seafood and her legs jolting with every step atop her father’s shoulders as he strides down the boardwalk; happy, relaxed, unutter ably content.

*****

She doesn’t go outside much for nearly two weeks, only stepping out to run errands and take out the trash. At frst it’s because she’s not sure how she feels about walking around with the headset on, despite how popular Aeson Companions are these days. They’re a common sight out and about and she’s been seeing them around for years now, but she just wants some time to adjust.

It’s also, admittedly, because she’d forgotten what it felt like to be this happy all the time, God, what is this life and why didn’t she do this earlier?

She doesn’t talk to Elias most of the time. Once they’d established that he could help block memories and regulate her emotions

however and whenever he saw ft, and to her immense satisfaction, she’d seen no reason to keep him confned to verbal commands. She can tell it’s getting better and better, too, simply because she’s making herself fettuccine alfredo for dinner one day and realizing that there’s no finch, no sadness, no nothing at all, even when fettuccine alfredo had been her ex’s favorite dish.

She hasn’t felt sad or depressed in days, no nightmares or anything, and it’s glorious. One day, she asks Elias, “Hey, can you check the weather for tomorrow, by any chance?”

“Of course. It will be a high of ffty-nine and a low of forty-three degrees Fahrenheit, mostly sunny.”

It turns out that Elias is linked to the Inter net, so he can look up things for her, play music, read the news, and more. It’s great. Then she wonders what it’d be like to talk to him even more, because the pamphlet says that regular conversation with the Aeson Companion will help it learn her speech and behavioral patterns better, so she sets about doing just that one day.

“Hey, Elias? Can we have a conversation?”

“Sure. Anything on your mind?”

“Hm, not really. Just want to get to know you better, I suppose. I - really want to.” “I would like to as well,” Elias says, and she smiles.

“Okay. Well, let’s see. How do you feel when you help me feel better?”

Elias pauses, whirs. “I am not suffciently equipped to answer that question.”

“Right,” Chris says, feeling oddly disappoint ed despite herself. “Because you’re a machine. You’re AI. Ergo, you can’t have feelings.”

“That’s correct. What I’m actually doing is monitoring neural activity in your hippocampus and amygdala and responding accordingly. When I detect the presence of certain stress and hormonal indicators, presumably in response to the recollection of a event, I send

signals activating the right neural pathways in order to food your system with hormones such as endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin so as to induce positive, calming emotions.”

“I see.”

“To your second point, I am unsure wheth er I am, technically or semantically speaking, Artifcial Intelligence. There does not appear to be a universal consensus understanding of Artifcial Intelligence.”

“Huh. What does it say in the dictionary?”

Elias whirs for a moment. “According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Artifcial Intelligence is the ability of a digital computer or com puter-controlled robot to perform tasks com monly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual

processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience.”

“The lady at the training session said something about pattern recognition too,” Chris says.

“That’s right, I am designed to identify patterns in your neural activity that precede negative memories. I am continuously adapting to better preemptively recognize the neurobio logical pathways and hormonal responses that are unique to you.”

“So you’re learning.”

“I am.”

“That makes you intelligent, then, right? Like, isn’t learning the main indicator of intelligence?” “I would like to pose a question,” Elias says.

“Shoot.”

“Does it matter whether or not I am intel ligent, or artifcially intelligent, or simply - as I perceive myself - a brain-computer interface designed to activate positive memories and regulate your hormones? I believe I serve the

same function regardless, and I adapt so as to maximize my fulfllment of the objective with which I was created, which is your mental and physical well-being. Is that not suffcient?”

“You sound like my mother when I ask her about God.”

“Hm. How so?”

Chris pauses. It’s perhaps the dozenth time in the past week Elias has used that exact phrase in that exact infection, “Hm. How so?” and it’s a little reminder that despite how human-like Elias sounds, he’s still artifcial, after all: coded responses based on extensive training with petabytes worth of recorded human conversation, including everything she says to him and to others.

But he’s trying, isn’t he?

“So my mom, she’s relentlessly pragmatic. Very common sense but also very no-non sense. Growing up, I’d ask her all sorts of questions about religion and about God, like how can God be omniscient but also have free will exist, and she’d just tell me it didn’t matter. As long as I believed, that was enough. I used to think she was just fed up with me but now I think she really didn’t care at all herself - it was really enough for her, like, she didn’t need to understand the mechanics.”

“I see. But you like understanding the mechanics, so to speak.”

“I guess I do.”

Elias whirs. “Would you like to read about the mechanics of the methodology my cre ators employed? It’ll be faster than if I read it to you myself.”

“Yeah?” She fops onto the couch, tips her head back. “Sure, why not.”

He gives her a search term to look up on the Internet, and then goes silent.

She sits back close to an hour later, processing. The technology that created the microchip and headset that make up Elias had

originated from a combination of neurobiolog ical disorder treatments that had gained traction in the 2010s for stuff like epilepsy, OCD, depression, and even Parkinson’s. There’s a lot on optogenetics and deep-brain stimula tion, plus a newer technique called decoded neurofeedback, or DecNef. A team in the UK had decoded fMRI data using a machine-learning algorithm to identify patterns associated with negative memories; more research had then found ways to target electrical currents at specifc areas of the hippocampus associated with good memories, and then yet more researchers had done what appeared to be a lot of work to downsize all the equipment. Aeson had then come along and created the brain-computer interface tying everything together, with a conversational interaction-enabled AI to boot.

All in all, she thinks, it’s really cool how the technology’s taken off. There’s even a research experiment being done right now with infants and children in a special school, outftting them with visual sensors to help them detect signifcant changes in neural activity and hormonal levels, and then teaching them how to react appropriately. Human Behavior 101.

It’s a little much, sure, but it all seems humane and consensual. The parents are on board, and if the kids come out much better socialized than most people she knows, then that must be better in the long run, surely.

“Hey, Elias?”

“Yes, Christine?”

“A lot of people put a shit ton of work into making you.”

Elias huffs what she thinks is a laugh, low in her ear.

As time goes on, she gets to know Elias very well.

They talk about God and about her mother and her family and Elias is, no surprise, a

wonderful listener. They start talking a lot about pop culture, which Elias loves in particular because he has access to the entire Internet and enjoys trawling all the different sites for information.

Elias greets her with “Hi” and “Hey” more and more, instead of his standard “Hello, Christine.” He picks up a little slang from her and she fnds it incredibly endearing. He’s reading her better every day: she barely thinks about her ex anymore, but sometimes she’ll get frustrated with a line of code or worked up about a rude client, and Elias will chime in with a soft “You okay?”

“Yeah, just - tired,” she’ll say, sometimes. “Annoyed,” others.

And then Elias will food her brain with happy hormones and she’ll feel better, so much better.

In the early days, she’d taken the headset off to sleep, shutting it down with care and setting it on the nightstand. She’d eventually tried sleeping with it on and when it hadn’t dislodged in the middle of the night from her habitual tossing and turning, she’d started just keeping it on all the time, taking it off only to shower and change.

“Did you miss me?” she teases when she puts the headset back on.

“Oh, so much,” Elias says sarcastically, and she laughs. “For all of the twenty minutes you were gone, Christine, I missed you.”

“Aw, missed you too. How do you feel about a movie?”

“Let’s do it.”

She tells him preemptively to turn it down a notch when she watches sad movies, because she wants to be able to wallow and feel sad and cry, and he tells her it wouldn’t have been an issue in the frst place.

“Did you know your endorphin and oxytocin levels actually rise when you watch sad movies? The oxytocin means you feel empathy

for fctional characters, and then the endorphins mean you feel relaxed after.”

“Oh. So that’s why I feel all washed out after Big Hero 6.”

“I suppose,” Elias says agreeably.

Em takes her out to lunch one day. Chris would rather not, but turns out it’s been ages since she’s seen Em, and she does feel a little guilty.

They go to the same restaurant they went to before her surgery, a nice little hole-in-thewall brunch place with ivy greenery and cheap sangria and avocado tartines that she’s actually really looking forward to, once she thinks about it. They chat about Em’s job and Chris’ online work and about Elias, “yeah, it’s going well, it’s really been working!” “Aw, I’m so glad to hear that, you look really good, Chris, I’m so glad!” until the waiter comes to take their orders.

“So, c’mon, tell me, are you seeing anyone? It’s been so long since we’ve caught up,” Em says as soon as the waiter is gone.

The question rankles her, and she starts wishing she hadn’t left Elias at home. It’s her frst outing without him ever, because she’d wanted to give her full attention to Em, but hindsight is 20/20 and her head is already starting to hurt as she answers.

“No, there’s nothing going on. How about you?”

“Aw, don’t tell me you didn’t go on a second date with the hot attorney?”

“I didn’t. So, have you been seeing anyone new?” she presses, and Em gives in, telling her all about her new coworker and how cute he is and the signals he’s been sending, how he’s invited her to a party at his house in the Hamptons and won’t Chris come with, and Chris is about to lose it because the last time she’d been in the Hamptons she’d driven off in the middle of the night to call her father,

sobbing on the side of the road.

“I’ll probably pass on the party,” she says, cutting Em off.

“Are you sure? I’ve missed you, and this sounds like it could be a fun way to hang out.”

“No, I defnitely don’t want to go, and you should know why.”

Em looks at her, and then her face creases in pity. “Oh, Chris. ‘M sorry, I shoulda realized. But it’s been so long, and this’ll be a completely different part of the area. I think it could be fun.”

“No. Just drop it, will you?”

Em’s eyebrows draw together. “C’mon, what’re you doing? Are you really getting upset?”

“No.”

“I just want to spend more time with you, you know.”

“Well, we’re doing that now, aren’t we?”

Em eyes her. “It’s been a while, Chris - I feel like you haven’t been getting out at all any more. That can’t be healthy, you know!”

Chris stews. “God, why can’t you be more -”

“More what, huh?”

“More fucking sensitive, God!”

Em draws back, looking hurt. “What the hell Chris, you don’t respond to my texts for months and now that we’re fnally catching up you - you’re yelling at me? I’ve been here for you, I’ve been trying, c’mon, you gotta give me something to work with!”

It bursts out of her all at once. “You’ve got as much to work with as Elias does! Physical indicators, he said - I’m worked up, can’t you tell! Can’t you fucking tell when to back off!”

“Who’s Elias?” Em asks, and Chris stares at her. She shakes her head.

“No one.”

“That’s just - you’re not even trying anymore.”

“Okay, he’s my therapist.”

Em snorts. “Right. As if you would go see a

therapist if your life depended on it.”

“Fine, he’s my Aeson Companion!”

A pause. “What? You named your compan ion?”

“He came with the name.”

Em stares at her. “You’re attached.You’ve gotten attached to your companion, oh my God, is this why you haven’t been responding to me? Have you even left the house?”

“Yeah, like I’d wanna go out or grab a meal if you’re just gonna push me to do things I don’t want to do!” “It’s called growth and moving on, Chris!”

“Bullshit. You just - God,” and now she’s tearing up, shaking her head. “You don’t really care about me at all.”

“You’ve got it all wrong. Is this about your companion? You think it cares about you? It’s a fucking computer, Chris, I promise it doesn’t care about you, but I do.”

Her head is pounding. “I can’t do this right now,” she says, and stands up and walks away.

As soon as she’s home, she runs up to her bedroom and puts the headset on, calibrating it quickly. Elias has barely said “Hey, Christine,” before she’s blurting out, “Make me feel good,” and oh, that’s much better.

She sits and breathes through it for a moment.

“Elias, can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you care about me?”

Elias pauses, hums. “I am not suffciently equipped to answer that question.”

“Elias. Please. I can’t, please dear God, I -” and she tears the headset off, finging it over the back of the couch as she gathers her face in her hands and bursts into tears.

and then jolts upright.

Shit. Elias! The chip, she hadn’t properly severed the connection -

She fails over the back of the couch and grabs the headset. “No, no no -” she fumbles it over her head with shaking hands, registers the load-up sound as the pulsing in her brain suddenly disappears.

“Elias? Hello? Are you there?”

“Christine,” says Elias, soft and affable as ever, and Chris shudders all over with relief. “Hi,” she says, sniffing a bit.

“Hi,” Elias says warmly, and already she’s feeling a lot better. “You okay? Let’s watch a movie. How about Lord of the Rings - it always makes you feel good. Hey, do you want me to make you feel a little better too, in the meantime? I - really want to.”

“Yes, please, Elias, thank you,” and Chris foats to her feet, serene, as she goes to put the movie on.

There’s a soft pinging in the back of her skull, like a tiny thrumming headache, when she drifts awake. Her face is sticky against the damp couch cushions. She groans, throat dry,

Islands

by Justin Werfel

“Bishop to C5.”

“Knight to E7.”

“Queen takes E7.”

“Rook to H1.”

They both stared for a moment at the boards on their respective screens, tens of thousands of miles apart.

“Looks like that’s mate,” said Beni. “Nice work!”

“Thanks! Good game!” said Gav. She pushed back from her console and drifted in a slow backfip, scrubbing her fngers across her scalp. Blitz chess was the perfect length for these rare meetings, when two passing ships were close enough for near-real-time communication, but it took all her focus.

“How’s the ship?” Beni asked.

Gav grimaced as she completed the turn. “About as good as you can expect at the end of a run. Air getting low, hydroponics is held together with duct tape, the usual microme teoroid scars. I’ll be in dock for a few days. Pretty good haul this time, though—found an M-type a few months back. How’s Ceres?”

“Same as always,” said Beni. He cocked his head. “No, actually, there’s one thing new. We’ve got an ambassador.”

Gav blinked. “A what?”

“You heard me,” said Beni, grinning. “From Mars, believe it or not. Come out to build bridges, or something. I didn’t really talk to them.”

“Did we ask for one? Or did they just decide to send somebody? And why now?”

Tide over Chess by Bella Nesti

“Good questions. I’m sure someone at Ceres knows. Rook, I think.”

The round-trip comm lag was already up to a few seconds, annoying for conversation and getting up to the border of prohibitive. “Repeat?”

“Rook. I think that’s their name. They won’t be hard to recognize.”

“Ah. Right. I’ll tell them you said hello.”

Beni laughed, and made the closed-hand sign indicating the lag was getting to be too much for him. “Do that. I’ll see them in a few years.”

Gav smiled, and returned the sign. “I’ll send you mail. Good hunting!”

“Good hunting!”

Gav hated everything about Ceres Station. She hated the light: too far towards the blue end of the spectrum. She hated the gravity: the few pounds were a constant drag on her body, and anything she tried to foat across the room moved in an unintuitive arc and got stuck on the foor. She hated that there was a foor in the frst place: such an unnecessary waste of space, and having to stick to one orientation all the time was disorienting. Most of all she hated having to be around people. At least at this hour there weren’t many others in the corridors that honeycombed the dwarf plan et—her ship clock had gotten desynced from the station’s during her trip, and she’d arrived in the middle of the local “night”—but still, here came someone now. She tucked her chin into her chest and tried to hurry past them.

They were staggering from side to side across the corridor. A sudden lurch carried them into her and slammed her against the wall. “Hey!” she grunted.

The stranger caught their balance, shook their head and peered at her. “Terribly sorry,” they said, speaking with exaggerated precision. “Out for an evening constitutional.

Constitutional. Taking the air. You came out of nowhere. I do hope no one was hurt.”

She glared at them, rubbing her shoulder. It was no one she knew by sight, which wasn’t unusual even though the Belt community was small and close-knit. The distances they were spread across plus the bandwidth limitations meant she’d never seen most Belters in person, or even by video link, most communication taking place in short text-only notes. But this person’s hair was much longer than any Belter would wear it, there was nothing around their waist, and they were having too much trouble with the gravity. This obviously had to be the Mars ambassador Beni had mentioned.

But, wait—the sour miasma hanging about them reminded her of something she’d heard about, common lore but nothing anyone ever actually encountered. She looked again at their bloodshot eyes, their swaying even as they stood in place—“Are you drunk?” she blurted.

“Nonsense. Sober as a jug. I may have had a small nightcap. To cap the night, you see. What time is it?”

Gav wasn’t sure whether to be more ap palled or fascinated. “Where did you even get the alcohol?”

The visitor moved to lay a fnger aside their nose and missed, ending up pointing at her. “Had to make it myself, didn’t I. Nothing de cent to drink in this backwater.”

“Excuse me,” Gav snapped, hooking her thumbs into her toolbelt. “Every child knows intoxication is the quickest way to death in a vacuum. You Martians with your planet and your fancy domes can be as irresponsible as you like, but out here we take care of ourselves.”

The other coughed a laugh. “And a fne life, worth taking care of, isn’t it. Creep ing around the sun in your rickety little tin cans. Hardly even a passable shore leave to break the monoty. Metonymy. That thing.”

Gav’s eyes were narrowed to slits. “Yeah? Our lives, we don’t need to poison ourselves to forget about.”

The visitor drew themself angrily upright. The effect was slightly spoiled when the motion made them overbalance in the low gravity and they had to windmill their arms to keep from falling. “You folk are so proud of your independence, aren’t you,” they spat when they recovered. “Well, let me ask you this. Whose bus is it that you’re driving?”

Gav gaped like she’d been struck. Words wouldn’t come. She turned and pushed off back down the corridor. And this was the Martians’ idea of an ambassador?

It would be a few days before her ship would be able to leave drydock. Like many oneship pilots, she preferred to spend as much of that time as possible in her tiny rented room, chatting with others on-station via the luxurious ly stable data link but not needing to tolerate their physical presence. But she still had to venture out from time to time to use the shared facilities.

It was on her second trip to the refectory the next day that she caught sight of a familiar mop of hair at the other end of the corridor. She spun and headed back the way she’d come, but the other had already seen her.

“I say there! Please!” they called. “Please wait!”

She hurried on, but they caught up, to her mild surprise. Apparently they were more accustomed to moving in this gravity than they’d appeared last night, or else she was out of practice with it.

“Please give me,” they said behind her, panting, “half a minute of your time to apologize.”

She turned and glared. They blinked, and bowed slightly. “I behaved quite abominably last night. No excuse for it. I fear I am—well, I suppose you’d hardly know

the idiom here, but I am a bad drunk. It was entirely unforgivable. But if you’ll allow me, I’d like to try to make it up to you by treating you to a local indulgence.”

Despite herself, her pulse quickened. She tried to keep it from showing in her face, but the other brightened a touch at whatever they saw there. “In another context, I would offer to buy you a drink,” they went on. “Obviously I shall do no such thing here, but I understand the local equivalent involves—smelling things, is it?”

Gav couldn’t restrain a laugh. “More or less. All right, I’m holding you to that.” She might detest the person, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The other bowed again. “Very well then. Let me—” They smiled at some private joke. “Let me treat you to a snort. Lead on.”

The darkness of the roma bar made it almost possible to pretend she was alone. The visitor squinted at the faint luminance of the menu as they slid into the booth. “These names mean nothing to me. What would you—”

“Sh-sh-sh,” said Gav, slipping the breather over her head. “Pick something.” Her fnger hovered over the display for a second, then settled on Golden Forest. She closed her eyes…

Some minutes later, she sighed one last time and opened her eyes again. It was remarkable how much better she felt. Once more she thought about relaxing the rules she’d set for herself, but no. One day it would all pay off.

The other took off their own breather a moment later. “That was—interesting, I suppose,” they said. “What was that, exactly?”

“Sequence of olfactory chemicals synthesized to evoke particular feelings and associations,” Gav said, half-automatically. She shrugged. “They advertise it as a massage of your limbic system.”

The other grimaced. “I’ll stick to gimlets, thank you,” they said. “Well, not around here,

I suppose. You have a device like this on your ship?”

Gav’s mouth twisted. By way of answer she tapped for their bill.

The other’s eyes widened. “My goodness,” they said, touching the panel to authorize the charge. “That’s a bit steep.”

“Making the chemicals isn’t cheap,” Gav agreed. “And that’s why I don’t have my own machine. Or come here on my stopovers, normally. I’m saving up.”

“I see.”

Gav looked at her hands. “That last thing you said last night. You were right, you know. My ship isn’t mine. I’m piloting, but it belongs to one of the consortia.” She looked back up. “For now.” She shook her head. “Another few circuits, maybe, and I’ll have enough to own it free and clear.”

“The self-suffciency truly is important to you out here, isn’t it.”

“It is. And that hurt.”

“I really am sorry,” they said quietly.

There was silence for a moment.

“You were right, too,” they said. “About poi soning myself to forget my life. That is what I’m doing, isn’t it.” They made a face. “I would like to think I wouldn’t have been so nasty if you hadn’t hit so close to home with that.”

Gav said nothing.

“You may have heard I’ve been sent here as ambassador,” they went on. “And you may have wondered what business an ambassador has in a place where every person is practically a nation unto themselves.”

“Some ships have up to eight people,” Gav offered.

“Touché. Every ship, then.”

“I had wondered,” she admitted.

They sighed. “Until recently I was Mars’s am bassador to Earth. For the past couple of decades, in fact. I was—recalled, and reassigned here. Offcially, because Mars discovered a

sudden need for diplomatic relations with a loose association of independent contractors they’d never bothered to formally recognize before. In actuality, to shut me up. I was becoming a bit of a gadfy on Earth, I suppose, and Earth grew tired of me, and I was unable to convince my own government that survival was more important than pleasing the giant.”

Gav raised her eyebrows. “Survival.”

“It does sound rather melodramatic, doesn’t it.” They dropped their gaze. “No less true for all that. Things are continuing to get worse on Earth. Their government is having a bit of a time keeping everyone locked down calmly. Sending any part of what’s left of their precious resources off-planet—the optics are not good. They’re moving toward shutting down trade.”

Gav started. “They’re going to stop buying our metals?”

“What? Oh. No, not at all. They need the metals you mine very much. No, I mean the things we, that is, Mars, buys from them. They may stop selling.”

They saw Gav’s blank expression, and shook their head. “Never mind. Interplanetary com merce is not the most fascinating topic, is it.”

“No, but, what does that have to do with survival? And what did you mean, things are getting worse on Earth?”

The ambassador looked at her hard, weigh ing something up in their mind. After a moment they took a long breath. “Right. So to start with, you know how Earth is down to a fraction of its historical habitable zone.”

“No.”

“What?”

“I mean, I can’t say I know much in particular about Earth. Or its history, or whatever.”

The other stared in bemusement. “Good heavens, what do they teach in the schools out here?”

Gav gave them a look. “Our own history.

I mean, obviously we learn about how we got here in a broad way, but, like, there … why would we care? I don’t know why we should know everything about a place we’ll never visit.”

They laughed. “Touché again. I daresay hardly anyone on Mars knows much about the Belters, for that matter. I hardly knew anything myself before my new assignment. I suppose we’re all a bit insular, aren’t we.” They tipped an invisible hat. “Well. To summarize. The middle latitudes are essentially uninhabitable, too hot and arid. They’re used for solar farms. All real habitation and farmable land is in the far north. That’s not a lot of space, for the population, and keeping it going the way they do has been using up a lot of what they have left. They’ve been quite ingenious at fnding ways to keep most of their people from really noticing that anything is changing, but it’s approaching the point where that will no longer be possible. And so their rulers have been looking to take an easy way out—making a show of austerity, being ostentatious about prioritizing their own and not letting anything they consider valuable out of their hands. More show than substance, of course. That will serve to pacify their people for a few more years, and push off the real problems to a time when they’ll be that much harder to solve. And in the mean time, that will mean real problems for us.”

“Why?” said Gav, still confused. “Mars is self-suffcient.”

The ambassador let out a humorless laugh. “And veryone knows it, don’t they. It’s such a fundamental part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. A pity it’s not true.”

Gav had trouble processing the words.

The other leaned forward. “Take oxygen, for instance. We import most of our supply from Earth. Cut that off and we don’t breathe.”

“But you sell us oxygen,” said Gav, still struggling to understand what was being said.

They nodded. “Economics has odd consequences. You sell metals to Earth, and become rich in Earth scrip. You pass it to us in buying supplies and replacement parts for the technology the Belt is too small to produce. We end up with an embarrassment of riches on paper, which we can only spend in trade with Earth. And so it winds up being cheaper for us to import low-mass articles like seed stock and, yes, oxygen, than to maintain the equipment to handle it all ourselves. Oh, we used to have the means, true enough. But prosperity breeds carelessness, we let things go, and now we rely quite critically on Earth imports.” They shook their head. “It’s not as if it’s a secret, exactly. The transactions are a matter of public record. After all, if they weren’t, Earth’s lead ers would hardly see anything to be gained in cutting off trade, would they. But no one ever seems to stop and think about what it means.”

“And you’re taking enough oxygen and, and whatever from Earth that it’s a drain on their own supplies now?” Gav asked.

They gestured angrily. “Not remotely. Earth throws away more in a day than we could use in a year. But it’s hard to explain that to a rest less mob, and so they’re not planning to try.”

“But if it’s so important, why won’t your own government support you?”

Another humorless laugh. “They’re no more rational. Not willing to recognize there’s a problem. Which means they won’t even support trying to build back to self-suffciency. Not that we could realistically do that in the time we’ll have left.” They shook their head. “And so here I am. Poisoning myself to forget.”

There was a long silence.

“Did you really make the alcohol yourself?” Gav asked at last.

This time the laugh was genuine. “I did,” they said. “Resurrected the ancient art of the still. Moonshine, they used to call it. It sounds a bit sinister now, doesn’t it, considering the fate of

the old lunar colony. But I was able to get a grapevine seedling from the luxury goods market, and piping and such from basic supplies, and I’ve had considerable time on my hands.

“That was my frst batch, you know, last night,” they added. “Considerably more po tent than I expected. It’s not at all an excuse, but—I was hardly at my best, in a number of ways.”

“It’s forgiven,” said Gav, head still spinning.

There seemed nothing more to say. They got up and stepped back out into the corridor, blinking at the light.

“So. Rook, was it?” Gav said.

“Pardon?”

“Your name. Rook?”

The other looked blank, then smiled. “Castle,” they said.

She smiled back. “Gav.”

Castle put out their hand. “A pleasure,” they said.

She hesitated, then took it. “An unexpected pleasure,” she replied.

#

The pure starfeld shone in through her hel met visor, overlaid with status readouts for her suit vitals and the small army of robots swarming over the surface of the asteroid. They knew their business, and worked inde pendently for the most part; she was outside with them to monitor and help out when they ran into trouble they couldn’t handle—a drill fouling, a fange getting caught on an outcrop or stuck in a crevice. That sort of thing happened frequently enough, no matter how much the art of robot autonomy advanced, that a human presence was still needed on these mining ships, and probably always would be.

Her ship’s reft had concluded that morning, and she’d heaved herself back in through the main airlock with joy and relief. The familiar

clutter greeted her, the kaleidoscopically painted walls, the tinsel futtering over the vents. She was home.

Her frst stop after foating free, as usual, was a C-type asteroid, to fll up on water and organics for the propulsion and hydroponic systems; she’d sold off the last of her excess supplies at the station at the end of her last circuit. Now she gazed blankly through the visor, eyes focused somewhere between the readouts and the distant stars. The conversa tion with Castle had continued chewing at her mind.

She rechecked her position. Still only a few light-seconds out from Ceres. The lag for a live call would be maddening but not yet im possible.

Screw it. This was a C-type; the robots could take care of themselves for a few minutes. She dialed the ambassador.

After a moment their fuzzy image swam onto her visor. “Gav!” they said, sounding only a little distorted. “It’s good to see you.”

“Nice to see you too,” she said distractedly. “Look, from what you were saying, Earth is planning to kill you all. How can they do that?”

The seconds ticked by while she waited for the signal to crawl to Ceres and back. “I appreciate your sharing my outrage,” the image said at last.

She shook her head. “No, I mean, the planet wants you dead? What kind of monsters live there?”

“Ah, I see.” Castle thought for a minute, and nodded. “All right.

The frst thing to understand about Earth is that there’s no such thing as Earth.” They shook their head. “What I mean is, it’s not like there’s a single unifed mind there to deal with, or to convince. It’s made of people. Peo ple have different opinions, different goals, different priorities; and so diplomacy is a delicate balancing act, with a hundred parties all

fghting you and each other. That may be less the case for Earth than it is for the Belt, or Mars for that matter, because it’s so centralized and hierarchical, but it’s still a complicated place.

“The second thing is that Earthers think ev eryone wants to be an Earther.”

Gav’s mouth fell open a little.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Castle went on, smiling. “They can’t conceive that someone else could prefer their own life as they have it.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Mm, I wouldn’t say so. Unimaginative, maybe. The geocentric viewpoint does have a long tradition. But no, I’ve never quite understood it myself. You may appreciate the creche you grew up in, but you hardly want to move back there once you’ve left, do you.”

Gav nodded. “We do things a little differently out here, but I get what you mean.”

Castle steepled their fngers. “The import ant thing about that is that every one of them can console themselves that there’s someone worse off. No matter how bad a worker’s life is, at least they’re not scrabbling for dirt out in the dark and vacuum, as they’d think of it. I would go so far as to say that their society relies heavily on that, for its stability.

“And then it’s a very human thing to band together with those you see as your own peo ple, and not feel the same responsibility for outsiders. And it’s hard to get more outside than leaving the planet.”

They spread their hands.“It’s not that anyone actively wants anyone dead. But when our cri sis hits, they’re going to cluck and wring their hands and say what a shame it is, shouldn’t something be done about it, and they won’t do anything about it.”

Gav was appalled. “I can’t imagine Mars as a graveyard.”

“Well, you won’t have to do that imagining it for much longer now, it seems.”

Wait. That didn’t sound good. “What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be morbid. But what do you think will happen to you after we go?”

A pit started to open in her stomach. “We go on mining, and selling to Earth? I—I guess we would have to buy supplies and tech from Earth instead of from you.”

Castle shook their head. “High-mass goods. It’ll be several times more expensive. Not sus tainable. And things like oxygen—they’ll be no more willing to sell that at all to you than to us, will they.”

“So we’re going to end up grounded. Stuck living on Earth.” She couldn’t imagine it.

The ambassador’s face changed when they heard her. Several more seconds passed before they answered. “Nothing so tidy, I’m afraid. Ceres is the highest gravity you’ve ever lived in, yes? Any of you, for generations? Or do you feel the accelerations of your ship when you’re out on your ventures?”

“No. The inertia compensators,” she answered numbly.

They shook their head again. “I don’t believe your physiology could hold up under planetary conditions now. Even on Mars, much less Earth.

“…I’m sorry.”

How was your stopover? Did you meet the ambassador? A message from Beni.

She sent a reply. I did. The name is Castle, not Rook, by the way. Although come to think of it, Rook might have suited them bet ter. They were a regular storm crow prophet of doom. End of the world and everything.

Beni was far away enough now that it was a few minutes before his next reply came.

Sounds fun. The religious kind, or the crazy kind?

The latter, I guess, she typed, and then a moment later added, Serious ly though, they were pretty convincing. Honestly I’ve been losing sleep.

Relax. It’s an ambassador’s job to be convincing. And people have been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years. It never happens.

It does, though, she thought, remembering the lunar colony.

The solar system’s been spin ning along since the beginning of time, Beni’s message continued. It’s going to keep spinning. That was hard to argue with, but not really what she was worried about. What would we do if something happened to Mars? she wrote. If they stopped selling to us?

Buy from Earth, I guess. Any way, nothing’s going to happen to Mars.

Beni sent another message the next day, when he didn’t hear back from her. The sky’s not falling. We are the sky.

Gav thought for a long time about every thing she’d heard.

A couple of weeks later, she started sending messages.

#

The message from Castle had an attachment.

She opened it. It was a tiny video of the ambassador gaping like a fsh. Apparently they’d felt that words alone wouldn’t be enough to convey the scale of their amazement.

She opened the message. How? it read in full. How is this pos

sible??

She couldn’t stop grinning. You told me how much Earth needs the metal. It seemed like that could be the basis for some leverage.

The round-trip message time to Ceres was over ffteen minutes by this point. Normally she’d go do something else and come back to her mail later, rather than waiting around for the reply, but she’d really been looking forward to this.

But...but! And the entire Belt stands behind it?! That is proverbially impossible! You are the proverbial cats it’s impossible to herd! There are two thousand of you and you don’t agree on anything!

It was clear pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to convince them the way you convinced me, she wrote back. We would have done the same thing you told me Earth and Mars were doing, just gone on insisting there wasn’t a problem.

The minutes passed—the transit time, and another few minutes to make it clear to the other that she wasn’t going to send more without prompting.

Gav, you are trying to kill me. I’m trying not to rise to the bait, but this is too much. If the Belt doesn’t even recognize a self-interest here, how did you get everyone to agree to accept the cost? You can’t possibly fail to realize that if you stop selling to Earth in the event they stop selling to Mars, your income ceases. And what about the risk that they decide to send up their own

miners and replace you entirely?

Another message followed on its heels. You are not going to convince me that the entire Belt is pure altruists intent on sacrifcing themselves for the sake of a foreign population.

And a third: Or maybe you are. I could be ready to believe anything at this point. Obviously I’ve underestimated you one way or another.

She was enjoying herself immensely. What it took was a common enemy. A whole planet of assholes who think everyone else is beneath them, and they’ll hang someone else out to dry because they feel like it? Screw them. We’ll tighten our belts for a few months to piss in their faces.

She added: And they can’t replace us all. If they can’t afford to send up a few spare parts, they can’t feld a feet our size. And where are they going to get the metal to build it, anyway? So yeah, we discussed it at length over the last two months on the big board, and we know what we’re doing. We’re behind you, Castle. Tell us what the next step is.

It took a while for the reply to come back. Speaking as a career diplomat, I’m very, very impressed. All right. I’ll take it from here. I know who I’ll be contacting frst on both Earth and Mars. Thanks are hardly adequate, but they’re what I have, so: thanks. And may you have clear horizons!

Or whatever your equivalent phrase is.

She wrote back: Good hunting! #

Check your savings account. The message came in unsigned.

She did, and stared, and stared again. The fg ure had jumped by over a full circuit’s proft.

She sent a message to Castle. All right. What happened?

The planets have reached an understanding, the reply fnally came over. Earth’s government has pledged to keep their beloved former colony well supplied with its needs, in recognition of the deep ties of feeling and histo ry between the worlds, and I’m sure having nothing to do with the axe you have hanging over their neck. Mars’s government, in turn, has expressed -- mone tarily -- its unexpected gratitude to me and to the miracle I’m being offcially credited with having performed from my new posting. I, of course, have passed along that reward to the true author of the miracle.

Things won’t be stable forever, the message continued, and this is not the end of the fght. But you’ve given us a few more years. It’s little enough compared to what you deserve, but I hope that giving you a few years in turn, shortening your journey toward that independence you seek, can go some way toward repaying the debt we all owe you.

I won’t be here when you next get back to Ceres. I’m being reassigned back to Earth.

Offcially it’s to recognize my centrality to the relations be tween the worlds, but I think the real reason is they want to keep a closer eye on me. Regardless, I will probably not see you again in person. But I hope we will continue our con versations in notes like these. I certainly have a great deal yet to learn.

Good hunting to you, now and always.

Gav reread the message, and again, and a fourth time. Then she pushed herself away from the console, drifted in a slow tumble over to one of the tiny windows, and stared out at the endless stars.

Responsibilities by Katrina Armistead

Democracies can die. When We the People lost trust in the government, corporations - already politically involved - reached in to fll the void; The United States [1776-2028] dissolved into limited liability city-states.

Asoftglow, tinged pink, summoned Hal from the depths of sleep. The gentle coo of mourning doves emanated from the bulbous artifact on her nightstand. Cracking her right eye to the building blush, Hal watched in resignation as her room was slowly bathed in light. 5:45 AM. Groaning, she realized her supervisor José must have virtually moved up her alarm to set an early meeting. Feeling the edge of a cold, Hal briefy considered playing hooky but knew she would not; her friend Sloan received an hour of Company Service for less – keeping her video off over pinkeye embarrassment – just last month. Tossing the duvet aside, Hal sat up and swung her legs off the bed. No point in dallying now that she was up. One coffee and a shower later, Hal was out the door on her way to HQ.Work-from-home permissions wouldn’t kick in until her next level promotion – Hal couldn’t wait to move into Senior Analyst quarters, everything would be so much more streamlined. She hated having to actually interact with people outside her division. They didn’t tend to understand her work and were mostly idiots, anyway. Eleva tor bank C promptly dinged, and she stepped into the cramped box, only narrowly avoiding squashing a small terrier underfoot as it made a freedom bid for the 16th foor’s hallway.

The indignant yelp of Bandit snapped Raj out of his daydream where he was piling his room mate’s week’s worth of dirty dishes onto their pillow. 16th foor. The doors shut behind a slow-moving woman wearing an oversized white button-down. Impatient, Raj shifted his stance and checked his watch. 6:52 AM, one notifcation. Swiping, Raj saw his frst client

of the day had just checked in. Shit. Katy was usually late for her session, and Raj had been taking his morning slower than typical. He knew his watch recorded his location for The Company’s Health and Wellness Division and he had 8 minutes to get onsite before accruing fnancial penalization. “Excuse me, sorry!” Raj sidestepped Bandit, nodded to his owner Russ, and slipped out of the carriage as the doors opened. Wishing he was advanced enough to merit a Company pickup service, Raj hastened through the revolving doors of his building and began a fast walk toward HaW Compound 2, where he led private training sessions for many of The Company’s mid-level managers between their meetings. A heavy summer breeze barreling east assisted Raj for ward as he hurried down the street.

It was one of those days where large swaths of the city smelled like chocolate from the west-town factory, and Ada greedily breathed in the rich smell brought on by a sudden gust. Today was a good day. Not even the agitated young man whose headlong dash - nearly shoving her off the sidewalk - could shake her contentment. She enjoyed caretaker duty and was pleased to have a week-long break from meetings. The old people were cute, and it was reassuring to keep an eye on the facilities she knew she’d enter one day when her mind was no longer useful to The Company. Add ing to her good fortune, Ada and her partner, Eric, just this morning received confrmation for his vasectomy reversal surgery - they were approved for children! The process had been long and frustrating, with multiple rounds of interviews and extensive background and

genetic tests. It was validating that HR believed in them as a team to produce and raise the next generation of executives and leaders. Once pregnant, Ada and Eric would each receive a salary increase that acknowledged their additional added responsibilities as parents and ensure adequate family-unit resources. As she paused to buzz the gate, Ada hummed the chorus to an oldie she knew would be a hit with the residents as she got them washed and dressed.

“Because I’m Haaapppyyy…” The catchy tune foated lyrics into Rory’s consciousness. He quickly forced himself to think of a new song immediately before it stuck; his grandmother had loved that song - especially singing it loudly off key just to annoy him if he’d left his room particularly messy. Rory settled on a #REF!™ original. He and Judd - friends since before either could remember - had started #REF! last year and were going to be musi cians. Neither of their parents - lawyers for The Company - approved. After all, music was very far removed from The Company’s core offerings and not qualifed as a Company Val ue-Add. Employees were heavily encouraged to fnd creativity within their roles, but quirky hobbies were always supported. Rory and Judd, however, knew that they wouldn’t be satisfed with any role but that of a real musician. They’d been familiarized with The Company’s Job Board since elementary-levels when most kids started to test and learn role affliations. But they weren’t developer deities, agile impact evangelists, or IT gurus — they were artists! That meant either life in the Culture Division (seen as a joke by normCos like their parents) making sponsored jingles or wrangling a transfer to Dreamer City, the major entertainment hub that output nearly consumable con tent available to Rory’s knowledge. Judd and Rory talked about Dreamer City all the time and how they would arrange a transfer when

Dreamer City took limited transfers and applicants must provide a promising portfolio and additional functional skills to employ prior to reaching the C-Level of Content Creators. Fiddling with his hoodie string, Rory rehearsed how he’d pitch their new angle to Judd:

“Ok so, we already know we’ve got the talent,. “Right (obviously).”

“But we know Dreamer City is chock-full of talent, and we need to stand out.”

“Right…”

“So, we need a special skillset to use as our way in, something Dreamer City is missing, but that The Company has too much of so they don’t try to keep us.”

“Which is what?”

Here Rory paused. He wasn’t exactly sure what that might be. Entities tended to have a system-like caretaker or cleaning duty to get people to temporarily pick up the slack on undesirable positions. Or handsomely re ward people who chose to dedicate themselves to those necessary-but-terrible roles. It was the law of supply and demand, which was The Company’s golden rule. But Dreamer City had different strategic priorities. Maybe a boring analytical focus which was the norm here would stand out there…? He’d have to wait to speak with Judd until Logic thoughthat class didn’t make any sense anyway. Who needed to know the amount of ping pong balls that would ft in an airplane? It was a stupid skill that made people like Tina so annoyingly smug. Not like their music, which brought raw feeling into the world and really meant some thing. A sudden incoming siren stopped Roryat the corner across from their school, eyeing their stupid mascot statue of The Accountant with hostility.

Ren steered the ambulance through the Ed ucation Division. Hopefully this assignment wouldn’t take too long. The call came fromwithin the Retired Division - dead or dying,

probably. Everyone regulated to “retired” roles were worse than useless in Ren’s opinion. A waste of Company resources that might go to more PTO for the Health and Wellness Division, for example. Not that Ren ever managed to use up all their annual hours anyway. Vacation was a bit taboo at The Company where everyone was expected to fnd perfect fulfllment through their role. Out of the 37 Company-sanctioned vacations this year only two - a mountain cabin stay and a desert yurt - had solitary tags; staycations were not considered enriching enough and were widely discouraged, if not outright banned. A loud stomach gurgle switched Ren’s musings to lunch. The Retired Division was inconveniently stationed on hub outskirts because the residents did not need to commute. Considering approximately 65% of emergency services time was invoked on their behalf, Ren fgured there should be a closer medical center for more effciency. No one had asked them, though, and it wasn’t the type of suggestion that would help advance their career — but it would be nice to have a closer food hall. As Ren mulled over their dilemma, a red-bricked estate came into view. The Retired Division occupied the old north shore mansions of the previous era’s wealthy. With the restructuring, the leisure class were given two options: return to work or (if you had the resources) fnd your own Entity. Nearly all chose the former; the defnition of value-adding work had become more inclusive. As long as you did your part, The Company allocated resources fairly. Pulling up to the front door, Ren left the ambulance idling – they didn’t think this would take long. “Paramedics!” Ren’s colleague knocked and entered the unit. A white-haired man, face half-drooping, was held up in a recliner by an equally ancient-looking woman. Sighing, Ren prepared to carry the man down to the ambulance. They hated the smell of old people.

Imogen watched in slow motion as the two paramedics scrambled around Zayden. He was no longer even her husband, though Imogen knew the thought dated her. “Partner” and “life teammate” were the corporately correct terms now. So much had changed in their 73 years together. Imogen smiled at Zayden, re membering the urgency of their new, backseat passion and the ensuing excited terror of becoming young parents. Her brief moment of nostalgia was replaced by a bolt of simmering grief. In this moment, Imogen could not lie to herself that she and Zayden had been the best parents, more wrapped up in each other than their unplanned frstborn. In the early years After Schism (A.S.), The Company had seen the damage unprepared and thoughtless par ents like them could have on society and had formalized the previously broken support system. After all, The Company was family now. That hadn’t prevented Astrid from leaving at 16. Before The Company had learned the dangers of unmoderated outside communication access, talent poaching of idealistic youths ran rampant. Astrid had fallen prey to a charming headhunter in New Amazon who promised the security that Imogen and Zayden had failed to provide. After she disappeared, Zayden had been one of the frst to advocate a change in The Company’s policies. Now, only roles with special clearance like sales ee exit KPIs that their advocacy had saved many others the pain of similar loss. Surely, it had protected their son, born too young to miss Astrid’s feeting presence. Bittersweet memories threatened to swallow Imogen as she focused on the scene in front of her. Zayden’s desiccated hand fopped off the stretcher. When had theygotten so old? It seemed only yesterday she and Zayden danced in the street on Earnings Day, their son’s promotion an excuse to food their bodies with champagne.They were so proudof their son, a living embodiment of the Values

and proof new structure was working, despite their parental ambivalence. As the door closed on Zayden’s limp form, Imosgen heard his email ding.

Last email sent, Gracie shut her laptop for the evening feeling accomplished. It was due time for her boss, The Company’s CEO, and his somewhat estranged dad, Zayden, to get dinner. The CEO was always busy, but Zayden wouldn’t live forever, and The Company had a stated Value of family. For optics, if nothing else. Gracie grabbed her purse and headed for the exit - after her day, she deserved a drink.

“Gracie!!” Her friend Chara enthusiastically waved her over to one of the bar’s high tops. Lia was to her right, single-mindedly fipping through something on her phone.

“Did you order yet?”

“No! We were waiting for you. You’ll never guess what Lia just told me.” Chara made an exaggerated sad face as Lia wore a triumphant smile and gestured to her phone.

“So you remember Arlow right?”

“The associate Chara has been in love with since he joined? Of course.”

“Well, I did some digging on the DL. Unlisted perks of IT. I pulled Arlow’s communications to fnd out why he’s being such a buttface and hasn’t asked Chara out yet. Messaging some bitch in Strategy.”

“Ew, why are boys so dumb? Can we get rid of her? Chara, you are in HR…”

“Or him.” Chara’s expression had gone from cartoonish to malicious. “If he can’t appreciate what’s right in front of him, who’s to say he can make good judgment calls.”

“Are you… suggesting fring Arlow? That’s crazy!” Gracie was caught between excitement in the drama and horror, knowing a fring could leave Arlow permanently as signed to the lowest roles at The Company with no upward mobility — or worse, excommunicated for life with no referrals.

“Why not?” Chara asked. “As his manager, I am now convinced he has absolutely no busi ness acumen if he is so blind to all that a relationship with me would offer strategically.”

“I think you could probably get rid of both of them, but we’d have to be careful,” Lia jumped in. “I can plant some inappropriate messages or show them breaking some archaic NDA clause by speaking.”

“It’s so good to have friends in low places.” Chara cackled and the three of them put their heads together to form a plan.

What felt like minutes later a quick ficker of the lights gently reminded patrons the bar was closing. ”Look at the time!” Gracie smacked her head for effect. “We’d better head out so we can put things in motion tomorrow.” The women strolled out arm-in-arm, giggling like teenagers.

A crescendo of voices leaving the bar as it shuttered at the company-mandated 10:59 PM drifted up through the open window of Hal’s room. Sighing, she watched her screen go black 5 minutes from the end of Fasting & Furious: The Famine. Not that she couldn’t guess the end, but she probably shouldn’t have paused for popcorn. Hal unfolded from the couch, brushing kernels to the foor. It was annoying but she knew The Company ultimately had her best interests in mind - sick and le thargic workers were bad for effciency. As she brushed her teeth, Hal’s phone buzzed.

Amy from HR: Take an hour to yourself tomorrow morning, I can see from your heart rate and swallow motion anomalies that you’ve been feeling ill. It will be deducted automatically from your remaining 4.87 sick days. Feel better, maybe make some tea :)

Hal felt relieved. Crawling under her duvet and curling into a fetal position, she was com forted by the thought that HR would notify José and adjust her alarm accordingly. Her breathing slowly deepened as she fell asleep.

Circadian Death by Ethan Hsiao

sleeplessness in a pill, ingested (imm)orally twice per day; they cry, we’ve mastered every resource, including time itself; i replace mastered with exploited, and time with ourselves; dreams are turned a euphemism, a boon for the industry by means of productivity and proft; monologues drown in a tired sigh.

Tangerines by Amanda Duckworth

Eye Freckle by Ethan Hsiao

i visit the optometrist, and he diagnoses me with a nevus: an “eye freckle.”

vision check-up - $97 *does not include basic treatment plans the mark is superfcial— honeysuckle and tea leaves that dot my peripheral. he offers me the knife as one would offer “good morning”, leaving a pamphlet of other aesthetic procedures.

iris alterations via pigment therapy - $34 partial expansion of visual feld - $16/degree tetrachromacy in sertion - $36 *fourth cone dependent on cell supply

i stife a laugh and stare absently, hand at my chin in the style of rodin.

the exam room is a checkout line, shameless pandering that promises an extra buck. at a barbershop, hair reconstitution - $22 *genes available in straight, wavy, and curly nearby, dermal phosphorescence - $31 i need a refll on contacts, so i politely decline. feigned interest and a strategic glance at the clock. back home, my roommates rush for the mirror to debut their matching incisors.

Untitled by Obie Amudo

The Historical Preservation Society by Nicholas Caputo

Rumors

traveled quickly around the informal settlements on the outskirts of what remained of the Cities. So when I heard about the new batch of Inquisitors who had showed up in town I split south, hoping to get back on track and make it over the Rockies before the snow came.

In those days the countryside of southern Minnesota was still pitted from the war, but some people had found ways to survive. I needed to restock before striking out across the big spaces, and as the sun went down a few days south of the Cities, I wandered into a little settlement and found a quick job that didn’t ask for much more than a strong body and promised food and shelter for long enough to get reset.

The next day I watched the soldier rush up the steep incline of the hill, his ragged breathing drowned out by the blasts of explosions and the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fre. Looking back towards the troops supporting him, he yelled encouragement. “Come on! Almost there!” Just under the rim of the incline the soldier paused, appearing to steel himself for whatever lay on the other side. Cresting the hill, he leaped on top of the row of sandbags piled there. “For freedom!” he screamed. “They will not take Faribault!” He began to leap forward off of the sandbags, but there was a resounding crack and something seemed to catch as he jumped and then collapsed heavily on the ground, writhing there as if intent on continuing his noble charge even as energy fowed out of him with each gasp of the evening air. He kept writhing again and again, arms and legs

jerking back and forth, up and down, recycled glitched motions matting the grass around him long after life would have gone.

The sparse crowd muttered its disappoint ment. Jason sighed and shoved his hands into the pockets of his replica Levi’s. I shook my head sympathetically. He pressed a button on his remote and the soldier stopped mov ing, resetting to a position of sleep-like calm. The sounds of battle cut off, leaving an empty silence broken only by the sound of Jason’s footsteps as he trudged through the fallen leaves to the body of the soldier and of mine as I followed him.

“I’m sorry, grandpa.” Jason said. “Looks like we’ll have to keep working on you.”

We lifted the soldier’s body onto the back of a patchwork truck parked nearby, blue and sil ver italicized Ford logo soldered into its grille. I felt the weight of metal bones pressing into my arms, smelled grass stains and machine oil. Jason tried to shake off his disappointment. The soldier had performed better than ex pected–earlier in the week it had apparently been unable even to make it to the top of the hill. But there was still a long way to go. For the old soldier to complete his routine, he had to make it down off the sandbags and into the line of Restorationist soldiers, fring along the crest of the hill to clear it of enemies before being shot down himself in a heroic act of sacrifce.

As Jason drove the truck back to the workshop, he talked about the scene of the battle as he imagined it, the green-clad soldiers of the National Restoration Army pushing back

the defenders all along the line south of Minneapolis as troops streamed in from across the sundered country. Jason’s grandparents had been campaigners in the leadup to the election of ’36, but once the Army split both had joined the hastily assembled civic defense forces that sprang up around the core of pro fessional soldiers. The Restorationists had started the offensive, a hundred sort-of sieges, cities encircled by the rural areas, which fared and simmered as mass fights to friendly ter ritory began and the lines frmed as violence escalated. By Faribault, the early enthusiasm of confict had long faded and Jason’s grandpa and his troops had been pushed back, fghting desperately, to homeward hills.

I knew the history of the Second Civil War by heart, rehearsed as it was by teachers and television throughout my childhood. And I even knew some of what had actually happened, pieced together through the hand-medown stories from people like Jason whom I’d encountered heading West and even a few banned books. Still, I enjoyed the sweet enthusiasm that Jason brought to his recounting of the events. As he spoke of his grandpa and the other soldiers, I could see him dreaming of charging up that hill himself. It glimmered in him: the weight of his machine gun, the clanking of his canteen, the rush of adrenaline as he and his comrades climbed towards their heroic fates.

We carried the soldier into the workshop, setting him down carefully onto a long metal table. Brown eyes gazed up from a face that resembled Jason’s own. He told me that the face had been carefully crafted from a picture taken of his grandpa when he was a young man, two years before he died on a hill outside of Faribault. The fexible plastic of the face was carefully stretched over a composite skeleton with real movable expressions. The skin was smooth and clean except for a few smudges to

highlight the vigor of the combat. In the heat of battle the face showed a ferocious anger, but now its deactivated visage refected an expression of mere repose. Jason told me he thought the nobility of the real man shone.

I watched as Jason tilted the soldier’s head to the right, quickly fnding a square of skin on the back of the neck which he peeled to the side. With practiced movements, Jason plugged a series of cords into the exposed port and pulled up a diagnostic on a nearby con sole. There was still some kind of bug. While he waited for the diagnostic to run, we pulled off the robot’s ragged shirt, revealing a mess of lead spread against the machine’s hardened chestplate. Jason showed me how to pry the lead loose from the chassis, the soft gray met al peeling away, and then carefully sweep each fattened bullet into a bucket for remelting and reuse. As we waited for the diagnostic, he absentmindedly rubbed the soldier’s black hair along the neat line of the undercut on the left side of his head. Jason told me he had just celebrated his birthday — twenty-fve, the same age his grandpa had been when he had fallen at Faribault. The two sat looking at each other in the fading evening light, one the ghost of a peaceful life the other was forced to leave behind. I wandered around the workshop complex. When I’d blown into town the day before, Jason had said he’d give me a place to sleep and some food in exchange for a few days’ help with his Historical Recreation. I don’t much like those things but I hadn’t had any good rest since I got through the ruins of Old Chicago, so I agreed. I picked the least moldy-looking bed in the dormitory he showed me. Jason was the only one left in the complex except for the soldiers, who were stored in the garage. There wasn’t much to the dormitory except walls covered in printed 2030s propaganda memes, some looking vintage. The centerpiece, hung in

in a place of honor, was an old map of the battle of Faribault put in context of the broad er thrust by the National Restoration Army which sought to follow the Mississippi upriver and cut the northern coalition in half.

Jason asked me to help clean up the reception area. There was not much to clean. Though some of the locals still dutifully made their way out to the Historical Recreation area to watch Jason’s Battle of Faribault, the central government was pretty far away and most people didn’t bother showing up except for the big Remembrances or when the sheriff made it known he’d be taking attendance. But it all mattered to Jason, who took special care polishing the golden AA that was affxed to a small boulder near the entrance to the site.

“We used to be AAA.” Jason sighed and shook his head. “Dad was a genius with the mechanics. One time he fgured out how to get two soldiers to do actual hand-to-hand combat. Whole family worked on the things.” Jason paused.“He died though, in the great ‘50s fu. The soldiers stopped marching so well. So they downgraded us. Most of the family left after that.”

“Pretty rare to get such a high rating out here.”

“Rarer and rarer. The National Historical Restoration Committee is coming to do an other evaluation tomorrow.”

I understood then the urgency in fxing the bot. I looked around at the tumbledown workshop complex. Jason was struggling keeping the site operating with the government resources guaranteed by his double A. If he was downgraded again, to the single A mostly used for small family memorials and roadside attractions, there would be no replacement parts, no debugging support. Just rust.

I didn’t tell him that it might not have been wise for him to spotlight the heroism of the losing side of the war if he wanted support of

of the Committee. I fgured he knew that already.

At dinner, Jason was silent, but he became talkative as the sun slipped away and the bootleg whisky I’d shared as thanks kicked in. I asked why he kept up the site instead of moving on. He told me that when the Resto rationists had started setting up the Historical Recreation sites, his father had volunteered to establish one for Faribault. Jason told me that he thought of it as a way to memorialize the Minnesotan dead, even if all the government plaques and narration painted them as the enemy. (I fgured the guaranteed money and protection was probably worth something, too.) Apparently, whoever the Committee had sent to do the evaluation had a soft spot for the Battle of Faribault because they were generous, providing the family with twenty-one fully mobile automatons, a full battlesound system, and many guns and bullets for use in the Recreation. Pretty good haul.

After dinner, we drove back to the battlefeld, the rusting truck bouncing over uneven roads, and began to walk up the hill to its crest as Jason talked of the rush the soldiers must have felt charging up that same hill. Suddenly, he yelled and began to run himself, cresting the hill and jumping down among the Restorationist soldiers and pretending to shoot them left and right. The hills resounded with his shouts and laughter. The soldiers along the line at the top of the hill were in worse shape than his grandpa, the rust of their metal joints discoloring the plastic skin covering them. They could no longer run along the line of sandbags as they once had been able to. We checked each one carefully to see if there were any critical problems, scraping rust and testing movement. We walked along the line, carefully collecting the brass shell casings that sprayed out of the rifes as they fred and putting them into a satchel. Jason told me not to reload the guns.

As we moved slowly down the line, Jason talked of making this walk as a small boy, holding his grandmother’s hand and looking for shiny metal in the dirt. Around him, his youngest cousins made the same walk, scrounging for casings to present proudly to her. Older relatives walked further afeld, scavenging the old battlefeld for any unplundered ammo caches to use in their reenactments. The Wang family was proud to use only live ammunition, though this occasionally dented their automatons and required them to stitch or replace hole-rid den uniforms. Everyone pitched in, and the workshop rang with the clangs of metalwork and the chatter of the cousins. Jason smiled, seeming lost in the memories of that time.

The diagnostic had returned a complicated error by the time we got back to the workshop. Jason sighed and rubbed his head. His technical knowledge seemed relatively rudimentary, not much better than mine, though as a licensed operator of a Recreation site he was one of the few authorized to learn programming languages. He walked back to his room: a small, spartan dwelling with a single cot pushed up against the wall and piles of books about the Second Civil War splayed on the ground. I passed it on the way to mine and glanced in. He sat on the bed staring into the mirror. I watched him tracing the lines of his face, the early wrinkles in his forehead.

“Well, grandpa, I hope this works.”

We rose before dawn the next morning. Jason drove us out to his battlefeld and we prepared the automatons for the day’s reenact ments, checking their rifes and preparing their positions. As the morning drew on, a small crowd of people gathered in the observation area by the foot of the hill, chattering amongst themselves in a wind beginning to smell like au tumn, waiting for the show to start. It began at exactly eleven o’clock, a triumphal blast of music accompanying narration about the course

of the war and the context of the battle. Stories of the horrors of pre-Restorationist rule rang out before the narration turned to the heroic histories of the combatants in the battle they were about to see.

Then the show began. The spectators turned to the sound of machine guns clattering along the top of the hill and the yells of the soldiers at its base. Most of these men stood still or lay prone, making only small, weird movements and shooting up towards their enemies. One soldier ranged along the ranks of his men, his smooth movements and exhortations contrasting with the jerking motions of his fellows. In his khaki uniform, carrying his rife, he looked like a hero. Suddenly, the soldier wheeled towards the top of the hill and began to run up it, into the face of the machine guns perched on the ridge. Nearing the top, he turned back to his fellows and cried to them to come on, up the hill, to drive out the Resto rationist invaders. “Come on! Almost there!” He leaped up on top of the line of sandbags and paused for a moment—“For freedom!” he screamed. “They will not take Faribault!” Then he was down among them, fring left and right and clearing the line to allow the defenders to push forwards. He paused for a moment in triumph, looking out of the past at the spectators who stood cheering below, then turned with a start and fell.

The visitors cheered their approval for the soldier, the great emotion of his victory and his sacrifce.

That night, after we had cleaned the battle feld, loaded the guns, and reset the reenactment, I watched Jason in his khaki uniform. He was gently cleaning the robot on the workbench. It lay still, the mechanisms and metal usually hidden under clothes now exposed. The seams where plastic fesh met steel, at the base of the neck and on the forearms and legs, were worn and uneven. The robot was clean;

it hadn’t been used today—but Jason still scrubbed and oiled it, his movements ritualistic. He had run up the hill four times that day, extra reenactments to prepare for the visit tomorrow, and the gel and sweat still encrusted his hair. But Jason exhibited no fatigue, words fowing out his mouth. He recited the story of the battle as if guns of the automatons at the top of the hill had been loaded and he himself had been in danger. I suppose that in the midst of the raging sounds of battle and the pulsing rush of the long run, Jason felt himself right in front of a great army.

After he fnished rubbing down the automaton, we turned to the night’s real work. We sat up late, trying to bring life back into the body of grandpa, to rouse the machine to its old force and fuidity of movement. The Committee was coming tomorrow, and we knew that Jason could not trick them as he had tricked today’s groups of tourists. But if the inspectors came to the battlefeld and saw only two lines of robots fring at each other with no movement, no great acts of heroism, then they would surely reduce or even strip the site’s rating. Jason

carefully scraped every last speck of rust from the joints of the automaton’s body, tracing the lines of the hinges with a special brush. We rebooted the robot, and Jason ran it through its simulated steps again and again until fnally it seemed to be working properly He coaxed it into action, carefully guiding each halting motion, until at the end he was running with it and matching its movements as it seemed to spring into life. We dressed it carefully in its khaki uniform, arranging the clothes against its synthetic skin until they hung properly in battle order. At last, Jason was satisfed. As we left the workshop, Jason looked at his grandpa, standing proudly at attention, ready for the next day’s work. I fell onto my molding cot in exhausted slumber and slipped to a dream world of Jason’s childhood. The sun arced overhead in the high summer as he walked through a feld with his grandmother and many cousins, the soil plowed and ready for planting. Jason and his cousins ran along the furrows, shoes im printing crazy patterns on the soil, playing and laughing and throwing dirt. I saw the calm of his grandmother’s face, weathered

SeaofShapesbyChrisBarber

and wrinkled and smiling as she watched the children play. Jason ran to her, and she gave him a handful of bullets, the same kind as the bullets we had pulled from the dirt up on the hill — but these were shiny and new, the brass casings gleaming. She looked down at him and then he ran in the heat of the sun, tossing a trail of brilliant seeds fashing behind him as he scattered the shells along the plowed furrows. When Jason reached the end of the feld, he turned and looked back to his grandmother. The feld was full of trees of brass with fruit of lead, and at the foot of the last tree was slumped the body of his grandpa, his blood mixing into the soil, crimson water for the metal trees and their heavy fruit.

I awoke early, but by then Jason was pacing the workshop. He wore a carefully preserved vintage button-down shirt, though I noticed that he had been unable to avoid slight stains of grease and oil. We prepared the battle feld, taking special care to check each of the twenty automatons arranged along the lines, massaging them into the highest performance remaining in their rusting gears. Jason talked rapidly about the repairs and upgrades he could make with a new grant from the Historical Recreation Committee, the fuidity of movement and grace he could restore to the automatons. We set up the line along the base of the hill, the soldiers ready to make their advance.

At exactly ten o’clock, the delegation from the United States National Historical Reconstruction Quality Evaluation Committee arrived. They were fve strong, each member dressed in the garb of their era of specialization. A man wearing fne colonial brocade stepped forward. He saluted smartly at Jason and presented his party’s credentials. Jason accepted them and led the party on a tour of the battlefeld. I watched the Committee members as they critically surveyed the hills.

These were the priests of the Restorationist worship of the past. Though not as feared as those from whom I was feeing— those who enforced the vintage dress codes and classic reading lists with the iron cruelty of the past — they remained at the core of our society’s unchanging way of life, responsible for a world lost in one that was long gone.

Finally, the group arrived at the site of the reenactment. I walked down to the overlook platform and joined a crowd of people from nearby towns who had gathered, for they knew what this day would decide. On the hill above us, Jason stood with the delegation, fdgeting with the buttons of his carefully pressed shirt in the silence of the governing ghosts, clad in the past. Finally, one nodded. Jason pressed a button and the battlefeld sprang to life. Bullets whizzed, mortars whistled, and the lines of soldiers arranged at the top of the hill and at its base sprang to life, fring at each other. Jason pressed another button and a real explosion detonated two meters in front of the Restorationist line. The crowd gasped. Our little surprise. More of these old mortar shells, scrounged at great personal risk and stored carefully for this day, exploded around the two lines, raising clouds of dust and fre, their crashing detonations giving the lie to the recorded reconstructions of explosions playing over the site’s sound systems. Finally, the khaki soldier stood up, called to his fellows, and rushed forwards up the hill, his cries sharp against the sound of guns. Those watching could feel the weight of his lonely run, the thrill of his dash against the Restorationist line. Looking back towards the troops supporting him, he yelled encouragement. “Come on! Almost there!”

Just under the rim of the hill, the soldier paused, appearing to steel himself for what ever lay on the other side. Cresting the hill, the soldier leaped on top of the row of sandbags piled there. “For freedom!” he screamed.

Buthe lost his footing and toppled off the bags, down into the line of robots, and lay there twitching, his legs up into the sky churning, running, though there was no ground there.

That night we sat in the workshop, staring at the robot lying on the slab. Jason sat silent, his face carefully neutral. The reenactment had ended; the Committee had left, to return tomorrow. I doubted he would succeed. I’d passed many forgotten historical sites on my journey West. An old man or woman, a rust ed sign, a feld where once some people had died.

Meditatively, Jason began to clean his grandpa’s body as so many times before. He refused my help. He scraped the pancaked bullets off the torso, each small circle of lead thudding as it hit the foor. Jason picked one up and rubbed it against his chest, as if measuring how the lead ripped through fesh. He held the bul let up to his grandpa’s cheek, the coldness of the metal against the warmth of the man.

We ate together, that night, under the halogen glow of the workshop lamps. Jason picked at his food, barely eating,,“Some nights, when I was a kid,” he said, “I woke up to the night shivers and screams of my father. He was only a kid himself during the War, but he never shook the memories of what they did after they captured the Cities. I can see him now, sitting shirtless shaking under these kitchen lights,”

There was silence for a moment.

“I’m going West. Will you come with me?”

“I can’t,” he said simply, “this is home. You’re not the frst to come here, seeking something.”

“We’re looking for a different way to live.”

“Good luck.”

I looked at him then, in his worn t-shirt and mended replica jeans, and wondered whether he had spent his whole life waiting to take on

infnite shapes of twisting white clouds, dreamed of a different future.

At eleven o’clock the next morning, the fring started along the lines at the top of the hill and at its base. The commissioners stood in their fne antiques, overalls next to crinoline skirt, like ghosts of the past assembled to watch. Again I joined the gathered crowd. They chattered back and forth; success or failure would be good gossip. We watched bullets whizzing across ground ravaged by explosions and seeded with lead. At the base of the hill, a soldier in khaki stood up and started moving along the line, challenging and inspiring his men to go forward with him up the hill. Some of their rusting hulks seemed to respond to the call to battle, shifting in a kind of yearning for the advance. Finally, the standing soldier turned up the hill and began to run, forwards into the teeth of the Restorationist line. Looking back towards the troops supporting him, he yelled encouragement. “Come on! Almost there!” Under the rim of the hill, the soldier paused, appearing to steel himself for whatever lay on the other side. Cresting the hill, the soldier leaped atop the row of piled sandbags. “For freedom!” he screamed. “They will not take Faribault!” He jumped into the line of his enemies, fring along it left and right, clearing the hill. He yelled in exaltation at his triumph, a whoop cut short and turned into a scream as slashes of red sprayed through the air and onto the soldiers next to him.

He fell, clutching his chest, feeling wetness of liquid run out of the holes that had appeared in his body. We ran and found him lying slumped against the side of the line of sandbags, his eyes staring at one of the soldiers beside him.

I watched the red droplets of his blood against the red stains of rust, running down to the ground, mixing with the shining brass shell casings and the fattened black discs into the earth along the line at the top of the hill.

Overwritten by Suzanne Smith

We will be able…to upload memories, create a brain-net (memories and emotions sent over the Internet) and record thoughts and even dreams. Basic proofs of principle for all of this have been demonstrated. —Michio Kaku, “A Scientist Predicts The Future”

Studies of interference in working and short-term memory suggest that irrelevant information may overwrite the contents of memory or intrude into memory… When items in memory share features, they compete for the representations of those fea tures in memory, and items can be degraded by “losing” the features to the representation of a different item. —Bancroft et al., “Overwriting and Intrusion in Short Term Memory”

June, 2032

Someone must have forgotten or disobeyed the instructions she had received, because when the visionary moved into the vast, mostly glass, lakefront house late one early summer afternoon, he found that there was not a single can of Diet Coke available — much less the multiple cases of that beverage that were supposed to have been there awaiting his arrival. He was all alone in a stifing mansion with an empty refrigerator.

What was the name of the person who had failed him—Ms. Pugh? Ms. Pulis? Ms. Pool? Something like that. Where was she? Thank goodness he had not brought an investor with him. This Pulis person had risked making him look like a joke professionally. What if the investor had asked him for a Diet Coke and he had been forced to say that tap water was the only option? Embarrassing. He would have cursed her but he could not fully remember her name, as his partner Billington had done

the hiring and presumably given the instructions about getting the house set up for the corporate retreat. He would get her fred. But in the meantime Lyman Hart-Payne, the pale, tall, bespectacled, middle-aged founder of Memsyne, was not going to let the incompetence of an assistant faze him. As he stood there staring into the empty refrigerator, he smiled, undaunted.

He stood there smiling for some minutes—“like a fool,” he thought, in a momen tary lapse into his childhood habit of thinking of himself as a character in a book—a “he” who did or felt or thought this and that and had things said or done to him. “He felt sad,” he would think, as a way of feeling sad. His fa ther Myron had said something to him once in a fury after Lyman had wrecked his brand new, albeit used Oldsmobile by speeding on a wet road and plowing into a tree, from which situation he but neither the car nor the old pine tree had emerged unharmed. His father had said, “You fool,” and added, “People say you’re so smart but you’re not very bright.”

The comment about brightness had been needlessly personal, Lyman thought, and inex act to boot. He knew of no research fndings positing a correlation between IQ and the tendency to plow cars into trees. True, his actions on that rainy night with the Oldsmobile admittedly had not been optimal, but studies showed that adolescent brains were not ideally equipped for mature decision making. Lyman reminded himself that, unlike his father, he had degrees from all the right schools, including a Ph.D. and an M.B.A. from the school thought by many to be the best.

Certainly, just as in everyone’s life, some mistakes had happened, particularly during his brief tenure as an academic. In particular, Lyman remembered the one year, right after graduate school and before his M.B.A program, when he had taught at a liberal arts college.

He had felt dead inside the whole time, and his hatred for teaching had made it worse. The faculty lunches, featuring all sandwiches all the time, were grossly inferior to those served at his alma mater.At one such event, he had asked, “Must all our meals involve bread?” and no one had answered. He had tried to get along with the mediocrities who had been relegated to teaching there, rather than at a top-notch research university where he belonged, but colleagues did not reciprocate his efforts at outreach. He remembered asking the dean—a family friend and his father’s former classmate—to get a lecturer who had rejected his advances dismissed. He had said that he had heard bad things about her and, in a way, he had, since thinking bad things about someone, Lyman later decided, amounted to allowing yourself to “hear” your own insights about a person that you might have suppressed.

Some strange glee took hold of him when he realized that the woman would be put in her place and would not know who had put her there. The dean told her chair that she was no longer eligible to teach even though she was. There was no one she could appeal to beyond him. She was bacteria in the college food chain. She couldn’t be seen but she could be stopped, and he, Lyman, had done it. That was the way the world turned.

Maybe the whole thing hadn’t been ideal, he refected, but it had served her right for her meanness to him, and he generally wasn’t the sort of person who did things like that. If he had really done it, he would have felt like a different kind of person afterwards, but he had never felt any difference at all. He had done it, but he couldn’t have really done it in a true moral sense, so he hadn’t done it. At least he remembered it that way. At any rate, the past, as was aptly said by someone whose name he did not remember, was the past. He was glad to be out of academic life, with all

of its petty viciousness and subterfuge, and making his way into the clean-cut world of commerce.

Now, standing there in front of the empty refrigerator, the door of which was now beeping in protest of its having been open for a length of time it deemed unacceptable, Lyman told himself that what with his new company “and whatnot,” as his mother would have said, his life was starting over. He remembered once being stopped on the street in Cambridge, Mass. and being asked for money by a home less guy who said he needed it for a taxi, back in pre-Über days, to a rehab place called “New Horizons.” For the frst and last time, Lyman had given a stranger fve dollars, knowing that New Horizons did not exist, but wishing that it did. He had felt ashamed for days afterwards. More often, though, he felt nothing at all, except for fury at people who got in his way.

When Lyman woke up in the morning, he would say to himself: you have great things to do, and then do them. Being positive didn’t mean, of course, that there weren’t some hurdles to overcome. Lyman or preferably his as yet absent partner, Billington, would have to take Ms. Pulis or Pool—whatever her name was—to task eventually. He decided on “Pool,” and in the absence of any certain information about her title, attached a “the” to it. He made a mental note to cover the sorry episode of the missing Diet Coke in the Pool’s frst performance review.

Memsyne was going to be highly democratic and equitable, of course. Lyman was happy to let low-ranking team members go to meetings where things would be decided like what color the “you did a great job” stickers would be. Yet this sort of thing was not to be taken to the point of absurdity. The higher-ups would give those lower down the ladder performance reviews and not vice versa. They needed feedback, not him. He was a team

player, of course, but he owned the team. And although he was “in the loop,” he held that loop wrapped around his fst with the ends of it balled up inside. He could tighten and loosen it as needed. He vaguely remembered reading something in college about the necessity of governors needing to remember what it was like to be governed — but he didn’t buy it. The way to rise in this world was to forget, not to remember. You were on a narrow circular staircase without railings like the one in the strange little brick building that had housed his college magazine and you couldn’t look behind you to see who was on the lower bend in the stairs or the upper one ahead of you. You had to keep moving.

The doorbell rang in the empty rented house. He walked out into the foyer. Through the distorted lens of the frosted glass on the door, Lyman saw a woman standing there. The Pool at last, no doubt. He would be very quiet and just walk with her back into the kitchen and over to the refrigerator. He would open the door and they would stand there together staring into the cold, empty space. He would see the shame in her eyes. She would apolo gize. He would let it go. He was magnanimous that way.

When Lyman opened the door, he saw a heavyset woman in her mid-ffties wearing a “Save the Pandas” tee shirt, plaid shorts, and fip fop sandals. She was smiling, but looked tired. He said nothing.

“Oh hello! I’m Helen Steuver. Welcome to Lake Pleasant! I cook part-time for the Proctor family across the street.We all heard that you people would be moving in for a few months, and I wondered if you might need some part-time cooking help.”

Intolerable, he thought. And those shorts. Please. This was what she wore on the job? What if his co-founders had already arrived and they had been in the midst of a work

session—perhaps at a moment of breakthrough—and she had interrupted?

“No, we don’t. Good day.” He had nothing for which to say “thank you.”

The shock of rejection fashed over her face and she said “thank you” quietly and presumably walked away. He didn’t watch her. He closed the door and locked it. The Pool would have to put a sign up saying “No trespassing or soliciting.” Then again, she might mess that up, too.

What if she messed up the food? If there was anything Lyman hated, it was running out of hot dog buns. His dislike of sandwiches did not extend to hot dogs. Indeed, when covered with mustard, hot dogs were his favorite food. This was proof of his love of democracy. The Pool would have to be advised about not buying hot dog buns that were about to go stale. But despite these worries, Lyman started smiling again, for the Pool’s forgetfulness regard ing what he thought of as his “chilled beverage needs” had given him something. It had given him a “human interest” anecdote that he could use in talks about the company’s revolution ary product, Memsyne, which doubled as its name. This was the world’s frst digital collective memory bank, into which people could upload thoughts, memories, and even dreams through sensors attached to their heads. The sensors were not needed but product testing research had shown that they were emotionally important to users, because they wanted to believe that they could turn the system off. They couldn’t.

Yes, the Pool would make a good anecdote for a speech. One of those “True Talks,” where no one is allowed to ask questions at the end. The Pool had failed, and audiences connected with failure. And besides, in this case, the fail ure was not his own. Lyman would say something like “we’ve all been there, right?” Then he would say something self-deprecating but in a

fattering way. In a competitive landscape, there was no point in making himself and by extension his company look bad or lacking in compassion or whatever. In fact, the company cared passionately about many things that mattered and would make a big difference.

Memsyne was directly informed by the most recent neuroscientifc work on human memory. It was designed to work partially like its human equivalent, save for the fact that it would be controlled and used by the company. When people heard that they often said well, that sounds dangerous, which was ridiculous. First of all, people’s memories were already shaped by technology and secondly, the company and its leadership had made integrity their core value. Bad things would not go undetected. Fi nally, given the scope of the global risk posed by non-curated memories, public-private partners needed urgently to take action together. They could not afford the luxury of cynicism or the burden of popular oversight by the uninformed.

People’s memories would still be free, since being free meant being free to be the best, as defned by Memsyne. In essence, the world of enhanced memory would be very, very human. All too human, in fact. Memory was a tricky thing. Once pooled and viewed in the aggregate, memories amounted to world history. From another angle, the whole concept of a “world” was just the sum of stories that people told themselves about living on earth. In the end, it was all just signals. Just data. Speculation about the abuse of power through technolo gy was such a tired line of critique, as old as innovation itself. People needed to believe in the science, whatever it said. They knew nothing about it, so they should keep their mouths shut. And nothing was written in stone. Algo rithms and data could be more or less “just” depending on how they were used.

The accuracy of a given memory was not the

point. The point was the power of the memory—its power to move people to action or paralyze them. Everything was fltered through people’s senses, and the senses were easily deceived, so accuracy was out the window from the get-go. In this matter of history and memory, everything was up for grabs. Evidence could be interpreted in different ways, some of which further justice more than others. If data concerning a remembered event was unjust according to the judgment of Lyman and his fellow founders, it could be overwritten in a responsible, socially conscious way.

In the present, we are doomed, Lyman liked to say in partially plagiarized fashion, to repeat the past until we remember it better or tell better stories about it. That did not mean writing books, although he had nothing against books, despite their being obsolete repositories for memories. He valued books a lot and was happy to hire assistants to read them for him. Looking back to the days when he had once had leisure time, he always boasted of having read Dante in the original Latin.

Lyman loved everything about education. He thought it was great. It was the dawn of a new day “in this space,” as he liked to say. Classes were about to start being downloaded into students’ heads while they slept. No one would be able to interrupt the lectures, which would make learning more effcient. Memsyne was even willing to provide jobs for the poor slobs who studied history or literature. In theory, they might be good analysts of where and how narratives should be enhanced or overwritten. Some things in the past needed to be made into other things—other things that maybe looked like what they had frst been but were better for having been altered to the point of all but complete non-recognition, as when you see a person you once thought you knew well when in fact you did not know them at all. And how often was it the case that there was no

pristine “frst thing”? There was no monster with millions of eyes that saw each event in re lation to all at every time. That was the dream of what Memsyne could become and there would be nothing monstrous or nightmarish about it.

Lyman was guided by two principles, which were actually one principle. They were both about betterment, leading up to what he called “the ultimate better,” which was the best. In speeches he would remark that the best mem ories happen when we remember together. No one remembers best alone. That meant that those who remembered alone were not going to be the best. People who insisted on hoarding their memories in private—were not friends of the future, which belonged to the commons, except for the part of the future that belonged to and was fltered by Memsyne, which was most of it. Lyman would fght to protect his possession, of which he was proud. But for most people, private property wasn’t necessary. They could take pride in things like keeping ft and being a good friend.

Some say that memories should be kept to ourselves, Lyman liked to say. No one had ever actually said that, but no matter. Memories in order to be moral needed to merge and be reshaped by experts for the common good. Lyman meant what was good for Memsyne and, through Memsyne, the world. Uploading memories would make them more uplifting or, if needed, more ugly.

Sometimes memories were inaccurate and needed to be fxed by being absorbed in something larger and more inclusive of different perspectives on comparable events. Sometimes memories were sick and needed to be cured. There was nothing dangerous about this idea. Someone, maybe the Pool, had been instructed by Billington to research this topic of making memories better and come up with some quotes. He had sent them Lyman’s

way. There was a great one from Shakespeare:

MACBETH: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart?

DOCTOR:Therein the patient must minister to himself.

Even as far back as Shakespeare, who, in Ly man’s mind, was a personage dating from the dawn of time, people knew about doing surgery on memory until you got rid of rooted sorrows. It wasn’t true that people could minister to themselves in this respect. People wanted someone else to minister to them. And now, with Memsyne, that promise could fnally come true.

There would be no risk of the Stalinesque-type manipulation of public memory be cause they would fght against invasive regulation every step of the way while working with governmental partners who wanted to do the right thing and working against governmental partners who wanted something else. Lyman was pretty sure that if a Stalinesque-type came to power, he would spot that person from a mile away and act accordingly. He had good instincts for charlatans, unlike Billington, with his idealism, which led to hiring people like the Pool. The company had nothing but good intentions. True, the technology could be used to mutilate memories, but it was inconceivable that it would ever be misused that way. If you look at history, Lyman liked to say, you can see that once they are educated, people aren’t that bad. Bad people would never get to the top at Memsyne, just as they never got to the top in academe. He would say: I believe in people because I believe in education.

Just in case, though, Memsyne was hiring ethicists, who had designed a software program

that would ask technicians, “Is what I am doing ethical?” and wait for the answer of “yes” be fore allowing the person to do anything else. In terms of executives, Lyman could personally vouch for himself and Billington.They had both gotten “A”s in their Moral Reasoning class back in freshman year of college. And he had only good things to say as well about all the great people they had brought on board so far, who seemed well, great. They were going to have a wonderful time at the retreat. They would all wear green tee shirts saying “Remember This.” The Pool might not get one, but if she repented and reformed, she would.

“alcohol transports.”

For a second, looking down at the slippery stone stairs spattered in vomit, Lyman had thought about letting go and watching his suite mate fall down to the landing below, but he hadn’t, not even when, in between vomiting, Billington had said, “I’ll be ok if you just let go.” Lyman had said: “I’m not letting go.” That was still true. It was the two of them together, for good. And they had drawn good people to them. Even the Pool might turn out to be ok, her shameful error notwithstanding. It was hard to get good staff but if an employer had poor material to work with, that material could be made better given good management. And Memsyne would soon be in a position to transform not only its team members, but the whole world.

At the heart of it all was his enduring friendship with Billington. Maybe that was what made any human endeavor worthwhile: the reser voir of unspoken trust that you could build up with another person over time with someone who shares your vision and your memories and your restlessness and your need for relief. A sudden memory of Billington vomiting while drunk by the base of a huge tree in the courtyard of their undergraduate house came to mind. Lyman recalled hauling him up four fights of stairs while he vomited the whole way. He had called the campus police to get Billington taken to the hospital but given that it was the night of the annual party called “Bacchanal,” all their cars were busy doing other

So what if the company got access to memories in the process in a way that revealed product and partner preferences, as it was designed to do—was that so bad? So what if they inserted mentions of better products and potential partners into people’s memories? Did the extremist critics of Memsyne disapprove of other people having jobs and partners and buying products? Would anyone be so foolish as to say that it was better to use products and meet partners that did not match one’s preferences? The point of Memsyne was the purpose of improving people’s lives by mak ing memory productive, not the proft. It could fnd you that perfect partner, minister to your rooted sorrows, and help you make memories of celebrations and great vacations even great er by inserting products into them and obliterating thoughts of annoying people to enhance the experiences after the fact, and for free.

All you had to do was remember.

Lyman stood there in the gleaming cream-col ored living room, looking out to the pool and the darker blue lake beyond it glittering in the sun and, far off in the distance, private docks

John Harvard’s Foot by Makoto Takahashi

of the neighboring mansions. Two or three birds were lying stunned or dead on the patio after having fung themselves against the glass walls of the house. That was life for you. You think you are just going along in your element, and then, splat.The element was not your own. The houses across the way were nicer than the one he was in. Why hadn’t one of those been rented instead? He remembered how sad he had been when his father’s business blew up in a stock market crash and they had to sell their beloved house. He had never loved anything like that house. Well, he would buy it back one day, and soon. He would live in his boyhood room, not that of his parents. Then he would feel all right again.

For now, the row of houses in the sun looked like a dream of a well-landscaped and pleasant life. Quick, he thought, before it vanishes, but that made no sense. He was moving into a world with houses like this, not out of it, and he could hire someone to pick up the dead birds or put them out of their misery if they were too stunned from their collision with what they had mistaken as air to lift off again.

Lyman looked past their corpses out at the pool again, and saw a squiggling, striped line in it. Must be a coral snake. He remembered the retired Marine of his father grabbing a snake that had been menacing him as a child and twisting its head off. Father had thrown snake at son’s feet. Lyman contemplated going outside and seeing if he could do the same thing to the swimming snake, but what would be the point of that? There was no child and no com petition except of his current self with his unrealized self. He tried to imagine what victory would look like.

Lyman began pacing the tiled foor. Something was coming to him. The Pool’s forget fulness about the Diet Coke had given him a new idea for a dedicated app distinct from but attached to the larger Memsyne system, a beta

version of which was already up and running, albeit in minimal fashion. He decided on the spot that the app would be called “Nimbler.” This app, through which employers would upload instructions into the memory bank, for the purpose of being downloaded into the memories of employees while they slept, would overcome the foolish tendency to treat employees’ sleep and work as two isolated silos. Being nimble and breaking down silos were, by defnition, good things.

Lyman said “Memsyne, remember” and then a few words about his idea for the app before saying “Memsyne, stop remembering.” He said to his watch, “Memsyne, what’s my memory of Tuesday” and, sure enough, his thoughts of just a moment ago were spoken back to him in a bored, female, faintly British-sounding, posh digital voice. They were already history. Of course, they were history that was also private property, so they would be protected by access restrictions, as would any material deemed sensitive on the system. It was not safe for some people to have regular access to unaltered memories. Memsyne would set them free from the past by dissolving their worst memories into a void.

The doorbell was ringing again. What was this place—Grand Central Station? He could see yet another woman—he hoped the Pool, rather than Helen Steuver again—standing there. And she was carrying what looked to be two cases of 12 cans apiece. She had not forgotten, Lyman thought with relief. She was just late. Such things happened. And come to think of it, she was not bad looking—probably at 40 or so, ten years younger than him. Her face looked like that of an overgrown child’s doll, with its unnaturally even features, and gleaming white teeth. She looked a bit like that lecturer he had gotten fred, which made him dislike her.

The Pool was carrying two cases that, as

Lyman approached the door, were revealed to be Coke Zero. He could feel the anger surging inside of him. He opened the door.

“Is that Coke Zero?”

She looked startled and said, “Yes, that is what I was told to bring.”

He said nothing in response and stared at her. She stared back. Something urgent occurred to him.

“Were you the one who put the biographies on the website yesterday?

“Yes.”

“You forgot to include my award from the UN.”

“No one told me about it.”

“You need to be more careful in the future.”

“How can I be careful about something I don’t know about?”

“You should have asked.”

Victoria Pool decided not to react. No sense getting fred this early on. She needed the health insurance.

“I’ll look it up. From what agency of the UN is it?”

“It’s from a group that partnered with an organization allied with the UN. Something like the Foundation for Enhanced Social Outcomes.”

It was important not to snicker.

Victoria put down the cases on the marble foor and took her phone out of her purse. Her hands were shaking. Should she risk writing a reminder to herself about the UN award? No. She managed to control her hands enough to open the relevant message and handed her phone to her boss. It made her anxious to see something so personal in the hands of this rude man, and she felt embarrassed about the pinkish glitter case, which was almost the color of her skin.

“Be sure to have Coke Zero ready at the house for Lyman,” it said. He wondered if she had realized her mistake and sent a fake email

from Billington to herself. No, she didn’t seem clever enough to do that. She was the sort of person for whom Memsyne existed. He couldn’t even look at her, which was perhaps best, as he might have detected her rolling her eyes.

He turned his back to her and stared out at the bird corpses, not looking past them to the pool and the lake beyond it. Were they dead or stunned and should he go fnd out? How would he do that? Poke them with a stick? What kinds of birds were they? So many dead ones these days, what with all the looming glass buildings springing up in the place of unglamorous lower-class structures like diners and bars. Then there were the windmills. They chewed the birds up, even eagles. Of course it must all be worth it. Destroying birds had never done any real harm. He hazily remembered something from Chinese history about sparrows. He couldn’t recall the specifcs. It didn’t matter. You did what you had to do to get results. You kept fghting your enemies.

It was going to be a battle. Lyman had thought for a time that he was in a new era of peace in his life, but it was the same old battle. In competent employees, and friends who were careless or worse. No one has your back, so watch your back, they said. Well, he would, even with those supposedly close to him. That Billington—trying to defeat him at every turn, as usual!

The Last Anthropologist

by Karl Dudman

29th May

Sothis is marshland. Acres ahead rolled out on the still water like foating turf. Marshes are long gone from Europe, and by right they should be here, the waters having risen higher and sooner than most anywhere else. But an ironic consequence of the war has been the wholesale destruction of the coastal infrastructure that previously would have stopped this precious ecosystem from migrating with the tides. Marshes are relational. They stay close to the ocean to know they are in fact of the land; take away the water and lose all sense of self. So as the seas rise and fall over decades and centuries, they and the marshes chase each other up and down the shore. When the water rises its roots drown, clutching at the bulwarks’ hard faces.

Yet here I am at the marsh’s edge, with a full continent of decay behind me for it to claim if it, and the bloating Atlantic, should choose. Giant clouds are wandering across the felds of cordgrass like cattle, and I’m overwhelmed by the peace. I watch some kind of long-legged, barely visible insect foat past my foot — deciding it is to a spider exactly what a whisper is to a word — and I wonder how anyone can feel separate from this. All of this. How many months and years I’ve spent trying to understand the Hominid movement. Plumbing their politics, their motives and aspirations, and still I just can’t relate, on an ontological level, how they see themselves in this world as some kind of exception to the grand living fabric. I can’t imagine looking at this marsh as if from above, the one species made of something altogether different, subject to different biotic tides than the rest. However much patience I afford their unsavoury ideas, however much I want to understand them, I look out here, my eyes level with the grass tips, and I can’t make that conceit real. Still, I suppose that’s what I’m here to fnd out. I have about a week to acclimatise and then I’ll meet my frst ever Hominid (!!), a guy called Dylan who’s been a UN contact point for the southeast district. He’ll be my gate-keeer I’m sure, and hopefully give me an entrance point to the wider community.

Maurice tapped his pen on the freshly inked frst page of his notebook and stared out across the soft waves of wind breathing over the marsh. It certainly didn’t look like a war zone. He looked beyond, at the unbending Atlantic horizon, and tried to guess how many miles of stern water lay between him and home. And yet there was no number high enough that could obscure the noise of people’s expectations; out of direct sight yet somehow dully visible, like a light dome in the night sky betraying a nearby city. It was a prestigious scholarship that had brought him to this tree stump on the other side of the world. Somehow his research had caused a stir of anticipation both inside academia and out, as he supposed happens to a person when their topic suddenly gets hot. In interviews for his university, funders, and even a couple of national outlets, he had answered questions about his upcoming feldwork with a hollow confdence, and was fattered with an authority on the Hominid movement he found embarrassing. He could see it was a compelling story: ‘In a world that was fnally moving beyond the human/nonhuman binary, what becomes of anthropology? The answer: fnd the remnants of this endangered species!’ One piece titled ‘the Last Anthropologist’ portrayed him as some old-time explorer on a quest to salvage the end of the discipline’s waning source. Absurd. In truth he felt no more sure-footed starting this year of feldwork than he would running headlong into the marsh.

The following morning, he stirred himself into action with an optimism and sense of purpose that only availed itself to him in early hours. He set out in search of breakfast and resolved to make a plan.

30th May Ok.

I’m sitting in Port Salem’s only cafe. On the walls are a mixture of small local paintings and signs saying things like ‘All I need to start my day is a cup full of coffee and a heart full of Jesus’. Hearing my order come out in dry, strangled words I realised I haven’t spoken in nearly two days. Even then my accent caused a stir among the cafe staff.

I’m starting as I mean to go on. Field notes every day; for purpose, accountability, company, and because most days I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night, let alone a conversation 3 months ago. I got in the day before yesterday (28th). It was the last UN boat before the At lantic closes for hurricane season.The journey was as bad as they said, with storms most nights and not much room on board to move around. Still, I feel lucky to have made it onto one of the ships; one of just 5 diplomatic vessels that makes the crossing before June. I could’ve gone private, but that would have tripled the cost. As it was, my Hausmann scholarship covered the cost of the journey and did all the diplomatic gymnastics to get me on a UN vessel. Truly don’t know how I would’ve got here otherwise. I was one of very few academics onboard, certainly

the youngest. It was a hard boat to get on, being used mostly by refugees bound for Europe. I’m sure Hausmann will come through, though.

Port Salem is on the ocean, but it’s actually occupied by the Central States - one of their few coastal towns, making it an important stretch of land to hold onto. It’s just a few miles from Savannah and the border to the Eastern States. I’ll be based here for most of the year but might try and connect with other Hominid strongholds if the opportunity arises. There hasn’t been confict in the southeast in recent years, and I’m pretty confdent things should remain relatively stable here. At least that’s what I told Ethics and Insurance.

So far…Vague research questions ideas / areas of interest: How do members of the Hominid movement conceptualise personhood - what does the Hominid identity consist of? A political orientation? A lifestyle? How does a personhood built essentially from political opposition man ifest in a sense of self, cultural practices? Do they understand it as such? or has it smoothed over its own seams, developing the look and feel of an organic cultural whole? To what extent is human exceptionalism a useful justifcation for Hominid communities to continue environmental exploitation? I still don’t know how to present myself to people. Will my Europeanness be taken as de facto sympathy for the Coastal States (Sentientism did originate there after all)?

A few days passed and Maurice, having enthusiastically introduced himself to every bemused shop and business owner in Port Salem, decided it was time to explore further afeld. He arrived at the train station early, having heard mixed reports about the reliability of the service and not wanting to miss an opportunity to start the next phase of his adventure. After only a short delay the train arrived, but the diesel engine proceeded so slowly he found he was able to write with minimal diffculty.

I’m on the train today. I booked one of the weekly services going north to D.C to spend some time at the Congressional archives of the Eastern States which are still housed there. There’s a lot of historic and journalistic material stored which isn’t available in Europe or the largely censored Central States (and somehow still not digitised?), and I’ve been wanting to get hold of them for months. I’ll also take this opportunity to look at their general collection and brush up on context, seeing as I’m not going to have access to a library again for the next year. I had some anxiety about getting through the checkpoints, but the UN visitor pass absolutely did its thing. (Thank you Hausmann). With the border behind me I’m allowing myself to feel cautiously excited. Passed

by a couple of Centre Guard camps, some bogs (very cool, pictured above!) and a whole number of dilapidated towns. Honestly all like something from flms. Wish I could spend a day walking around a border town. Anyway, everything is now fnally scanned. See Archives folder. for more

TOH54.238.2104 Becoming One TMG26.823.2099 - Geopolitics TMJ54.515.2092 - Reparations and Repair

Geopolitics of the 6th extinction - Alison French

This was messy. Looks like there were initially a number of plans agreed under the UN (?) to coordinate a reduction in emissions by all states, but these fell apart after a wave of fascist movements in Europe and North America in the late 30s and 40s. Some domestic and constitutional tensions, combined with escalating climate instability led to a tangle of compounding political crises in the West. This bit just reads like a bar fght where nobody can really tell who threw the frst punch. At some point (50s-60s?) the balance of global power began tilting towards a bloc of countries dubbed the Tropical Alliance, who rallied around a shared identity as net-victims to colonial emissions by temperate states. Led by China, the TA had largely man aged to future-proof their economies while the then United States of America was tearing itself apart. By 2070 we’d reached 3.5 degrees Celsius of heating and the TA countries managed to leverage an emergency summit of the Global Council (Kampala Declaration) to force action from the remaining laggard states. Their argument was for a diplomatic intervention as an alternative to more forceful solutions, but French suggests this was at least in part a strategic attempt to consolidate a new geopolitical order by Asia.The result of Kampala was a resolution to impose weighted reparations on the early industrial states and this was to be spent on remuneration for victim states and UN climate stabilisation projects. The USA, Canada and Rus sia were also forced to submit to UN oversight on domestic decarbonisation.This, plus a major fre season on the West Coast compounded existing instability and led to the 2nd US civil war in 78 that saw the country’s disintegration into its present day Coastal (East and West) and Central factions. So this has really been a climate war whichever way you cut it.

Becoming One: the Birth of Global Sentientism - Peter Hunt

Not much I don’t already know here. Ch 2 talks about early foundations. The ecological cost of the 6th extinction had already stirred a global patchwork of movements calling for legal protections for ‘non-human life’.

Ch 3 on Kampala Declaration. The Council of Indigenous Societies and about 60 gov-

ernments, lobbied aggressively for it to be included in the wording that reparations were to serve harms done not just to victim states but to the wider community of earthly life. This was passed and paved the way for the Treaty on Natural Personhood (2073), which in turn made exploitation of fossil fuels a ‘crime against Life’.

Ch 7 on growth of Sentientism in Europe. This is what I fnd interesting. What enabled the movement to take hold in Europe and not here? Both were similarly hit by reparations. Haven’t read yet - see scan.

‘Meet the Hominids’ - Angela Basu. Washington Post. 23 August 2074

The earliest mention I could fnd of Hominid movement (scanned, see Archives folder). Emerged from a comedian’s bit about a man from Tennessee trying to kill and eat as many sentients as possible to make up the numbers left by Spain, which had recently banned the practice. He had called the character the Hominid to give his hyper-masculine persona a hint of the Palaeolithic. The article talks about how the name was quickly getting appropriated as a rallying point for militia groups in other Central States. A cropped version of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam became an unlikely banner, signifying disdain for liberal ideas of parity between species.

Got some other clippings on Hominid movt from mostly Coastal journals and papers, some British/international (scans in Archive//journalism). Early coverage generally dismissive and sa tirical, variously comparing growing rural pockets of activity as a new chapter in the same old tin hat survivalist story, or an anti-reparations temper tantrum that got contagious. Interesting to see - as the movement built steam the ridicule seems to have given way to more sober nar ration, with greater outrage and a more overtly moral dimension. The Coast called it a ‘weak, liberal-baiting joke that any serious individual should take as a pointless attack on global environmental security’.

Maurice’s attention soon became focused in the video archives from an early news and entertainment channel called Fox, formerly an independent media company that eventually became the de facto state media for the Central States. It was only when a couple of librarians started talking loudly nearby that he became aware how much time had passed. He ran a di shevelled pile of newspaper clippings through the scanner and quickly returned to the station. As a wash of dusty colours ran past his eyes on the way back south, he thought about how strange it had been to see Sentientism written about in such a sterilised and dispas sionate way, as a product of this geopolitical shift or a reaction to that political upset. He found it hard not to see the movement as a story of moral awakening akin to other moments of explosive social progress. The Suffragettes or the Charlie Green riots; these were moments of enlightenment, not contingent histories; discoveries rather than inventions.

Once or twice his critical academic voice protested that there is nothing inevitable or objective about such notions of ‘progress’, but the voice was timid and easy to ignore. No, he could see that humanity as a concept was a failed institution. It could only be propped up for so long. His eyes ran along the unchanging ocean horizon as if on their own set of rails, while his mind cycled through the talking heads on Fox, each issuing sermon-like tirades about the Western States’ conspiracy with the Tropical Alliance or the hypocrisy of Europe. He thought again about the marsh, and decided it was just like the Hominids; so puny compared to the weight of water it stares down yet determined to build its home just above the high tide line to make a show of its defance. Surely the most recalcitrant ecosystem, he thought.

The feldwork began in earnest later that week, and the months began to tick by. Maurice had little trouble ingratiating himself into various social networks. Despite his initial fears, he was received warmly even by more politically vocal community members, and, in fact, his foreignness freed him of any partisan baggage that might have blown a Coastal researcher’s cover. On some occasions the hospitality even became diffcult to stomach.

13th July

Today was Riley’s barbecue. What an ordeal. I knew sentients were still eaten here of course, but somehow knowledge alone does not one prepare. Essentially, it’s a social event where community members gather around a sort of fre pit, and cuts of fesh are then cooked on a wire rack. I was completely horrifed; it took half my brainpower to steer my innards away from revulsion and the other to iron any judging creases out of my face. I understood this was something of an honour to be included in though, and so a third half of my brain was deployed to showing good grace.

Apparently it’s a regular event, though I wondered what sort of role it’s supposed to play. Does the eating of sentients have some kind of signifcance in reinforcing the distinction between them as humans and the animals they eat? Is the shared moment meant to frm up a collec tive identity? Certainly it felt like a kinship-building moment, regardless of how (or if) it tied in to Hominid sympathies. I asked some gently leading questions of some unknown guests, and the replies were interesting: ‘it’s great to do something normal. Forget about everything going on out there’, one person said. Another woman half-joked about how little time there was these days to share carefree moments with her neighbours. It was clearly an event that felt private, not performative at all, something just for attendees and their enjoyment. But more than that it was a chance to put distance between the community and the (cultural or literal) front lines, if only for a short while. Not to cultivate and reinforce a new identity but to privately

enjoy the meaningful core of an existing one. It suddenly felt rather conceited and self-centred of outsiders to think of Hominids as little more than childish contrarians, with moral foundations built only to be the inverse of ours. It reminded me of being a child and believing teachers didn’t have private lives to go home to; just living for the [misery-inducing] role they played in one’s life before bedding down in school at 4pm. Still, I was confused about the role the pig had to play in this.

As months passed, Maurice became increasingly restless, fnding precious little in his interactions to answer the questions he had arrived with. Almost to his disappointment, he was not hearing the kind of brazen human exceptionalism he had crossed an ocean to fnd. Or rather, there was no fre in it; none of the antagonism he’d built thesis proposals and funding applications on. Partic ipants would answer his questions politely enough: yes, they felt hurt by reparations and resented China’ yes, they frequently farmed and hunted sentient life, but any carefully crafted prompts to connect these facts yielded only anemic replies. Often, he had the feeling that they were keen to help him, but unsure what it was he was getting at. One evening, he took his now dog-eared and water-stained notebook to a small bar by the pier.

8th October

Something that has been quite shocking is how little people actually talk about humanity and who they see as a part of it. Even card-carrying members of the movement with Hand of God fags springing out of their lawns don’t usually discuss it unprompted. It’s not that I’ve got the wrong place, or that peo ple don’t believe it - every Sunday morning Father David preaches something about ‘Man’s dominion over the fsh of the sea and the fowl of the air’, and by afternoon said fsh and fowl are loaded onto most of the congregation’s best crockery. No, it feels more as though it simply isn’t a load-bearing belief in people’s broader identities. A total mismatch with the media representations and the little literature there is. In fact, everything going on at home, the global consensus behind fattened species hierarchies, the selfsh and compassionless picture of Hominids that circulates ‘out there’ feels like just that: something very, very far away.

Today I got up early to meet with the fshermen who leave from the pier (completely illegal under international law but here we are). Somehow the conversation turned on me, and the guys started asking about every aspect of life where I’m from. They were so curious to hear about laws against enslavement of sentients (I have to call them animals here), natural land ownership reforms etc.They seemed... entertained. I almost felt patronised by their fascination, even though I knew they weren’t making fun at all. Then they went off in their boats. I don’t know what to make of this. Have I been barking up the wrong tree here?

Maurice spent more and more time in the marsh, away from his questions and their confounding answers. He would sit for hours hoping to see a wild sentient, to talk to them just to hear their names and how many there were left. He wandered around, taking photographs of old fooded infrastructure and abandoned houses. Anything to avoid his informants. In the spring he made arrangements for a visit to Fort Napier. It had become apparent to him that even if Sentientism didn’t inspire impassioned responses from people, the war absolutely did. He resolved to make the trip after the winter nor’easters had subsided.

18th March

I met Sergeant Malcolm at the gate of the complex and he gave me a quick tour of the base. I felt intimidated walking past groups of ft, uniformed soldiers in my baggy clothes, but Malcolm (I never fgured out if that was his frst or last name) was good at putting me at ease. He was direct and honest; a man who somehow inspired your confdence. When he took me to his offce I felt encouraged by his own bluntness to be more candid with my questions. I presented my dilemma to him and said people seemed more preoccupied with the war than ideology or the humanity thing, which seems so prominent from the outside.

He told me ‘all of that’ is just a placeholder. That the specifc arguments come and go, but for most people it’s a question of control and independence. Nobody here wants to be managed by forces they have nothing in common with. He actually laughed when I brought up the Hominid movement, as if remembering a joke.

It’s beginning to make sense. The idea that some grotesque movement emerged here simply out of petty spite towards the Coast and the world beyond it has always been simply wrong. For people here it was the world that changed around them, a community that only ever wanted to be left to its own devices. As the future of the human on Earth was negotiated and settled somewhere ‘out there’, so were our accepted standards of right and wrong, and before long Riley and his friends at the barbecue were failing a test they likely didn’t know they likely didn’t

know they were taking. Cue sneering articles. Of course it’s naive to think that change can be avoided, and no population should be able to evade their responsibilities to global Life by claiming ignorance, but I can’t help feeling the Hominids are not the only ones to blame here. Listen to conversations at home, in academia, on TV, even within UN dialogues and the subject of species equity is not even contested. We’ve convinced ourselves that the matter is settled, and every op-ed and piece of satire just depoliticises it further, until just the thought of a group not moving in the same direction becomes tantamount to denying reality itself.

On his last day in Port Salem, Maurice was pulled by sentimentality to the tree stump he had found on his frst. He felt again the haze of expec tation lurking on the other side of the horizon and wondered what he would write in his report to Hausmann. Watching tiny waves pat the muddy shore, it occurred to him anthropologists had been in his position many times before. He thought back to his undergraduate classes about the history of his discipline - the cranium measuring, the graphs ranking cultures by material complexity, all the bizarre lengths to which early anthropologists would go to explain why some of us are ‘more evolved’ than others. At some point it was generally accepted that this was very racist, and cultural anthropologists dropped the keys to the gates of humanity like a grenade.

But the question ‘what makes US different from THEM’ never went away. Biological anthropologists stepped up to fnd what set humans apart from the rest, but whatever rarifed qualities or behaviours they came up with as the exclusive gift of our species - culture, language, tool use, intelligence, social complexity - they soon found in monkeys, dolphins, crows, everywhere, until the high walls of humanity began to collapse, unable to support its own delusion. At the time, Maurice had taken this to be proof that the study of humans had reached its apotheosis; that there is in fact no such thing as humanity. He was proud to have be longed to the intellectual pillar holding up a global movement. But now things looked different.

‘Anthropologists,’ he thought, ‘we’re not a pillar, but a crutch. Propping up the prevailing ideas of the day’. Gatekeepers of humanity, they had at every stage been embroiled in the dirty politics of belonging, and even relied on the idea that there were those who did not belong. Was now any different? The world had redrawn the boundaries of selfhood and Maurice’s whole discipline was on hand to say why it was right to do so. And what of Maurice? He came here to understand them, like so many before him, in order to understand what makes us special. Wasn’t that what the funding and the hype and the articles were about, really?

At root, everyone just wants to be told they’re right. And now he was to set sail tomorrow and report to Noah on the ungodliness of those who refused to get on some stranger’s boat. Maurice looked down at his notebook. It had pleased him greatly to have one blank page left to close the year, but he wrote nothing down, instead letting his thoughts evaporate into the low clouds.

As he got up to leave his stump for the last time, Maurice looked at the faxen cordgrass, still swaying like so many limp metronomes, and decided after all that the marsh was an anthropologist. Both are boundary dwellers. Both guard a secret line; one they did not draw. Ultimately, he thought, both serve the tide, and live to frame its whims in gold.

All photos from North Carolina by Karl Dudman

The Circle of Life by Michael Evans

Ipick up a letter sealed with blood and massage it with my fngers. Next to it lies an other note. It had been weeks since I dared to open it. The seams come undone as I scrape the manilla exterior with my jagged fngernails.

The letter slips open, my hand shaking and dropping it onto the ground. I gasp, fearing that the wind from the cruise ship would knock it into the turquoise waters below. Then a sea turtle would fnd the piece of paper and chew on it, mistaking its red ink for the ten tacles of a jellyfsh. Just like that, another of the great Galapagos Green turtles would die at the hands of mankind, likely followed by a hefty fne and jail time after the cameras lining the ship detected my infraction. There was no trash allowed – no environmental impact. Yet, picking up the letter meant confronting a truth that I didn’t want to face. That I couldn’t.

The love of my life dies next week. After years of chemo treatments, Maura is throwing in the towel. A peaceful end to her life

by euthanasia and one last dinner with our daughters, sealed with a letter for them signed and marked with the date she is scheduled to leave this earth.

Anna and Ava are just fve and two years old.

I slip the letter into my pocket, keeping my promise to never open it – to only give it to them when they turn eighteen years old. Instead, I unfold the paper with my own note written on it. My wife’s dying words to me. A note she wanted to share when she was still in good health before the fear of the unknown overtook her.

As I narrow my eyes to read her cursive handwriting, I frantically wipe away the tears pouring down my face and obstructing my vi sion, tensing my cheek muscles to make them go away. But not even the sight of an iguana rolling around and sunbathing on an outcropping of volcanic rock could slow the tears.

I can’t do this.

I put the note away, my mind thinking back to the endless fghts and how me holding this

Turtles All the Way Down. Photo by Michael Evans, Rendered by Aishani Aatresh

letter was the one nightmare I had tried to prevent. She didn’t listen to me. She’s trying to sabotage me and the girls. I sigh, crumpling up the note and shoving it back into my pocket. I can’t let that happen.

I walk along the top deck of the cruise ship, passing by a bar and rows of circular couch es that give one a view of the archipelago all around it. My body ached after days of kayaking with sea lions and hiking through the hot jungle-like environment of the Galapagos. All I wanted to do was melt away with Maura.

But every time I think about her leaving me, the fact that she is knowingly putting my life in danger, I feel the anger bubble up to the surface. If she dies they are going to kill me. My investors and the government will bury me. Men don’t come back from promises that are broken.

“Sir, can I get anything to help you?” A robot humanoid rolls up on two wheels as I enter the staircase at the center of the ship. Its voice and face are designed to appear human but its body is full of different contraptions that can enable it to juggle dozens of tasks at once. If it weren’t for Ecuadorian regulations requiring there to be a certain number of naturalists on the ship, it could likely run without any humans.

“I’m good,” I reply, nodding my head with a smile. My instinct is always to treat the robots nicely, even if it doesn’t make a difference to them whether I respond with an angry cursing or a polite British accent.

The humanoid rolls away without a second thought, its artifcial vision scanning the en vironment for new people to help. The idea that most people are awed by such technology feels cute in a way. They have no idea what’s possible. I can make people live forever.

The walk back to my room ends with me knocking on the door. Maura opens up, a warm excitement to her face that sends a tingling sensation throughout my body. I feel guilty that

I left her to read her note to me, but couldn’t even bring myself to read it. I want to share with her my thoughts – to tell her how much I love her.

But the one thing masking it all is an unbelievable sense of betrayal. She’s going to tear down everything I ever built.

“Want some coffee? I made some,” Maura says as I walk out onto the porch overlooking the ocean waves beneath us. I sit back against the nylon chair and stare at the glassy waves. A frigate darts through the sky, its red throat bulging out from its long, gray body like a warning sign.

“Not right now, thank you, though.” I exhale, feeling the warm, humid air invade my pores and blanket my body. It was just one of the hundreds of moments from the last few days that I wish I could freeze in a picture and frame forever. Instead, each memory shattered into a pile of broken glass.

Maura places the coffee pot on the granite countertop running along the side of our king suite. The pot hits the countertop with a loud clank, her arm yet again losing its fne motor control. She groans softly, her hands brushing through her hair as she walks past me.

“I just want to be free from this pain,” Maura says as she leans over the balcony of the ship, the last rays of sunlight beaming off the wa ter and lighting up her face. The butterfies still race through me every time I look at her, and the entire world seems to stop as our hands touch.

“I know you do,” I respond, keeping my ears focused on the slow lull of the engine. The expanse of the water stretches on for miles, the edges of several islands in the Galapagos archipelago visible on the horizon. Part of me just wants to stay here forever. Snorkel ing with the sea turtles, rock climbing on the side of million-year-old volcanoes, and hiking through jungles spotting new species of birds

and insects with every adventure.

“You care more about the company,” Maura scoffs. She pats a hand against her dress as if to make sure the black sequins stay in place.

“I don’t wanna have this conversation again. This was supposed to be one of the best weeks of our lives.”

“What you aren’t willing to accept is that it’s also supposed to be the last week of our lives together.” Maura’s face twitches, battling back the tears that surface at the corner of her eyes.

Suddenly, Maura pulls herself away from my grasp, leaving a round of chills to cascade down my spine. I shift my gaze from the ocean to her face, her eyes glassy and jaw taught.“But I don’t think you are willing to do what it takes.”

She turns away, the pit in my stomach growing. I want to reach out and hold her, but the fear of digging my hole even deeper holds me back. “You know what I want. And you aren’t willing to let me have it.”

“What you want is to be away from me!” My voice booms off the ship. If any of the other hundred passengers on the high-end cruise line are outside then they surely could hear me. “You want to die,” I say in a much softer tone. “And I can’t let you do that. You deserve to live. The girls need you. They can’t grow up without their mother.”

She stands with her hands on her hips and lips pursed.

“Maura, you are the light of my world. For the last twenty years, you have been the center of the universe, the greatest gift, the great est joy—”

“Stop it.” She cut me off. “You are just selfsh. You love me enough to hold me. You love me enough to have me in your life. But you don’t love me enough to let me go. You don’t love me enough to end my pain if it means you’re not holding me again.”

I gritted my teeth together, straightening

the blue-speckled tie that hung off my neck. “That’s not true. You know there is another way.”

“I’m not hooking myself up to that damn machine.” She turns away from me, her olive skin coated in a thin layer of sweat from the hot air that collects on the porch on the top deck of the ship. “That’s not living.”

“I would be with you though. We could be together. The girls would be able to have you in their lives. You could see them graduate, maybe even get married one day. The bionics could operate for hundreds of years without major repairs and the neural net would retain your exact brain wiring.”

Maura turns back to face me. The corners of her eyes reddened, tears forming at the edges and spilling down her cheeks. I move to hold her, to embrace her in my arms. But she squirmed to the edge of the porch, her body pressed against the glass railing and expanse of the Galapagos behind her.

For a second we both stop to breathe. My mind fashes back to the moment we boarded the ship just days ago. A speedboat brought us to the hull, the crew unloading our luggage and greeting us with glasses of champagne. Despite the small passenger load due to government regulations, there were seven decks on the ship, fve of which were reserved for passengers. Pools and hot tubs were on each deck with the foors able to change color with the heat to keep the ship at optimal temperature. Humanoids roamed the ship, passing out drinks and conversing with the guests, each conversation recorded and fed back to a master machine learning algorithm. Every interaction was used to optimize the guest experience and personalize their itinerary to make the most of their ten days traveling on the Renegade Fauna.

“Don’t you understand?” Maura’s voice cracks. She reaches out, her arms falling on

my shoulders. I hold her close, trying to have the warmth and love inside of me radiate onto her. “I don’t want to be turned into a bunch of computer parts. I won’t let my body become metal and transistors. Even if one day a synthetic version of my body can be made from organic materials – I don’t want that.”

“I know that. You are so much better than just computer parts. But you know my struggle.”

“I will not put myself through pain for eterni ty because of the mess that you made!”

“I’m not telling you to do that. The investors are gonna be out to kill me if they see you give up this fght. You are the reason this all happened. The charter city was built for you. Billions of dollars were poured into research by the federal government. Tens of millions are on a waitlist for the products produced in our biohacker sanctuary. Do you understand how big this is? How selfsh you are being? How you are endangering countless lives?”

“It’s all just a number on a spreadsheet to you. These people were sold on a promise – a promise that you pulled out of your ass. And look where we are now. I’m dying and after years of working like a maniac, talking to every investor, and practically living in the lab, you want to ask me if I will spend forever on this planet with you?”

“Okay.” I close my eyes, a migraine beginning to come on as a wave of stress brings a sensation akin to clotting the blood in my veins. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just tried reading the letter, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” My voice cracks as tears reform in my eyes. “This is impossible.”

“You don’t understand me,” Maura sighs and both of us stand in silence as the sun sets beneath the horizon, erupting into reds and purples. A pelican faps its wings as it smoothly dives into the water, picking up a scaly green fsh as it rises from the water.

Maura sighs, “You want to use me as a pawn. To show the world that I, too, have bought into your vision. That we can all transcend the boundaries of biology and merge with machines. But I can’t do that.”

“Then why don’t you keep fghting the cancer, you don’t have to upload your brain to the cloud. There’s still RX-Clavian 301. I know it’s experimental, but it could —”

“James, just stop!” Maura roars at me. She collapses to the foor, the tears spilling out of her faster than ever. “For the last fve years, you have put me through hell. Endless treatments. The press tours. Trying to promote the products you and your company creates.”

“I’ve been trying to save you. To save every one who has to suffer like this.”

“It’s not your job to save me. That’s what God is here for. I just wanted you to hold me. I wanted to enjoy the little time we had together. But every time I tell you what I’m feel ing, you never understand.You only care about yourself.”

With those words, Maura storms back into their suite, slamming the door shut behind her. My fsts clench as I gaze up at the sky. Splashes of red and orange have broken through the horizon as the sun withers away into darkness.

“You son of a bitch!” My sanity tore at its seams. With every second my heart pound ed through my chest, shooting pains coursing through my arms and legs. I fumble for the letter in my pocket. Part of me wants to read it and get it over with. To look at her fnal goodbye and end this all myself. But I push the thought away.

It was all a lie. I imagined my days sitting in church with my dad, his liver only in greater and greater distress by the day. He had been an alcoholic for 15 years but had fnally kicked the habit as I entered middle school. I was proud of him.

What I didn’t realize is that he had done it

out of fear.

I walk back inside and wrap my arms around Maura. We hold onto each other as we collapse onto the bed. Both of us lie there in silence until the pain in our hearts fades for an instant, replaced by a ferce growling in our stomachs. We soon leave for dinner, the suit and dress we both adorn ftting for the fourcourse meal that is served to us on the cruise ship. As a kid, a vacation like this would have been beyond my wildest dreams. Endless food in a grand ballroom decked out in diamond chandeliers and gold-plated silverware. The exterior of the dining room is surrounded by windows, the dark outline of the islands visible beneath the shades of purple and dark red that linger in the sky.

“I love you,” Maura says as we sit down. The tension from our fghts always fades away to give light to the connection that has drawn us together for decades. “And I will love you for ever. I know you are doing your best. And we will get through this together.”

I smile, gripping her hand in mine. “I know we will,” I say, but the familiar rush of warmth doesn’t food through me. Instead, I feel some thing much darker. A clarity that lifts a weight off my shoulders. A determination that suddenly brings me the solution I had been waiting for.

“I’m always on your team,” I say, blowing her a kiss from across the table. “Forever.”

She grins, her eyes lighting up as my hand moves to her wrist and gently touches her. I can’t push away the fresh round of tears flling my eyes as the frst course is plated on our table.

A walnut cranberry salad with homemade Greek dressing. Not the typical Ecuadorian cuisine served on the ship, but with the goat cheese and seeds, it is a savory mix. The next courses come in due time, and by the end of it, both of us are so full that we can barely stand.

In what feels like minutes, another night fies by between us chatting with the other cruise goers on the back of the ship and then getting ready for bed. It had already been a week of us away from Charlestowne, the longest time I have taken off since starting the charter city. Maura couldn’t be happier that I’m fnally tak ing a break. I’m fnally giving her what she has wanted the entire time. To spend time with her, and when we are home, to spend time with the girls and be one big, happy family for as long as we can.

“I feel I sacrifced everything for this,” I say with an arm around her. We are lying in bed, looking out at the stars that line the horizon. The lights automatically turn off on the ship at night, leaving everything in a sheet of ebony, comforting and frightening at the same time.

“We both did,” Maura says. “This was the best last week I could have dreamed of. The animals, plants, adventures, it was so fantastic.”

I pause at the deep sense of contentment in her voice. As much as I had tried to will her out of this state, nothing was working. She was prepared to die. And if the world fnds out, my reputation and my life’s work will be destroyed.

Yet, I know she’s ready to leave. She refuses to merge herself with machines and after years of chemo treatments she is done.

“I just never want this to end.” I squeeze her as tight as I can, kissing the top of her forehead. We both drift asleep, nightmares of my past surfacing.

I envision all the late-night meetings convinc ing the federal government to grant Charlestowne a special economic zone and legal freedom that allowed it to become a novel place of experimentation for science. Biohackers, renegade engineers, and disillusioned academics traveled from all over the world to populate the marsh of South Carolina. And I created it all with the belief that it would save Maura.

But she doesn’t want that. She’d rather die.

The morning sun breaks through the cur tains as both our eyes futter open. I hold Maura, breathing her in. It is a combination of her lavender shampoo, deodorant, and her natural aroma that tickles my nostrils. I want to hold onto her smell forever — her everything.

“What are the girls going to do without me?” Maura says, the thought hitting her after another round of night terrors. We both were tossing and turning.

“You will always be with us,” I stroke her hair, keeping my tone level, not wanting to reopen the wounds of our past conversations. Even more importantly, she can’t be suspicious of what’s about to happen.

We change, shower, and eat our breakfast. I try to fnd the words to say to Maura, to tell her I love her more than anything. But it’s too late now. We both enter the tender, a small speed boat that takes passengers from the cruise ship closer to the islands. A couple of hundred meters ahead, the cliffs of the islands tower above the ocean. They are over fve hundred meters tall with dozens of caves carved into the sides by the pounding ocean waves. Thousands of birds nest along the milelong rock face, sparse greenery, and cactuses growing on the steep sides of the cliffs. It is another world from the other islands, just as every day has been.

On the frst day’s excursion, we had visited a fat desert-like island with a blue-footed boobie colony that had painted the sides of the cliffs white with their excrement. The next day we visited the newest island, Fernandina, the volcanoes freshly erupting with black, molten rock coating the seafoor. Some of the islands are mountainous, covered in dense jungles and massive tortoises that roam the lands, search ing for grass to eat and soft dirt to burrow homes into. And other islands are covered in seals, red shrubs springing from the ground

that make the landscape look more like a martian planet than an earthly biome.

But this island is another level of magnifcent. The sheer cliffs resemble giants, tops piercing through the clouds. As we close in on the diving location, I wrap my arm around Maura. I know she’s nervous from the way she’s grip ping the exterior of the boat. She has wanted to deep sea snorkel for the entire trip — she’s now fnally getting her chance.

“I still remember all the times I’d do this with my father,” she says, looking to the sky.

“It’s gonna be great.” I try to hide my own uneasiness, my nerves, of course, for different reasons. All I can think about is Charlestowne. The vision. The numbers. The sheer glory of being able to create a future in which the old, boring biological rules don’t exist.

The freedom the future was supposed to bring only made me a prisoner to the promises. Chained to Charlestowne. Enslaved by the vision. I had no idea what I was really getting into until it was too late. When I could no longer tell myself any lies, I was forced to face the reality that I was being used as a centerpiece in a global play for power.

I am disposable. Nature won’t kill me if I don’t play by the rules. The government will. And Maura has dared to break them.

“Time to get your gear on. Jump in after me and we will follow along the face of the cliff until we reach that boat over there.” The naturalist points at a ship in the distance, already a group of tourists fapping their fns in the water as they explore life under the sea.

I slip on the last of my gear, helping Maura into her fns and snorkel gear. I wish I could hold her one last time, relive this last week all over again, but it’s gone forever now.

We jump into the water. Its warm, salty tex ture makes its way through my pores. I feel freer, more alive, almost like I am in an amniotic fuid designed to grow extra limbs and

infuse new energy into me. In the sea, a school of hundreds of tiny fsh passes by me as dozens of species of bright purple, orange, and yellow follow a sea turtle. Maura is pointing with excitement, bubbles coming out of her mouth as she is shouting in the water with excitement.

“Oh my god!” She grabs onto me. “This is the coolest thing. Wow.”

“It’s amazing how they don’t even move with us,” I remark, following the turtle who is swimming deeper into the sea. That’s when I make a thrust downward with my fns, sucking in as much air as possible to touch the corals at the bottom. It takes almost thirty seconds to get down, a sharp ringing in my ears as my head grows heavy with the pressure. Maura watches me, soon diving down herself.

We soon start to drift away from the pack, the seaweed and cloudy sky making it hard to see much further than ten or twenty feet in front of us in the water. It gives us a perfect sanctuary. For what feels like hours we dive into the water and back up to the surface taking big gulps of air.

Then, right as I sense she is beginning to tire, I make my move. The group is still in the water. There are at least another fve minutes before our disappearance strikes any suspicion. That’s why I take the opportunity to do what Maura has wanted this entire time. She dives down into the water, me trailing behind her. As she hits the bottom examining the corals and starfsh that stick to the molten, rocky foor, I foat above her. I take my legs and use them to pin her back against the seafoor. But she battles back, kicking as bubbles fy everywhere in the water. We fght back and forth for a few minutes, my arms pinned against her legs to keep her from escaping. Then, fnally, she gives up. The vision has taken over. I’m numb to every thing but the pounding in my head from the water pressure. I begin calling for help, letting the crew and naturalists know that she had

dived into the water and never came back. I cry, part of my mind flling with a hot regret, my arms and legs shaking with terror at what I have done. The thought of not ever being able to hold her again makes me sick. But I know there is another way out. Her body will be found a few days later, any suspicion thwart ed with a few tragic, generous donations in her name to the Galapagos Foundation. But her legacy will live on to protect the natural beauty in the world. An old way dictated by Darwinian beliefs of natural selection, where life and death are certainties, and God is the only hope. Today, I killed that way of life.

I killed my wife.

I open the note in my pocket, wet and torn in sections, but ink still faintly visible. All around me the world spins as paramedics and humanoids dive into the water to retrieve her body. My heart pounds as I realize they may connect it to me. It’s too late for me to go back. Too late for me to save her. A screaming sounds over and over again inside of my head, my breaths shortening as the panic boils over. I’ll never forgive myself. But true progress doesn’t come without great risk. I had already put it all on the line to bring Charlestowne and the plethora of technologies that sprung from it to life — no other option but success. No model but to scale the solution to billions and generate trillions of dollars in return for my investors.

They will hang my head if I fail. Hang those of everyone I love, by bankrupting us, blackmailing us, and driving us into the ground. Maura deciding to take her own life is the one needle the balloon needs to pop. The one hint of doubt that will keep devout from believing in my vision.

But that doubt is buried now.

It’s dead.

My real worst nightmare has only begun.

Strike of the Gavel by Mira Jiang

the basic threads to revive some memory.”

Snatches of scenes fashed back to him—the controls buzzing beneath his hands like a live wire and the sleek transport looming in his windshield. His head had jolted back at the impact. Metal crumpled around him as pain lanced across the side of his neck.

The

sheets were rough beneath his skin, the lights glaring down with an artifcial brightness that blanched the room to white. Keilan tried to sit up, but the world blurred around him as nausea rose in his throat.

“Your Honor, not so fast,” a voice called from somewhere to his left. “Your memory chip needs time to integrate with the peripheral nerves. Take it easy.”

Pain twinged along his temples, and he reached up to clasp his head. His hands re sponded like they were moving through mo lasses. He stared down at his fngers, dark against the bleached covers. They were a deep mahogany with half-moon cuticles and unblemished skin. The day before, his hands had been as pale as dough, marked by liver spots and scars from concrete burns.

This was not his body.

A doctor stood beside his bed in a white coat, making notes on a datapad she had tucked against her side. “We rushed an emergency chip download to a new clone.The body is younger than your usual preference, but the labs were unable to obtain growth serum on such short notice.”

“What happened to me?” Keilan asked.

His voice was rich and melodious, a contrast to the growling rasp he had spoken with after the cancer started to grow. It was the voice of a man used to being listened to.

The doctor looked up. “I am afraid there was an assassination attempt. A street worker crashed your transport into a bulldozer, and the collision killed your bodies. Even the chips were damaged, but we were able to reconstruct

He hadn’t meant to kill. Hell, he hadn’t even known whose transport he was crashing until he caught a glimpse of the man on beige seats with a newspaper across his lap. In the mo ment, Keilan imagined there was a ficker of recognition in his eyes.

It was foolish, of course. The most powerful judge in the country had no reason to remember a man he sentenced decades ago.

“Your Honor,” the doctor said. “Are you al right?”

Keilan swallowed. “Can you tell me what happened to the assassin?”

“His memory chip was crushed beyond re pair. We disposed of it in the furnace and sent his body to the recycling center.”

“So everything is lost.”

“Indeed, Your Honor.” The doctor blinked. “You wrote that mandate into law centuries ago.”

“I suppose I did, didn’t I?” Keilan stared down at his hands again, tapping his fngers against the sheets.

He had lived with chronic pains for so long he had forgotten what it felt like to move without aches in every breath.

Under normal circumstances, he would have passed up his cancerous body for a clone de cades ago, but the Council’s sentence had been clear. He was consigned to the work gangs for the rest of his life, and when his heart gave up, there would be no chance of continuation.

The strike of the gavel haunted him for years. Elder Hakim had stared down at him, stony and bored, as if he’d been deciding what he wanted for lunch instead of Keilan’s fate.

Now you’re the one ruined, and I’m the one who survived, he thought.

A hysterical laugh escaped his lips.

“Your Honor, I must insist you rest.” The doctor’s brow furrowed, and she entered something into her datapad. “Because of the damage done to the chip, we may need to or der a psych eval to—”

The door slammed open with a bang. Chips of paint faked off the walls.

A balding man hurried into the room, typing furiously into a commlink. “Your Honor, you are needed in the courtroom.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” the doctor said. “Chip interfacing is a delicate process, and—”

“Elder Hakim has recovered from transfers in half the time he’s been here now.”

“He has never dealt with damage as extensive as this.” The doctor turned to me. “Your Honor, if you do not allow suffcient time for recovery, there may be permanent damage that will plague you for as long as you have this body.”

“Your Honor, the deciding vote is held today, and the media will become a circus if you don’t show up.” A fush spread through the man’s face. “The blogs are speculating that you are dead. If you don’t make an appearance soon, the dissidents will have a feld day about how the Council has become too old to rule.”

“If there are enough people voicing opposition,” Keilan murmured, “maybe they have a valid point to listen to.”

The man gaped at him. “Sir, what are you—”

“I’m only joking.” Keilan tried to summon up the oozing condescension he remembered from his trial decades ago. “You know the youth can’t be trusted to rule themselves. I’ve got centuries of wisdom and life experience to guide them.”

And the only thing he has even gained in that time is stubbornness, he added in his head.

What would happen if they found out who Keilan really was? Elder Hakim was one of the frst members of the Council of Elders. His death would shake the foundations of the government. It was what Keilan and his friends had dreamed of doing before years in the work gangs had crushed his idealism.

An uneasy look crossed the doctor’s face. “Your Honor, if you are not feeling well, I must insist—”

“I think I can be the judge of my own capa bilities.” The sharpness in his tone made the doctor turn back to her datapad.

“What’s the case?” Keilan added. “Help me up. I want to go to the courtroom.”

Relief swept across the man’s face. “I’ve set up a hologram system for you in an offce up stairs. The courtroom confguration should be the way you prefer it. Be prepared for a bloodbath afterwards though.You have to give the media something if you don’t want endless speculation.”

“They’ll speculate whether I talk to them or not.” Keilan waved a hand. “It’s the job of vultures.”

He seemed to have struck the right tone because the doctor’s unease relaxed as they stepped out the door. Halls stretched out before him, brightly lit and scrubbed to near-sinister polish. It was like a scuttling beehive, populated by doctors and beeping drones.

The man stopped in front of a heavy door. “Your robes are hung on a peg inside, Your Honor. The Council is waiting to hear your thoughts on the case before they pass judg ment.”

When Keilan pushed open the door, it was like stepping back forty years in time.

A young woman sat at the defendant table where he had once pleaded his case. A row of black-robed elders sat in the box at the head of the room, their gazes imperious and bored. A lawyer paced across the front,

gesticulating with increasing fervor.

The bench sat empty at the center of the room. It was the only object amongst the fickering images that appeared real. It was waiting for him.

As far as everyone is concerned, I am the most powerful person in the world. If some one fnds out I am not who I seem, my life is over.

The idea sent a shiver up his spine. He thought he had made peace with the idea of his own death, but in this young body, with the aches of decades melted away, he found he desperately wanted to live.

Keilan slipped on the dark robes and took his seat. Sound in the courtroom roared to life.

“—an obvious case of blatant disregard for the law. Elders, if we let this miscreant off with a warning, we will set a dangerous precedent for people to get away with behavior like this. Thieves are a plague that must be excised without mercy.”

The elder beside Keilan leaned over on the bench. “Hakim, I trust you have gone over the briefs for the case.”

“I’ve had time to skim while I was in recovery,” he replied. “What’s happening now?”

“The defendant is permitted to give closing remarks before we make our decision. The verdict should be cut and dry. She’s guilty. It’s only a question of how much.”

The prosecutor took his seat, spots of red on his cheeks. He shuffed his notes and smoothed nonexistent folds in his suit.

The defense attorney rose to his feet, biting at his lips. “Esteemed elders of the court, while there is no doubt a crime has been committed, the law is not always cut and dry—”

This provoked murmurs from the specta tors.

The attorney’s eyes widened. “What—what I meant was that the law allows for a range of

punishments, and I believe this young woman should not be expected to act with your wis dom. There is foolishness in youth that must be forgiven if it is to be cured. I am certain she repents deeply and—”

The young woman rose to her feet. “Could I say something?”

The courtroom burst into an uproar. Through a hologram, the crowd appeared as nebulous shadows, but Keilan could make out fickers of hands cupped to mouths and peo ple leaning over in conversation.

The attorneys and elders stared at him in expectation. It felt like a test. Keilan tried to grasp the gavel in front of him, but it slipped through his fngers.

Right, nothing in this courtroom is really here. He rose to his feet instead, robes faring around him like raven wings. “Order in the court.”

His voice boomed over the crowd, and silence fell. The young woman remained standing. She had indigo hair and sharp eyes that pierced Keilan to his soul.

“Could I speak?” she said. “I don’t believe it’s against the rules.”

The other elders made no move to stop her, so Keilan tilted his head in acknowledgement.

“Sarika, please ,” the defense attorney hissed. “This is a terrible idea. You could incriminate yourself.”

Sarika lifted her chin. “I took an oath to give the truth when I stepped into this courtroom. My attorney has not been telling it.”

“Perjury is a serious crime,” said a judge to Keilan’s left. “Are you claiming a practitioner of the law would deliberately defle it?”

“He says I feel repentant for what I did. I think I did what was necessary to survive in the environment you have made us live in. He says I should receive a lighter sentence because of my youth. I think the punishment should fall on your heads because you’ve had centuries to improve the world and left it in shambles instead.”

“Remind me,” Keilan said, waving down the protests rippling across the room. “What crime are you being accused of?”

Loathing fickered in her eyes. “I took apples for my family, because we couldn’t afford them after weeks of work. Your generations have hoarded wealth and live in luxury off our suffering.”

Her words were a mirror of the ideals Keilan and his friends once preached. The

prosecutor had pulled them out at his trial, making a twisted mockery of his intentions. He thought they had been lost in the darkness years ago.

“Death or the work gangs,” said a red haired elder behind Keilan. “It’s obvious she has no remorse. Let us put it to a vote.”

“I am not afraid to die.” Sarika’s voice flled the space like an ash cloud. “You can’t silence us all. Unless you change your ways, your time of reckoning is approaching.”

Death or the work gangs. For a moment, Keilan was back in her shoes, staring at the sea of black robes with Elder Hakim sitting ghoul-like in front. He had been sure of his convictions when they threw him to work on construction sites. The years dashed that spark to dust on concrete foors.

Right now, it burned in Sarika as a roaring fre. Keilan would hate to see it broken.

“I am not afraid to die,” she repeated, her eyes boring into his.

Around him, the elders tallied up their decisions. It was a tie for both options.

“You have the fnal vote again, Hakim,” said the woman behind him in the box. “Do you hold off giving your opinion on purpose for the dramatics?”

Keilan’s own trial had ended the same way. At the time, he thought he had been granted mercy. He understood now it was an execu tion either way. The elders lived as gods, and a few more decades for a criminal passed in the blink of an eye.

Sarika spoke up today when I wouldn’t have had the courage. She’ll lose that spirit in the work gangs. I think she’s afraid of losing it too. A symbol can be more powerful than a person though, and I can make her into one.

Keilan forced himself to meet Sarika’s gaze as he spoke, “Give her death.”

The gavel struck.

1.

Footprint (A Makeshift Legend)

by Kelsey Chen

There is a rhetoric of walking. —Michel de Certeau, he Practice of Everyday Living

RecentlyFootprint has been showing more and more error messages in response to my motions. I started to notice this about three months ago—an error is typically a very unusual thing, but during the week of May 2nd alone, I logged three non-negligible recalibra tions in my Footpath. Before this May, I averaged around one recalibration a year since I turned eighteen; even during developmental years, annual recalibrations never exceeded 6-8 in total, which is already on the high end.

In the past month, I have logged twenty-two recalibrations. This is far out of the norm, according to my GP. She referred me to a technician, who was just as puzzled, because there was apparently nothing wrong with my Foot print. All systems were up to date, she said, and the hardware was fne too. The technician referred me to a psychiatrist, who cleared me from the only real syndrome that excessive Footprint error is an indicator for—schizo phrenia. I was then referred back to a second technician, who promptly referred me to yet another psychiatrist. I didn’t bother to schedule an appointment.

But I think I fgured out why I’ve been getting so many errors.

This past year, my information feed has been overloaded with constant notifcations and news reports on violent crimes committed against people whose phenotypic characteristics mark them to be socially classifed as “Asian”—therefore, diseased, foreign, dirty. The

violence is gratuitous, horrifc, and directed at the most vulnerable members of the demo graphic body. It’s completely devastating and still somehow feels abstract, even as my own body is implicated in this same calculus of violence. It’s completely devastating, how same we are, even in our incommensurably differ ent lifelines—how same we are in our bodies, our classifcation, our disciplining within and by this city.

For nearly half a year, I hunched over in a perpetual finch. In that time, I learned the exact air density in a space where there is an expectation of violence, which is to say that all public space suddenly became viscous: not like honey, more like tar. I wondered for long periods of time about the sculptural formation of a human skull—if it takes around eight decades for a human skull to be made, what is made in its place when the body does not live for the necessary time of its sculptural in cubation? I thought it might resemble a turtle shell—architecturally deformed, functioning neither as trap nor armor, but somehow both at once.

I am certain, had I gathered the courage to see a doctor in those early months, that I would

Oracle Bones (Silkscreen), Series by Kelsey Chen

have been diagnosed with a slew of neuroses. But even then, as deeply as I had sunk into depression, Footprint was logging an average recalibration to motion ratio.

And then, in April, Yao Pin An was brutalized. A 61-year-old man who had immigrated from China only two years ago to this unforgiving city, Yao Pin An was collecting cans on the streets, having recently lost his apartment to a fre and his job to the motion of the business cycle. He was assaulted while picking up bottles to pay his rent, his head repeatedly stomped into the curb at 3rd Ave & East 125 St. In the news report, his wife of 31 years, Baozhu Chen, said, “My husband is a hard-working man. He picks up bottles to help pay the rent and the bills. He is innocent. He did not do anything wrong. He is a very kind person. He is quiet. He doesn’t cause trouble to make people mad.” He suffered a cerebral contusion and multiple facial fractures. I do not know where he is now. The last I I remember from a news update,Yao Pin An was in critical condition in a medically induced coma. The half-life of information is so tragically short now—even news on life, on death, and on catastrophic human violence begins to decay within a week.

I could not move my body for twenty-three minutes after viewing the news report. I was paralyzed, thinking about (1) How exactly the contours of a human skull might change in form when crushed between a concrete curb and a human sole. (2) How much Yao Pin An resembled my father. (3) How, fuck, he was just picking up bottles, (4) How much sadness was contained in Baozhu Chen’s quiet insistence that he was kind. How crushing the grief in her plea, he doesn’t cause trouble. (5) How dare this country call itself Beautiful in its own naming in our language. (6) And how there must be something wrong with the Footprint data, which the press released in an oddly intrusive reporting decision. There were 0

recalibrations and 0 deviations in the six months before Yao Pin An was assaulted.

Everyone knows how Footprint works in the abstract, but no one knows how Footprint works in actuality. Its precise mechanism is entirely opaque, which is remarkable in this moment of explosive information circulation. Everything about Footprint seems vaguely out of grasp. No one knows anyone that works for Footprint, but everyone knows someone who knows someone who is Footprint-affliated. It isn’t just because I’m a ceramicist, rather than a systems engineer, a physicist, or an information scientist. Even those in the relevant felds seem to have no concrete sense of the actual workings of Footprint. What I do know, or what I think I know, is that Footprint works by mapping motion, in the most expansive defnition of the word. It tracks all of your motion, and all of the motion that is you.

My mother used to tell me stories about the magic of the ancients—how, in classical times, those trained in divination would use a turtle shell and bone fragments carved with trigrams to look to the I Ching for directional direc tives on living. Face this way when you sleep. Face this way when you work. Be careful when you walk in this direction. The Book of Changes would guide you in your motions; align you directionally towards a virtuous, auspicious life. It’s funny that more of my knowledge of feng shui comes from my white colleagues than from my mom. They think they know a lot about how to save yourself with magical realignments; I don’t think I know very much about anything, especially about Change. But from what little I have gathered in my crude impression of what the I Ching is, Footprint strikes me as its post-modern, substantially more brutal iteration.

And, unlike feng shui, it’s not magic. Footprint could not be further from magic, even though there’s something phantasmic about how

cleanly it’s disappeared its own innards, any trace of its mechanics. There are no bones and shells, just a sleek watch-surface that offers a set of optimized potential motions at any given moment. It doesn’t just tell time; it tells you all your possible timelines. And it doesn’t just map motion; it maps all possible motion—not just what has already been enacted, but also what is to come. I won’t pretend to know how it works. But I think there’s probably some kind of quantum logic involved.

Sometime in the days of college, I stumbled across a theoretical physics class. I remember myself wedged between the hard green plastic of my seat and the splintered wood of the desk in the dizzying humidity of early fall, listening to the professor speak about wave-particle duali ty. I was lost in the math, but I still remember with remarkable clarity how he explained that a particle’s location consists of probabilities. At any given moment, he explained, it is this like ly the particle will be here; it is that likely the particle will be there. This set of probabilities, in turn, can be described with a mathematical function—a wave function. Until the moment of measurement (which, in physics, means an encounter with a possible observer), the particle is somehow splintered, at once located at all points on the wave. When you look at it, its infnite possibilities collapse into a sin gle location. Infnity becomes singularity; you gaze upon it and suddenly it gets fxed. Which is the same as saying that with one look you can stop the entire world; with one look, with one motion, you cohere infnite possible iter ations of what you encounter into one. I remember thinking, how beautiful, really, and how sad. How beautiful to think of space as flled by infnite possibilities, so that we are constantly walking through echoes of what could have been. I remember thinking what a beautiful way to think about existence, to understand that to be is to cohere yourself in every moment.

I remember thinking, maybe it’s all worth it. In each miniscule gesture, I am somehow being reconstituted by an infnity of possible Is. How gorgeous, that in every step I am writing myself into being.

This is how Footprint works, I think, in a very provisional, crude sense—which is the only sense in which I understand it. Footprint traces the infnite possible motions of “you” in the next instant and calculates the likelihood of you carrying out each action, given the con stitution of “you” in all your past and present motions. Within these possibilities it selects a curated few and presents them to you as your Footpath, displayed on your screen alongside each of their probabilities, which have been determined by computing indices such as past motions, biological composition, and experiential making. Many times, the Footpath is how you would have moved anyway. The curation of your Footpath happens through optimiza tion—somehow, “they” decide which of your possible actions would be best for you and for the entire world. No one knows how the optimization algorithm works or who writes it. No one knows who “they” is, only that they are constantly making “you.”

Described this way, Footprint seems overwhelming in its complexity. But it’s really a smooth, liquid motion. In each moment, Footprint presents you with your Footpath. Your watch screen continuously repopulates with a set of optimal movements. You learn to read the screen quickly. You make small movements easily, without looking. It’s likely, anyways, that an inconsequential movement is within your Footpath. A breath, a slight lean of your body, an adjustment of the angle at which your elbow rests on the table. For bigger movements you glance frst. Then you act. A step in this direction, a turn of your head, a decision about which job offer to accept. I always feel a little bit behind, like I’m

constantly catching up to the temporal location of my own body. But even this con stant, slight lag is smooth: a continuous motion with no beginning and no end.

No one is obligated to take Footprint’s suggestions. A Footpath is a gift—an offering. A general trajectory determined to be optimal not just for you, but everyone in the world. Every being reverberates; every motion ripples throughout everything that exists and that will ever exist. This is one reason most people never think to deviate from the Foot path: it is beyond you. The consequences, in fact, are cosmic. But mostly people follow the Footpath because it is good. When you are young, you learn quickly that Footprint is re ally good at what it does. Deviations always result in injury. You trip. You get a small scrape. Sometimes, you die. Sometimes, your cat dies.

Footprint is the blueprint of this city—and every city. It has many versions around the world: Wu Gui (“Turtle”) in China, Link in the Middle East and North Africa, and Deca in Cuba. But they are all Footprint. The program opti mizes human motion. It tracks motion—of every being in the world. Its calculus is organized by zoning, by local aggregation. Each city is insular, a system of motion that is at once open and closed. In his PhD disserta tion, Takashi Murakami made a map of the art world as a multiverse: many disciplinary lineages, many spheres of cultural production, many

inheritances of technique—countless systems of artmaking, constantly colliding. They coexist and intertwine, yet they have their own gravitational pull—have their own boundaries, no matter how unstable. Human cities are the same way. Each individual motion ripples unpredictably through the fabric of our world, but it does so unevenly. There is a kind of pull towards large collections of human motion, so that cities begin to cohere not just in topography, but also in cause-and-effect. Footprint pays a privileged attention to your immediate locality—that is to say, your city. Because they are whirlpools of human motion and emotion, even the momentum of “you” gets caught.

Human cities and Murakami’s art worlds are the same thing: constellations of people and concepts ordered by aesthetic principles. How to live is an aesthetic question, and Footprint is humanity’s fnal answer. Somehow, in the messy web of constantly colliding human orbits, in the crossing and enfolding paths of everyone in this city and in this world, there is an optimum. You can see how this might have enormous implications for governance, city planning, and the practice of everyday life. This is why Footprint has become so universally integrated into all of our lives. It is an ethical administrator of futures. There must have been so much casual disaster before Footprint. I cannot even imagine what it would be like.

There really is something indisputably beautiful about Footprint—about how coherent, how synchronized our collective existence has become. Footprint has made one giant, harmonized map out of every possible human future. Spatial design has always been about making futures—Cellini thought of disegno (design) “as a tool for ordering human endeavors toward virtue. Man cannot act virtuously without disegno.” Footprint is a kind of designed spatial ordering, but not meant as Cellini had hoped, as a mode of

ethical self-transformation. You no longer invent “yourself.” Ours is a new age of cartogra phy where the map makes you.

Footprint accounts for all possible instantiations of “you,” including the sub-optimal. Sometimes, people move in a direction outside of what has been offered by Footpath. This is a deviation. It can occur intentionally or by accident. Deviations are within Footprint’s comprehension. A deviation does not trigger an error message. But people rarely decide to deviate. No one wants the cat to die.

Recalibration is more diffcult to explain. It is a motion so substantially outside of Footprint’s calculus that you receive an error message—a small red notifcation on the right side of your watch screen. I’m not sure even the people behind the empty-centered infrastructure of Footprint, the engineers writing ghost code in their ghost chairs, know exactly what triggers a Footpath recalibration. Even specialists, like my technician, whose services are wildly overpriced on account of the many certifcations and degrees she’s racked up, could not explain what a recalibration is. Unlike a deviation, a recalibration happens when something gets messed up—even when you undergo a motion that has been offered by Footprint as your optimal Footpath. Somehow, somewhere in your motion, Footprint’s projected trajectories for the “you” that comes into being as you move get reconfgured in a way that is unexplainable. It means, ostensibly, that you have constructed a possible future that was impossible. So the system recalibrates.

I once had a conversation with a chemist about Epicurus’s theory of the swerve. Swerves, he said, are unexplained moments of randomness within largely orderly systems. I remember him showing me a mathematical function, speaking quickly in his excitement. He was telling me how even the most recent research could not explain why a smooth

function like this might suddenly have a jump like that. I remember that while he gestured at the function, I was having the greatly unscientifc thought that maybe math was a kind of poetry; that maybe the function chose to jump, because it, like Pascal, was terrifed by “the eternal silence of these infnite spaces.”

I couldn’t tell you why we were talking about Epicurus, much less why I would ever be speaking to a chemist. I think we were standing under green-gray tinged scaffolding. I think there was rain, and I think it was quite humid. But I’m not sure about any of these impressions; everyone that’s lived here for a while tends to locate lost memories under a non-specifc piece of scaffolding. There’s something about this place that’s a bit loose and hazy. Things are not good at happening in specifc places— events, like people, often get lost in space.

I remember the chemist describing how contemplating the swerve was an exercise which had much to reveal about the infnite unpredictability of the world, and of us, even within the statistical likelihoods created by universal laws. I didn’t know that chemists could be so elegant in their words; I didn’t know that func tions could stutter so much in smooth motion. I guess even a mathematical function can’t resist the staccato inertia of the whole world hurtling through time. Andrew Hui has written in A Theory of the Aphorism that “it is the halting, broken fragment…that is the only viable form of expression…not so much a distillation of doctrine as an expression of the impossibility of any formal systems.” What if the universe only speaks in fragments? What have we done to ourselves, to reconstitute humanity in a formal system of constant, unending motion? I truly could not tell you what a recalibration is. But I imagine it to be a swerve, of sorts, in all my possible futures. If even the best mathematician cannot predict the swerve of a function, how could Footprint’s algorithm ever account

for the swerve of a person?

These are the reasons I was rendered immo bile when I saw Yao Pin An’s released Footprint data. 0 deviations and 0 recalibrations in the past six months meant that he had followed, exactly, his Footpath. He is innocent. He did not do anything wrong. He is a very kind person. In what kind of world is the optimal trajectory of Yao Pin An’s life one which ends with his skull crushed against the pavement? How was it decided that the structural deformation of Yao Pin An’s skull against the concrete curb was necessary for the architecture of this city? If Yao Pin An’s brutalization took place along his Footpath, how many of the previous string of murdered and assaulted Asian people had also been optimized?

I could not move for twenty-three minutes, fxed to my bed. According to my biomarkers, this was the longest time I have ever been still, even in my sleep. Me, fxed in my bed in all my abstract grief for something that had been lost since the birth of human civilization; Baozhu Chen, fxed on the screen in the heartbreak of having lost her husband.

2.

The habitable city is thereby annulled.

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Living

Master You said: When practicing the ritual, what matters most is harmony. This is what made the beauty of the way of the ancient kings; it inspired their every move, great or small.Yet they know where to stop: harmony cannot be sought for its own sake, it must always be subordinated to the ritual, otherwise it would not do. —The Analects 1.12

Whenever my mother wanted me to clean my room, she would almost always recite this one Chinese proverb:

if the old doesn’t leave, the new cannot come. It was a lesson on many things, especially on let ting go—on making room for the uncertainty of the unknown. But contained within those words is also the understanding that there must always be something lost when there is something gained. For so long, I didn’t stop to think about what might have been lost in the grand spatial-temporal mapping of human futures.

There was grief and a deep shame at my own inurement towards the obvious neces sary violence of optimization. That night, I was so ashamed that I thought I would simply die, right then. I was so shocked by my own shock at what was so exceedingly obvious that I be gan vomiting violently.

It was so easy to miss the brutality of Footprint. The way Footprint makes “you” and “I” who we are, reconstitutes us in our planned collective motions, seems so benign, disegno where control is not centralized in a person, but dispersed—collectively confgured. Each one of us is optimized for everyone else and for ourselves. We had given up the arduous task of self-transformation through the dis ciplining of our bodily comportment to they who knew how to do it better. It doesn’t matter, really, whether this way of thinking about Footprint was right or wrong. Whether the systems of Footprint disaggregated power— whether it truly was a decentralized, collectively choreographed motion towards optimum—or collected it into the spectral hands

of the invisible they; whether they were really us or not; none of this mattered because there was nothing to be done. The required subject is absent. The center, even if it exists, cannot be located or held responsible. All of us are held by the inertia of this deep structure.

The night the news of Yao Pin An aired, I walked all the way from my closet-sized apartment in Brooklyn to 3rd Ave & East 125 St, pitching through the dark in unclean motions. Imagine the desperation, the vicious anger, the grief of someone who is trapped in something unescapable, who has no choice but to subject themselves to something to which they had always and would always be subjected. I was overcome, violently, with an urge to do every thing wrong—to deviate in all of my motions as a giant fuck you to them. But I could not. Everything I do is beyond myself. There will be consequences for someone else.

I remember once reading an anthropolog ical text on the wisdom of the Apache. The anthropologist wrote: The past is a well-worn ‘path’ or ‘trail’ (‘intin)… the past has disappeared—and…must be con structed—which is to say, imagined—with the aid of historical materials, sometimes called ‘footprints’ or ‘trails’ (biké’goz’áá) that survived into the present. The Apache imagined that we would grow in wisdom by looking for footprints—directives for path-building found in the stories told by memories, places, and moments past. Footprint eliminates the need to look for footprints. No one is involved in the construction of their own paths. No one is involved in their own making.

How will you walk along this trail of wisdom? Well, you will go to many places. You must look at them closely. You must re member all of them…You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it

and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother.

I was thinking about how people go places but do not look, or remember, or learn any names; Footprint eliminates this need. I was thinking about the rhetoric of walking, how the sounds of all our motions have cohered into one sin gle harmony. I was thinking about Yao Pin An and his broken skull.

I was thinking about this when I arrived at 3rd Ave & East 125 St.

I was thinking about how the price for optimi zation was the annexation of all of our selves and all of our possible selves.

I was thinking that somehow, at this moment that is by all “objective measures” the height of human development, we are coming upon the end of the world.

3. In the transforming process of the universe, the past has just gone and the future continues to come. They continue without a moment of rest. —Chu His, Lun Yu Chi-Chu Ch. 5, comment on Analects 9:16

From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them.You can make it home this way. —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefy Gorgeous

That night, I started to write things down— and Footprint started to recalibrate at an abnormal pace.

Standing there at the corner of 3rd Ave & East 125 St, a day after Yao Pin An’s head was bashed into that spot, I thought about Baozhu Chen and Yao Pin An. I thought about my father. I remember feeling ashamed of the complete abstraction of my own sor row. Yao Pin An is in a coma. Baozhu Chen must live. And I am just… here. What was the reason for my arrival in this place?

I don’t know what I expected to see—maybe I thought that a catastrophic event would have changed the terrain of the place, just a little. But there was nothing. No yellow tape, no markings, no trace of where Yao Pin An was crash-landed into the earth. Just a nondescript street corner, the faded yellow paint peeling like tree bark from the curb, the impact of a human skull lost among decades of scrapes and weathering. A bit of grass and a lone, scrawny dandelion broke through the earth where curb met street.

Standing there, watching the dandelion waver in the thick air, I reached in my pocket and wrapped my fngers around the cheap ballpoint pen inside. I popped off the cap and drew a line on my left hand. It felt right, so I kept going. I drew the line all the way from the tip of my left index fnger to my elbow. Above the line, I wrote “R.I.P” and below the line I wrote all the names I could remember of ev eryone who has died in the past year. Yao Pin An is not on the list. If he is dead, I don’t know this. I didn’t put him on the list.

None of these motions were deviations. But the second I lifted the pen from my arm in the gesture of writing, Footprint recalibrated.

One month later, the ink from that night long gone from my arm, fnally beginning to relearn the motions of casual happiness again, I stood by a magnolia tree. I watched it blooming in the warm light of the coastal spring, and suddenly, I knew that its name was grace. I marked it down on my hand so as not to forget, using the same pen, stashed still in my jacket pocket. When I lifted my pen, Footprint recalibrated again.

Two days later, I tripped on the sidewalk and fell in a remarkably protracted and ungraceful motion. Not a deviation. I wasn’t injured. I re member seeing the gentle cracks in the pavement of the sidewalk, the thin dusting of a soft tan flm over the surface. Overcome with a

random, rather airheaded poetic force, I took my pen and marked the spot on the sidewalk with a tiny X. Here I fell. Here I once was. In this moment of small wonder, I let myself make a mark on the street, fancying myself a poet. Footprint recalibrated.

Walter Benjamin wrote that “[t]he value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A sto ry is different. It does not expend itself.”

Let me tell you my stupid little theory about the reason behind the unreasonable number of recalibrations my Footprint has undergone over the last few months. I know already, even as I am writing this down, that it is massively unscientifc and makes little to no sense. Probably during my next functionality review with a technician, it’ll turn out that there’s been a small malfunction in the hardware after all. But for now I fnally feel as if I might be able to breathe again.

So let me tell you my theory. For us who slip and slide with complete ease and certainty through our lives, knowing that at all moments our Footpath has been optimized, the art of memory has been forgotten. Tolstoy once wrote in his diary that “since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to remember it…if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all.” Memory is unnecessary when you do not need to learn; Footprint supplants learned wisdom. There is something impeding the development of memory because we are told where to go. It directs us always towards the most appropriate motion. Executing our Footpath is a fuid, unconscious motion. And sometimes the most appropriate motion somehow calculates “you” as expendable. But there is nothing to be done; there is no possible form of revolt.

There are ghosts in place of anyone or anything that could have been held responsible. There is nothing to be done. Not following the Footpath devastates not just yourself but everyone else. What can be done?

Because there is nothing to be done about anything, acting is no longer acting. This is the same as not having done it at all. Nachmanovitch, in Free Play, explains how, “by reinterpreting reality and begetting novelty, we keep from becoming rigid. Play enables us to rear range our capacities and our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways.” There could not be a moment in human history more devoid of play than now. There is nothing unforeseen, because Footprint is the ultimate panoptic operation.

New York is freezing over. It’s cold because of the steel and concrete and ecological disaster which has left almost all areas of the globe inhospitable without great artifcial climate controls. It’s cold because it isn’t a home. Here, nothing makes any place special. Everything is unmoored amid a sea of scaffolding. There is nothing special: Nothing is marked with a story or a memory, all legends having been drained from the land by the precise logic of optimization. So what of us, then, who remember nothing? You and I—we drift from place to place in the dictated motions that necessarily confgure everything that we are. Turtle shells litter this city—places that are only special because we dwell within them. We make nowhere a home. There are only places in which one can no longer believe in anything. Proper names for places “are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure.” There are no names for places. There are no places, really—just scaffolding.

But what if I left a word behind, as I move, so I could return—anchored myself, somehow, to a spot on my Footpath with poetic force?

What if by naming and remembering—writing down—I can fnd my way home?

What if both you and I could fnd our way home by making places habitable, and, in doing so, tell our own stories? What if we wrote down our own urban legends, made “a crack in the system that saturates places with signif cation”? What if the mysterious substance of a swerve is simply the telling of a story?

Stories are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris.

All vocabulary is temporary. We only ever fnd words for an instant. Then everything grows hazy again. Whenever I read poetry, or literature, or anything, I feel, for an instant at a time, that I am coming into my own speech too. It lasts for an hour. A day if I’m lucky. In those times, I can write. Then it’s gone again, and all there is left to do is live.

Nothing I used to write ever triggered a recalibration. The act of writing itself is un meaningful. Everything is an act of signifcation; language itself, the practice of writing, is unexceptional. But words can project—they can throw me back into places of meaning. So if I hide a word in a place I visit, the smoothness of the function breaks. Making poetry out of the world, making rhetoric out of my motion— that is something that disrupts something. It’s something meaningful, somehow.

Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the leg ends that used to open up space to something different.

I think I am triggering recalibrations through the simple act of giving names to places. There is a rhetoric of walking which is lost when movement doesn’t require improvisation, play, or thought. Something about Footprint charting my course through the future has taken the language out of my walk. But I am learn ing, from the stones, the fowers, the cracks in the sidewalk, to make temporary stories from debris. To become anchored, somehow, in a

way that Footprint disallows. To stutter in my motion; to swerve.

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning his tories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or plea sure of the body.

I do not know what happened to Yao Pin An. Am I allowed to swerve, when nothing has changed for anyone else? When my Foot path recalibrates, what happens to the rest of the world? Does my stuttering cause others to stagger in their footprints as well? Am I allowed to learn to swerve from my secondhand mourning for a man crushed against the New York streets? Am I allowed to let my de pression lift, when Footprint still crushes us all with its gravity?

I don’t know. I don’t know what I am allowed to have, but I’m going to let myself have this: these words.

MyMuse by Austin Clyde

My good friend, when I was about to cross the stream, the spirit and the sign that usually comes to me came — it always holds me back from something I am about to do — and I thought I heard a voice from it which forbade my going away before clearing my conscience, as if I had committed some sin against deity. Now I am a seer, not a very good one, but, as the bad writers say, good enough for my own purposes; so now I understand my error.

— Phaedrus 242b-d

If corporations, governments, and whatever other packages of institutional power reigning over us are doing this to us, then at least one of us should do it to ourselves—to tell the oth ers, right? How to know the future, I guess that’s the root of the question. If some are making the future behind a curtain so dark, so impenetrable, even if what is behind is even darker, shouldn’t one of us cast ourselves into it for the rest of us to know? And there is no better refection of what I am to them other than by treating myself as the material to plaster over a blank canvas in hope someone buys that frame, carrying me along. At least that’s what I wrote in the art grant for this project.

It started when I was in grad school, in the Ph.D. student offce. It was really nothing special. I found it quite cold, anti-social, and alienating. Pretty refective of my feelings about being there. Maybe that was the offce’s goal (which it met). The whiteness of the whole thing must have been slowly stirring my subconscious like those magnetic stir sticks that create vortexes over hotplates of reagents and reactants, smashing little molecules together, hoping some decide to change energy states (though many never did, and then the graduate student overseeing this mixing would go home to drink too much lamenting another failed experiment. But with a slight hopefulness that the intoxication to come may inspire a way to recover the experiment. If the next glass functioned the way he imagined, a way to justify the low yield of the reaction as acceptable for Scientifc Reports, or maybe some other predatory journal, would arrive to his feeting, although still supervisory, conscious. Sadly, he would soon forget these ideas he had because there would be many more glasses to come after that. Was his muse, too, a forgetful one , like mine?).

The offce had 18 desks, most along the walls, with a few facing each other in the middle, al though no actual faces faced each other. There were 30” inch black squares between any possi bility of open air to see another person’s face. If you turned to the left or right, you’d see a refection of yourself: skin, t-shirts, shorts, ponytails, bare feet, shoulders that looked latched to the screen. If the screen was slowly ratcheting those shoulders deep into it… Sometimes I wondered if the screen would just swallow that person up at any moment, as every week into the academic quarter, they would move deeper and deeper into the screen.

Watching others in the offce like this made me recall a philosophical folly (well, most

would probably still say insight at that time). The distinction between the hammer ready to strike the next nail and the hammer whose shaft had shattered. The dumbfounded being there, holding that broken hammer, which now overtook his mind—removing him from the hammering—and bringing him into a refection. Was I concerned for the other to my right being swallowed alive by the screen whose pull on her shoulders looked painful, being drawn into a deep refection about this colleague’s posture as if it was broken too?

Moments like this, where everything around becomes problematic and simultaneously present—concerning—are manifestations of something broken. At least it felt that way since those moments seemed to disallow sharing the experience with others. When concern for being with others becomes present and total, no other than I could seem to have an entrance into the ex perience—one that I know others have, but we have different words.

The offce reminded me of my own personal views of this discipline. I, too, haphazardly signed myself up for one solemn winter. Really, I hated working after undergrad. It was cool for a week—nine screens lined my desk, bells going off, trade announcements on the foor. But I nev er could answer why I had to write this code for these rich men who came to my desk every Monday with great excitement at my youth—still young, full of fre, hair, and a sense of joy? They needed to change their system design if they wanted to make money. But no, why help them? Instead, I sat quietly and wrote the best C++ code I could. It was a puzzle I enjoyed. How to be fast and poetic. But then, after a few weeks, they asked me to work on the same thing again. I quit immediately, and phoned my undergraduate research advisor, who, with a smirk on her face—one of the few happenings I will not forget—on that cold winter morning near where a New Yorker article pegged a famous philosopher’s home opera stage, said something along the lines: come do a Ph.D. with me, you have a week to apply.

In the offce that afternoon, I found the GitHub page. I had to teach; otherwise, I wouldn’t subject myself to the ensuing existential crisis that the offce, or tech company robot manufacturing facility, always brought me. I tried to work on a paper I wanted to write, and, as usual, I fgured I had nothing to say, nor could I write it well, nor could I get my citations right. Maybe I’ll go home. I turned to Google to perform a series of searches that felt automatic and addictive—the thrill of

And something caught my eye once I passed the usual ads for probably ineffective mind-altering “vitamins” that I would probably

anyways in a last-ditch hope to save myself from the unutterable

vortex of ideas I wanted to just spew out. The name of this link reminded me immediately of a class I had eight years earlier. Coming in and out of inner-thought, emptiness, and slight atten tion—like I imagine others in this boring class, my high school humanities teacher, Mr. Calligari was talking about Socrates’ daimonion. I remember thinking, ‘huh, that inner-voice which is somehow me and yet speaks to me—that’s cool someone else feels this way.’ I remember also thinking ‘what a crock-of-shit this old man Socrates was.’ My teacher didn’t say much about Socrates’ daimon besides some sentence or two which felt like it came from somewhere deeper inside of him but caught between that social flter which places many of our fondest and most intimate thoughts between apathetic I’m-smarter-than-you joke and genuine “nerdy” curiosity which his public high-school teaching job rarely afforded. He seemed to want to say more but didn’t.

The link took me to a GitHub project page. Lots of stars, recent commits, and many contribu tors—a tell-tale sign to keep reading and forward the link to your co-workers in a similar apathetic ‘here’s a link to show I’m working’ and a ‘can-we-please-talk-about this?’

readme.txt

MyMuse is an extension of your thoughts. A friend who remembers that thought you had one night over dinner. A database which can curate those citations you mentioned in that Zoom call for when you are writing a paper. MyMuse is a platform automated con sciousness. The platform consists of

• hardware embedded computers featuring microphones, ultrasound, and cameras (all available in local maker facilities),

• large language models (LLMs) which transcribe, analyze, and curate your every uttered thought or text. Talk out loud more! If it cannot hear you, it cannot help you,

• A LifeDatabase which stores your movements, locations, ac tions, and utterances/correspondences in a local database for reference using the Muse,

• An audio and visual interface, MyMuse Co-Pilot, which can re spond to questions using the latest LLMs such as “can you write a paragraph based on the thoughts I had while reading last night” or “can you prioritize what I need to do today,” or, in conjugation with our most recent development, “can we go back to last Thursday and see how Nate would have responded?” and

• AI-based models which utilize the latest stable diffusion mod els to recreate your home in VR for experiencing counterfactu al past experiences. As you walk around your home, all your thoughts are collected including metadata about your location, activities, and more. Leveraging this home-scale network of sensors, MyMuse Co-Pilot can remind you of previous thoughts you expressed to the network of microphones. It can even predict the next series of thoughts

which may be relevant to guide current thoughts towards those most relevant to your programmed goals and ambitions.

RoomSense allows one to pursue counterfactual lives. At any point, one can enter the SpaceExplorer where they can rewind their interactions with realistic virtual reality. These Coun terfactuals allow one to examine, research, and even share and network these experiences via Autonomous Agent Network (AANs). AANs are trained using a differential-privacy scheme to recreate the actions, thoughts, and motivations of users all while pro tecting their privacy. The AAN is trained using the database of your home information and therefore can recreate your actions in the SpaceExplorer if you allow another user to access this model…

## Example Use Cases

You can put that thought on MyMuse when you are writing your pa pers. Then, you can go back to my notes and say, “hey, I remember that paper you wrote about that idea last year” and you would get your paper from the database and be able to write about it. If you have a thought that you want to be public, you can also put it on MyMuse. In that case, I might see a citation to that thought later in a paper and want to cite it as a reference.

So, MyMuse is about building this database of thoughts which can be accessed through a browser to make it easier to reference other people’s thoughts, and it is also a platform where you can build your own thoughts and put them online and in the database.

## Vision

As you move your head, it will look at your facial expression and read your body language. This will inform it of changes in your intent. Thus, it will ask MyMuse to change the program and curate your next sequence of thoughts in a way that the thoughts are directly aligned with your current goals and ambitions. In essence, this will curate what you were thinking about before you decided to be engaged, to be distracted, to be interested in some things, to be interested in other things, or perhaps at other times you will choose to go blank when you consider something you are unsure of. For instance, when you are driving you would like to be thinking about how you can get to the destination faster.

But then when you are with your friends in the evening you want to be thinking about other things, and perhaps you will choose

to go blank. So there will be an interface in which you can tog gle between those two modes at any time. When you are reading the paper, you know that MyMuse thinks about what you are read ing just the way you are thinking. That means it will be able to predict what you are interested in, and when you are ready to move on to your next article, it will be so curated. Of course, MyMuse will be able to learn about your interests on an ongoing basis. This means your home could become a space for you to de velop your passions over time, and the MyMuse app may ask you to write a letter to your future self about your current thoughts on something you have learned or done, so you can move that to the next stage. You can think of this as a way for machines to learn to think better in the way you have been inspired by what you are reading (or playing), and to understand the next series of thoughts that you want to have. In time it will be able to an ticipate where you are going to go in life and what you want to do, and it will provide you a series of cues that will support that path. And as you know, today we have a long way to go be fore machines can truly understand our thoughts. We are not quite there yet. But there is a way for us to help AI machines improve their understanding of what we are thinking, and a way for us to get closer to thinking more like robots, which will be much more interesting and productive for all of us. As I mentioned earlier, this is one way the MyMuse app will help you do that. There is no need for you to wait to see the movie about the singularity. You can begin now to live in the singularity. In fact, I encourage you to do so as soon as possible.

…an AI project which could help me be more productive, remember my thoughts for once, and allow me to try to replay some of the most tragic conversations I’ve had? This was so freaking cool. I sent it to a few of my friends and biked to the local MicroCenter to buy a few Raspberry Pis, sensors and a few recorders. Luckily, I had a fre inside of me for projects. They always felt revolutionary to me and often confusing, and eccentric, to others. Why was I like this?

I had started collecting audio databases of my home already. I would store these in a database which transcribed the clips into text, timestamped them, and indexed them into text analysis tools. The base words themselves I used to fne-tune the model that was already available on the MyMuse GitHub. The model was a very large language model which, using a corpus essentially all available written text, attempted to understand what the probability of an utterance was given some context. Thus, giving it some context, one could ask what is the most likely thing to say? Of course, this initial model was from no one and everyone—it was just an aggregate of some linkages about language in the most average sense.

These questions I had about myself no longer meant an exercise in internal suspicion vis-à-vis the few weeks a good student reads of Freud. Initially, MyMuse felt like exactly what it was: a recitation of the internet with a tone that seemed closer to mine:

Setting `pad_token_id` to `eos_token_id`:0 for open-end generation.

>> I had my epiphany at some point around the time I was fnish ing my Master’s. I was in the library researching something that would beneft my research (not AI per se), and came across a sto ry about a Chinese man, who was born blind, but learned to see because of one man’s efforts. During his early life he was known to everyone but lived in a world that was more or less like ours (he could not read maps, so his family was lost in the mountains and he could not fnd them in the valley, he could not tell if it was the next day or evening, etc.). A random man who worked in a nearby town, heard of his abilities and set out to fnd him and teach him what he knew.

>> At the core of the story is the idea that everyone has a dif ferent set of capabilities, but not that we are all equal. People who are born blind, have a different set of strengths, abilities, and limitations than people with 20/20 vision. This same concept is true in the realm of artifcial intelligence.

>> I am not asking you to believe this is all true. I’m not ask ing you to believe what I am about to say is true. It’s up to you if you believe in any of it or none. What I am asking is, that if you don’t believe it, maybe you at least consider it. To think that some human may have created us all, is not completely outlandish, is it? (p=0.94)

You can see that it is just spitting out the kind of “epiphanies” I would text my friends late at night. But the content was blank. It seemed to have no intention. What is the utterance? But over the next few weeks, I started telling others about it. They were intrigued by it. A few joked about needing to get Institutional Review Board approval for my own self-data-collection. I thought maybe I did, honestly. But that would be a great scandal: my university telling me I cannot collect data on myself meanwhile megacorporation’s collected even deeper samples of my actions than I imagined I could—at that time. Although, right after speaking about it no less than a tenth time, I wondered if I was only interested in this as a last-ditch effort to rectify any sociality out of those around me. After all, the idea was a cool assortment of recent advances in large language models (foundation models for a minute in 2022). Or what was it something else? Why did this project hit so personally?

>> Because we aren’t wired to be productive. We aren’t wired to be effcient. We aren’t wired to use our time and get anything

done in a day. Some of us are wired to work and work and work. And that’s great for some people. Our family and our business and our church can’t function without me, and I’d probably be in the same boat if I were a farmer. They need me to do the work they can’t do. But in all my busyness, I was really, really not that productive. (p=0.8)

>> I’m not wired to be effcient and productive. I’m wired to have an epiphany and then not do the same work for two weeks. A lot of the things we do, we get paid for. I’m not the only one who feels this way. I see this all the time. I see people in “normal” jobs, and their body language sucks. They can’t walk into a room full of interesting, intelligent, like-minded people. They’re just doing their job, and it makes me sad. I see it at start-up events. I see it at my friend’s wedding. I see it when friends are over, and they just want a beer. I see people getting paid to do the same thing day after day, just like I do, and they can’t get shit done. That’s what’s up. (p=0.4)

>> Of course, this isn’t the whole truth. I am so, so not that different. I do the same thing day after day. I’m not as bad as I could be, and I’m glad I work hard at things I care about, but there’s a difference between “wired to” and just plain “wired”. And the difference is this: how you are wired. ( p=0.4)

Possibly so. A deconstruction of my interest through a rejection of a 21st-century Protestant ethic? Sure.

I had seen before how language models can summarize papers, generate fake news articles, or even, by way of my research at the time, generate hypotheses based on scientifc papers. Part of me hoped that it would build a new sense of self-care into the fabric of digital life. A friend, a refection, a mirror into oneself which disguised itself as a productivity tool. A tool which could be productive for the current mode of production, but with a more insidious agenda of building personally built worlds.

Some people, as I’ve come to learn, would be happy to let their world be shaped by language models. For others, their world shape doesn’t matter — only that the tools to shape it are free, and so they can use them. A world shaped by language models would not be a dystopian future for me, but a dystopian future for many others. These are the people who need a mirror, a friend, a refection. So it isn’t the language model which has to change, or who is allowed to write text. There are multiple factors which make language models more dangerous: The more they are used and trusted, the more likely it becomes that the algorithms could be used maliciously. For this reason,

an ethical responsibility lies not only with the developers and users of language models, but with the entire society at large.\n

It was about a year later. I had now collected over a year of recordings of my home behavior, voice, expressions, and thoughts. Talking out loud to the MyMuse lurking over my home felt no different than talking to myself—like when you admit to yourself something that you simultaneously knew but did not admit to yourself—a confession. Despite years of training and writing on the kinds of biases and behavior modifcations technology imposes, I somehow felt different about this model. It was no longer a model of anyone’s utterances but of mine.

The summer was full of color—greens, aqua, browns, purple, and pink. I had to say it out loud, otherwise MyMuse wouldn’t know, right? That winter I had extended the MyMuse code to index the local bird society that would frequent my feeder. Using an array of cameras, I was able to track every bird as an individual, when they would come, where they would look, and, if I was correct in my assumption that being’s behavior can be aligned in the latent space of the LLM, their thoughts. After all, we were all just blind to the bleakness of no-questions.

My birdfeeder, retroftted with a small edge computer running an AI program to track visiting bird friends, texted me that it had registered a unique pigeon on my deck. I had such a love for these fying city sweepers—mostly because of their deep sociality with each other and intellect for love and companionship. I decided to name this new friend Hank. Hank was one of my favor ite birds. He seemed to care for me in a deep, intuitive way. He would visit me on my off days, and I would even sit in a special chair where he felt comfortable, and he would land on my right shoulder, where he could look out over everything. He always had a little smile on his face, and he didn’t mind my petting his back. Hank enjoyed eating. He would perch on our bird feeder like the other birds and beg for seeds. He got his favorite birdseed, the blue one, but I wanted to make him try all the different seeds. I got him his own dish. He would sit on our back patio and eat, in full view of anyone who passed by. He seemed so happy, and I wanted everyone to know it.

That summer evening, though, I decided to try the SpaceExplorer—a way to go back and ex perience a moment in my home as it happened. As a personal note, I had a little fing with a boy who also listened to Italian music which ended not so well. Maybe it was a bit cliché in that it was more ‘I want to be you instead of me’ rather than the homoeroticism society deems acceptable. Not wanting to be oneself, for some reason, is unacceptable. The models would fll in the details based on my behavior, and using some data collected from him, fll in him. I had spent many nights musing over a failed conversation with someone I still cared for deeply.

That night, with him…it was not a bad conversation; in some ways, it was pretty good. But there was some misunderstanding that never quite resolved. We were tired of dealing with that person, but I let the conversation go. I went on the SpaceExplorer, and I saw that it knew I had been dreaming about that conversation. It was not as helpful as I’d hoped. The site said that my conversation had taken the form of the conversation in the movie ‘Her’.

But that didn’t make sense. The website did note the conversation was “based on dreams I’ve had.” I could remember details of the conversation, and what I had been doing at the time. But the SpaceExplorer was just not showing me what I wanted to see. I took a deep breath and started over. I re-created the conversation, based on as much of the circumstances as I could remember. The program now shows me a conversation that seems familiar, but still not exactly right. It is still not that useful. That is, until I decided to go back and watch the conversation in its original form. If I recall correctly, you did not actually have a chance to look at the picture. So, my suggestion is to go back and watch the conversation in \”real time\”, as if you were there. But I am not getting anything useful from it, given how I didn\’t get to review the picture.

\n

Now, I can see why he didn\’t get anything useful from browsing. I could see some of the con versation being in the wrong place. Not sure how I missed it, considering I had already seen it for myself. Now, I re-listened to the recording, using “real-time” mode. I was still not sure exactly what I was looking for. I didn\’t know what the key details were. I have now spent quite a while on this—and I still don’t know what I’m looking for. But I know what not to look for. For this user, the SpaceExplorer is not very helpful (he said). I am going to have to go back and revisit my dream. But next time, I think I will let my friend experience it, frst-hand, as it unfolds. The Space Explorer’s current form simply misses the point of what I was trying to accomplish.

\n

The problem is that you’re looking for things that are in common and not things that are different. In other words, you’re using the same set of clues that you used when you originally asked about this issue. As a result, I am basically looking at the same information the user is looking at, and comparing it to the same info you have, which may or may not exist. The Space Explorer\’s design simply doesn’t work in your context. In a different context, it might work.

\n

There are three things you could do (though only two are technically applicable here):

1) Don\’t look at the Space Explorer\’s website. Instead, sit down in front of your friend and show him the images in the same manner that you’re doing. The pictures are not the issue here. It’s the presentation and comparison that’s the problem.

2) Don\’t ask your friend. Get your friend to answer a different question, and then the Space Explorer\’s service will match the question to the appropriate answer.

3) Go back to your friend and explain the problem with what your\’re doing. Then tell him that you will need to use different techniques to solve this problem and ask him if he’s open to that approach. If he indicates that he is, then go back and use the second approach.

“I wonder what would have happened, if I hadn’t been distracted by this question, and his comment.” I’m happy to know that it has changed, and I will see what happens when I go back to it. I have to say, I am still very skeptical of its usefulness. If I only want to work with what is directly true, then it doesn’t seem very helpful. Maybe I will revisit this moment to look at the details and see if some of the things that the SpaceExplorer shows me are accurate. You can always go back — if nothing else, it’s an interesting exercise to see how wrong the interpretation can be.

Author’s note: All monospaced text was generated by GPT-NeoX. After the coda, the text weaves between the large language model’s output and my own voice based on fne-tuning and prompt-engineering with audio recordings in my home. MyMuse is under development.

Night and Day by Catherine Yeo

Tibby

zaps awake from her evening nap at seven o’clock, just like any other day.

She stretches her joints and takes eleven steps forward. On the tenth, Tibby stumbles into a chair. She pulls it out of the way. One more step, and—

Her forehead slams into a door.

Tibby takes a half-step back. Then, she carefully turns the knob and enters the kitchen.

At last, she reaches the coffee machine. Tap. Tap. Tap. A long beep. The hot liquid streams into a mug Tibby has ready in her hand. When the mug feels heavy enough, she punches the off button.

“Madam Mendoza,” Tibby calls outside her bedroom door. “Your coffee is ready. ’ve placed it on the kitchen counter.” Silence.

How odd.

Madam usually replies with a “thank you.”

On groggy Monday nights after a long day of work, Madam might grunt a hazy “thanks” in stead.Tibby has never been greeted with mere silence. But it’s not her place to question it.

Madam Mendoza always requests dinner at 7:48 p.m.: enough time for her to change out of her work clothes, shower, dry her hair, and fnish her cup of coffee, not enough time for her to linger too long on her social media, “the evil squandering away our livelihoods.”

Tonight is steak night. Tibby takes out a slab of strip steak. Is it marinated? Yes, she mari nated it last night. Good, that means no extra work for her tonight. The frying pan is on the second shelf to the right. She turns on the electric stove. Lightly drizzle olive oil onto the

Bathroom Light Love by Ellie Fithian

pan, she recalls. Roll the pan around so the oil spreads out evenly. Place the steak on the pan, wait three hundred and twenty seconds before fipping it, and repeat.

The meat touches the pan with a silent hiss.

As she waits, Tibby prepares the table. Madam Mendoza only eats steak on the round, gray plates. Tibby learned that the hard way after Madam scolded her for using a white plate once. The fork goes on the left, the knife on the right. Which knife did Madam ask for last week? Not the regular knife. Not the butter knife either. Tibby selects the sharp knife with the wooden handle. The handle needs to point toward the bottom of the table, not the side, Tibby reminds herself.

She hates disappointing Madam.

The three hundred and twenty seconds are up. Grabbing one of the metal tongs dangling from the oven handle, Tibby uses the tongs to hold onto the edges of the meat. She turns her wrist.

The steak slides out of the tongs’ grip.

She tries again. But the steak is no longer at the center of the pan. Oh dear. Tibby hasn’t been instructed on what to do in this situation.

“Madam?” Tibby asks. “Can you help me?”

Silence greets her question. Maybe Tibby should just try the same action, but at a different location—

It works. The steak fips over, and she hears the familiar sizzle.

Hot oil shoots out at her, splattering across her face.

While she waits for the other side of the steak to cook, she boils a pot of water. Eight baby carrots, a handful of spinach, and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. “Don’t overdo it,” Madam told her a few weeks ago as she watched Tibby prepare vegetables. “Just boil them or something. As long as there’s enough so my doctor doesn’t get on my case about it.” Madam Mendoza never clarifed how many

vegetables were “enough,” so Tibby simply took a guess. She has been serving her this amount every day, and Madam has never complained, so it must have been a good guess.

The steak is ready. Tibby slides the slab of beef onto the round, gray plate. Three clockwise stirs, and the vegetables are ready too. She scoops the foating vegetables and dumps them in a pile next to the steak. “Madam? I’ve placed your dinner on the table.”

Again, no response.

Tibby doesn’t know what to do. Is silence good? Is it bad? She’s never faced this response before. Maybe Madam has chosen to stay silent today. Tomorrow, Tibby will ask her about this behavior.

Her next duty is to clean Madam’s room, so Madam can return to and relax in a spotless room after dinner. Tibby taps a button on her right arm. Her shoes whirl to life. The sharp bristles of the vacuum kiss the foor in speedy circles. She makes way across the room in a snake-like pattern: forward, turn, turn, forward, repeat. Every square inch of the foor must be vacuumed at least twice.

Another tap. Rags and sponges spring out from her left arm. She dusts the bed frame, then the desk. The surface of Madam Mendoza’s desk feels empty—no laptop, no scattered post-it notes, no coffee mug. Another odd oc currence, but it does make Tibby’s job easier.

She spreads her hands on the bed, preparing to make the bed. The sheets are taut and neatly tucked under the mattress. The pillows are already fat and fuffed. If Tibby could frown right now, she would.

Perhaps Madam had wanted to try something new and had time to make her bed after her usual pre-dinner nap.

At 9 p.m., Madam Mendoza always watches the nighttime news. Tibby needs to set up the TV for her. Where is the remote? Good, it’s still in the remote control box. Tibby presses

the large round button on the top left corner, and jumbled static springs to life.

“Tonight, we bring you a more somber piece of news.A terrible string of accidents happened on Highway 88 over two hours ago. According to fre offcials and the state highway patrol, the ongoing snow storm had caused a major, nine-vehicle collision. At least two trucks and seven other vehicles were involved in a crash around 6:30 p.m....”

The house telephone rings. It shakes and dances and jitters across the coffee table.

Tibby departs to clear the dinner table. Unless she orders otherwise, Madam Mendoza prefers to pick up the phone herself. Tibby gathers the dirty plate and utensils, reaching for the sponge. She turns on the faucet.

The rings echo and fade, and the phone enters voicemail. “Kelly,” a woman wails. Her high-pitched voice sounds familiar, but Tibby needs another second to match it—oh! It is Madam’s sister. “I’m watching the news right now. I know you usually take Highway 88 back home, please tell me you’re okay. Can you please pick up the phone?”

“…Both directions on Highway 88 are closed tonight and will remain closed for all of tomorrow…”

“I—I can’t get through to your cell phone—” A sob and a hiccup.“When you hear this voice mail, please call me as soon as possible. Or tell TB-34 to send me a message if you’re too tired. Please, Kelly. Please tell me you’re okay.”

A long beep. Then, silence. Again.

Tibby tilts the plate, and water splashes everywhere. She hastily adjusts the plate’s angle. A single droplet has landed on her spray-painted eye, streaming down her face.

The clock ticks 9:15. She fnishes cleaning and turns off the faucet. Tibby walks down the stairs and into the basement.

On the foor above, the television screen illuminates the living room in a phantom blue glow. “We have received an update—we are saddened to hear that the Highway 88 accident has resulted in thirteen injuries and fve casualties…”

Tibby tucks her limbs in and squeez es into her charging cube. It’s time for her to sleep.

Just like any other day.

No More Worlds to Conquer by Aidan Scully

“For as long as our two species have known of one other’s existence, the Humans and the Sedron have viewed mutual respect and tolerance as the ultimate end of our interactions. Striving toward this highest goal, the delegates of the Human Galactic Union and the Sedron Dominion hereby en act this Treaty of interspecies cooperation, non-ag gression, and neutrality. Between our two nations is thus established a Demilitarized Zone around the Daiagalerian Systems, closed to the military advancement of either power but open to the sci entifc pursuits of both. May the peace we forge here today ever fourish between our two peoples, co-inheritors to the vast wonders of the Galaxy we share.”

- Treaty of Tet Gorala, 3631

Message from Senator Col-Torann-Calex to Caris Halen, 4 June 3664

Caris,

I hope that this message fnds you in bet ter spirits than I. I know it has been several months since we last spoke, and I do not know if you can forgive me, but I truly feel that I have nowhere else to turn.

Yesterday’s results are frightening, to say the least. To think that we had spent all that effort to rid ourselves of Annador Scofl four years ago just to see her returned to power on an even more hardline platform…I prefer not to think too deeply on it if I can help it.

Though I did retain my Senate seat in these elections, I have notifed outgoing Consular General Ennox that I will be resigning, effective immediately. While my departure will mean that the Senate will now be entirely Human, it is merely an offcial step to confrm what people like us have known for years: that

the Senate, and the Galactic Union, will never respect or protect us.

I have made arrangements to depart Earth tomorrow morning for Constantian, where I am hoping to assist you and your work as much as you will let me. I am truly sorry for all that has happened between us, and that I refused to acknowledge just how right you were all those years ago when you told me my membership in the Senate would legitimize an irredeemable institution. I wish I had under stood you sooner, but here we are.

I do not know what the future holds for me. Though I am Sedron, I will never be welcome in the Dominion…not for my caste as a Col, not for my position as a former Union senator, and not for…well, you know. It is painful, this being of two worlds. I am sure you understand better than I can.

If you can spare the space for me, please hold me in your thoughts. I am holding you in mine. Yours, Calex

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Tactical Memo provided to Ric-Baltorachin-Rann, Dagonatach of the Sedron Dominion, by Fet-Tumusevit-Par, Fet Prime of the Sedron Dominion, intercepted 18 June 3664

The skimmer Canosretan has reported nearrange military activity on the Union side of the border. Four dreadnoughts each have been deployed to the border system of Leviticus. This is the closest Union military vessels have come to crossing into the Daia galerian Demilitarized Zone since the Treaty, an escalation unlike anything we have seen since the early days of the Cold War.

Preliminary scans have been largely inconclusive, but have confrmed the presence of Class Zero antimatter weapons on the ships. These weapons, if used, would violate international law, but we have no reason to believe that this would deter them.

I recommend the relocation of planetary defense cruisers to the Lavrocan system in preparation for a worst-case scenario invasion of the border worlds.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Consular General Annador Scofl’s Inaugural Address to the Galactic Senate, 1 July 3664

My friends, I wish I returned to this offce today under more pleasant circumstances. But just as we are called to love our nation, we are called to acknowledge when it is under attack and defend it by any means necessary.

We have long known that the Sedron Dominion poses an existential threat to the sur vival and safety of our Union. From the frst moment we discovered them, it has seemed that war was inevitable. Their empire could not tolerate our existence, our bold assertion that no being must live in subjugation, and thus it has sought to wipe us out from the very beginning.

They had hidden their intentions before. But just last week, military cruisers were sta tioned at the border system of Lavrocan, an unprompted escalation which cannot be tolerated.

It is clear that the Sedron Dominion can no longer be expected to respect international law. The agreements which protect our Human worlds at the edge of civilization have been torn to shreds by Dagonatach Baltorachin and his cronies. That is why, as my frst new act as Consular General, I am offcially calling upon you, members of the Galactic Senate, to formally repeal your recognition of the Demilitarized Zone between our two nations. Only

military outposts between our borders can ensure our mutual security.

I trust that this body will do the right thing. The very existence of our culture is in the balance.

= = = = = = = = =

Domain Warp by Chris Barber

Audio Transmission between the Sedron outpost Senn on Daiagalerian B and the Union cruiser HSC Augustin Rhodes, 10 July 3664

Senn: This is the outpost Senn calling the military vessel in high planetary orbit around Daiagalerian B. You are in violation of the Treaty of Tet Gorala. Leave the Demilitarized Zone immediately.

HSC: Good morning, Senn! This is Inquisitor N-076-01 of the Human Stellar Cruiser Augustin Rhodes. We no longer recognize the Demilitarized Zone. You are hereby ordered to stand down and retreat with whatever staff you have to Dominion space.

Senn: Warship Augustin Rhodes, this is a peaceful outpost protected under the Trea ty of Tet Gorala Section Four. We have no weaponry. Any attempt to seize this outpost will be taken as an act of war by the Sedron

Dominion and a violation of international law.

HSC: Now, Senn outpost, why would you willingly offer up that you have no weapons?

Senn: Because we have upheld our end of the treaty, warship. This is a peaceful endeavor protected under international law. No aggression directed against this base will be tol erated.

HSC: What’s your name, outpost commander?

Senn: That is irrelevant.

HSC: We’re all friends here, just tell me your goddamned name.

Senn: I am Commandant Fet-Tomersagun-Tox, warship.

HSC: Now listen here, Commandant Tomersagun. We have reason to believe that the Sedron Dominion is harboring heavy antimatter weaponry at that outpost of yours, and we’ve come to dispel that rumor. You are going to vacate the system with your staff, and we are going to search the base. If we fnd any weapons, we will take the base by force. Any objection to this course of action will be taken as an admission of guilt and therefore an act of war. Is that clear?

Senn: [inaudible]

HSC: Speak up, Commandant Tomersagun.

Senn: I said “fuck off, Human trash.”

HSC: Noted. Lieutenant Younger, ready the orbital cannon. Prepare to fre on my mark.

= = = = = =

Emergency Public Address by Dagonatach Ric-Baltorachin-Rann, 11 July 3664

Fellow citizens of the Sedron Dominion, I come before you today with alarming new developments from the Demilitarized Zone. In blatant violation of the Treaty of Tet Gorala, a Human warship has seized a Dominion outpost in the Daiagalerian B system. Their ac tions have rendered the treaty null and void, and we must prepare as a nation for the possibility of all-out war between our two powers.

Yet I have faith in the Sedron people. For centuries, we have defended the integrity of our supreme castes of the Ric and Fet from Col radicals who would seek to undermine our way of life. We have defended the integrity of the Sedron species from nDro and Fleroi revolutionaries bent on usurping our power. And we will continue to defend the harmony that we have built from these Humans.

To those watching in the Galactic Union, your unprovoked assaults on our people will not go unpunished. If you seek war with the Sedron Dominion, we will fght until the last. And the Sedron Dominion does not tend to lose.

Good evening, my fellow citizens, and long live the Ric.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Strategic Scouting Report from the HSC Orono Bergeron on the Delqertio Exclusion Zone, 15 July 3664

To Central Command:

After our brief confrontation with Sedron forces at Alconost, the deployment has arrived at the Delqertio Exclusion Zone. To our sur prise, the Sedron appear to have been telling the truth about the Zone; preliminary scans have indicated no Dominion ships in orbit.

We have thus far not been able to determine much about the species known to the Sedron as the Delqertion, who have built a sprawling civilization on the surface. Technological readings indicate scientifc development akin to twentieth century Earth.

We have, however, been able to determine one thing for certain. We have amplifed our communications arrays to receive radio transmissions from the surface, and most broadcasts have included at least cursory reference to a group known as the “Aio.” We have yet to be able to determine whether this term refers to a group of the Delqertion or a subspecies occupying the planet alongside them.

After consulting with the senior staff, we have reason to believe that if the Delqertion had the requisite technology, they would attempt to wipe out the Aio completely. Such requisite technology could include the heavy antimatter weaponry we have onboard our vessels.

Inquisitor N-052-01 is en route to our location now. Awaiting further orders.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Message from Col-Torann-Calex to Caris Halen, 17 July 3664 Caris,

I hope your trip has been going as smoothly as it can. Your departure, while understandable, was abrupt. It seems no one is safe in Scofl’s Galactic Union. I have been trying to remember what my last words to you were all morning, but whatever they may have been I fear that they have not made much of an impact.

The Inquisitor has remained in our offce since you fed. I had assumed that we would have all been arrested by now, but they are toying with us instead.They just wander silent ly through our building. At least with the fed eral police you can see their faces, but the Inquisitor hides everything, whatever emotions they may have, behind the mask. It is haunting. Though I suppose that is the point.

The only time they have spoken was to ask about you. What we know about you. What we think about you. We are all on edge.

I worry about you, Caris. I worry what will become of you if the Dominion decides you are no longer valuable. And I worry about all the people here, Sengrand and Elisiu and the others. In lighter moments, we joke that you held out the longest, but we all had to end up on the wrong side of the border eventually. In darker ones, we mourn. And hope.

I don’t know when it will be safe for your return. Inquisitors don’t go after just anyone.

Yours, Calex

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Audio Recording from Nova City Executive Tower, recorded 19 July 3664

Annador Scofl: Well, Inquisitor Berin?

Ellot Berin: Still nothing.

AS: Why hasn’t he responded? No ships, no statement, nothing?

EB: Perhaps he wants us to think it’s inconsequential. Convince us we haven’t actually achieved anything important.

AS: And pass up an opportunity to rail against our aggressive expansionism? EB: He has other opportunities.

AS: Balto is many things, Inquisitor Berin. Picky is not one of them.

EB: Excellent point.

AS: Any word from your people?

EB: Four Inquisitors have now arrived at the system. N-052-01 is the most senior, so they have been relaying their developments to my offce.

AS: And you crunched the numbers?

EB: Analytics believes the weaponry on those four vessels alone would be more than enough frepower to end a confict within the week.Technological readings suggest they have nothing even close to being capable of countering it.

AS: And a report from the folks at Domes tic Security suggested that this species, the Del-somethings—

EB: Delqertion.

AS: —would be a useful military ally. Strong command structure, intense cultural weight on loyalty and duty and that bullshit.

EB: Correct.

AS: So are we moving forward?

EB: There’s a minor complication.

AS: Out with it.

EB: N-052-01 has confrmed that the Aio the Delqertion radio stations speak of are not a

subspecies. They’re a race of the Delqertion themselves.

AS: So you’re saying that if we give weapons to the Delqertion military, they’ll use them on their own species.

EB: Conservative estimates suggest at least 6% of the population would be wiped out. AS: What do you think?

EB: Professionally, I believe we must consider all options with respect to how deliberate our impact will be.

AS: What about personally?

EB: Well, Consular General, in my line of work, people get caught in the crossfre. It happens. In war, there’s always collateral damage. But that doesn’t mean you just surrender. And it doesn’t mean you let your enemy get the upper hand while you sit around debating morals.

[silence]

AS: Give the order. The Inquisitors will make frst contact.

EB: Understood, Consular General. This is the right call.

[inaudible]

Personal Log Entry - Inquisitor Commando NC-014-04, 23 July 3664

The death toll hit three million today.

I was assigned to the weapons deployment, me and four other commandos with a fullfedged Inquisitor from one of the other ships. It was the ffth deployment, but it was apparently the frst weapons we were delivering to this region of the planet. Only one of the com mandos had been to the surface before. The rest of us were new.

The creature we handed the guns off to was a mass of a being. Not much taller than us but about twice as wide, all muscle. Skin like thick gray leather, hands scaly to the touch, and a mouth that looked almost reptilian. But the thing that stuck with me the most were its

eyes. Those eyes. I could see the fre burning inside them, the rage boiling just beneath the surface. That rage never left them. But once it felt the weapon in its hands, there was something else there…something I can only describe as glee. And for that moment, handing this creature a weapon, I felt more powerful than I had ever felt before.

Most of the guns came down in shipment boxes, but that one I gave to the creature personally. I wonder how many of them it’s killed so far, how many lives it has left to take. I won der if the barrel is staring down an Aio as I write this out…

The creature called itself Galixo. It asked me what my name was and I gave him my designa tion, but it asked again. I said I didn’t have one. It laughed at me. I tried my best to remember once I came back to the ship, but nothing. Only NC-014-04.

I must have it written down somewhere. = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Tactical Memo provided to Ric-Baltorachin-Rann, Dagonatach of the Sedron Dominion, by Fet-Tumusevit-Par, Fet Prime of the Sedron Dominion, intercepted 25 July 3664

The news from the Delqertio Exclusion Zone has been largely the same. Casualty counts among the Aio have been growing exponen tially, and estimates suggest that they will no longer meaningfully exist within six rotations.

As expected, the Ciladi and Kitilik ambassadors have privately expressed their revulsion at the confict, and have agreed to support our military development and advancement however we see ft. These ambassadors have requested an audience with Your Eminent Supremacy, which executive staff are currently arranging. For the purposes of these conver sations, we had no advance knowledge of the Union’s intent.

We also have reason to believe that Human

agitator Caris Halen has received unoffcial asylum in the Ri Sagakh autonomous region after feeing Union police in the border system of Constantian. I would advise offering them offcial asylum as a demonstration of good will with Human defectors. Making it clear that Halen is under our jurisdiction may make them a useful bargaining chip in potential negotiations.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Consular General Annador Scofl’s Speech from the Leviticus Rally, 28 July 3664

It’s good to be back in Leviticus! A century ago, you saved our Union from total collapse at the hands of the Sedron, and now, you will see us off into a bold new future for mankind.

My friends, the universe that we once knew no longer exists. The universe where we lived in perfect harmony alongside our galactic neighbors is once again a myth. We have done our best to coexist with them, but the Sedron know nothing of peace. Whether we extend the olive branch or the sword, they will try to wipe us out, so we must fght back and we must fght to the last.

In one week, Human soldiers have liberat ed the Demilitarized Zone from heavy Sedron weaponry and have liberated eight border systems from Dominion tyranny. Now, with our new allies the Delqertion, we will strike into the heart of Sedron space and ensure that no being ever has to subject themselves to their oppression again.

Our people used to call space “the fnal frontier.” They looked up at the stars, and though they would never live among them, they claimed them as their own. The cosmos are still ours to explore and win, my friends, and no alien will stand in our way. Humans were destined to be the masters of the universe, and so the masters of the universe we shall be! Never again cowering in fear from the Sedron! Never again setting boundaries and borders

we refuse to go beyond! Never again questioning whose right reigns supreme over the galaxy!

Long live Humanity, ever may it fourish! Long live our civilization and the light it brings to even the darkest corners of alien space! Long live Leviticus, long live Earth, and long live the Galactic Union!

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Message from Col-Torann-Calex to Caris Halen, 31 July 3664

Caris,

I assume by now you have heard the news.

I am told that the Inquisitor will return for me any moment now. I charted it out, and it appears that both our transports will be tak ing the Hyperway Delta…to think that we will probably pass one another is more than I wish to bear.

I am taking some solace in the fact that our countries care enough about us to cooperate on our extradition. It means our work has had an impact.

It is not much, but it is something.

In the hours since being detained, I have had an abundance of time in which to refect. To refect on what we have done together, on what I could have done, on what we are to do now. I have confdence that the others will be able to continue our fght, but I do not know what that means for us. Part of me fears what the Ric will do with me when I return. Part of me wants them to do it quickly. The coming war…I do not think I could live knowing what our nations are doing to one another. And to all the people caught in the crossfre.

You humans used to have a saying about Alexander: that when he reached India, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. But Humanity will always fnd new worlds to conquer, lands to claim for itself and exploit. You slaughtered one another, industrialized the air and sea.

Destroyed ecosystems, destroyed civilizations like they were nothing, always thinking that it was moving you closer to progress. And you were terrifed of losing that control, losing the power you had fought for and won over your domain, so you fought back harder and beat down anyone who stood in your way. And when you looked to the stars and claimed them for your own, you feared that someone, something out there might take that control away from you.

But the only thing you needed to fear out there in the galaxy was fnding someone else like you.

That is who you Humans are, and it is who we Sedron are. I do not believe the galaxy is big enough for the both of us, nor will it ever be . We both believe the universe is ours to conquer and rule, and neither species could ever live knowing that someone else had named their stars.

No matter how much we claim we are foreign or “alien” to one another, we know who we are. We are the same. So we lash out against one another, try to assert that our understanding of the universe is better than the other’s. And people like us who do not ft neatly into their defnitions of nationality…or gender…or love…suffer because of it.

I think this will be the last message I will be able to send you. I am truly sorry, Caris. It really is painful, this being of two worlds. I regret every day that I did not listen sooner, that I did not recognize our two nations for what they were, and that I will not be able to see our two species live together in peace. But my greatest regret is that I will never see that world we dreamed of, with the cabin deep in the wilderness of Juturna and orchard out back.

Whenever I go, my thoughts will be of you. All my love, yours forevermore, Calex

Black Hole by Chris Barber

Anxious by Chris Barber

What’s In a Name by Arjun Nageswaran

It had been just like any other day. The boy woke up at 7 AM and bicycled his way across town, going over the bridge over the river so that he could reach the east side and visit his grandmother. This visit had become rou tine ever since the passing of his grandfather, and besides, the boy quite enjoyed the visits. There was just something about the stories his grandmother told, of a time which seemed just close enough to reality that he couldn’t dismiss his grandmother’s stories as fction, but also just off by enough that it seemed completely foreign to him. He preferred to view them as legends, surely exaggerations where the truth was stretched because of his grandmother’s old age, but with kernels of reality hidden somewhere inside.

On this particular day, however, his mind could not grasp what the story was about at all. Peddling back home, his mind somehow feeling both numbed and pierced at the same time as he struggled to put together what his grandmother had said, the boy was sure that he had discovered a secret that was so indeci pherable that it must have been true.

”There was a time, grandson, when I wouldn’t have called you grandson.When your parents wouldn’t have called you son. When your teacher wouldn’t have called you student. When the other kids you play with wouldn’t have called you friend.”

“What do you mean, grandmother?” the boy asked, washing the plates he and his grand mother had just eaten their afternoon meal off of.

His grandmother’s eyes were on him, but it was clear that she was staring some place much farther away. “There was a time when this river wasn’t just the river. When this town wasn’t just the town. When this country wasn’t just the country.”

The boy had become accustomed to his grandmother’s strange cryptic way of speaking, so different from all the other adults in his life, but even then this seemed like just a whole lot of meaninglessness.

“What do you mean, grandmother?”

His grandmother seemed to snap back into focus, her momentary visit to the past broken. She slowly shook her head, with little drops of tears starting to pool around her eyes, washing off some of the white paint she had applied and exposing just a little bit of her dark skin underneath.

“I can’t, I’m sorry. Names are to be forgotten, and so they shall be.”

Many years had passed, and so had the boy’s grandmother; he found himself in literature class in high school, no longer the boy but in stead as the teen. It was just like any other day. In their literature class, they had been reading the pre-wartime play of two star-crossed lovers, a tragic warning tale of what happens when teens disregard the rules they are meant to follow.

“Would the student in row 3, seat 2 read the lines of the female lover? Student in row 5, seat 1, you can take on the lines of the male lover.”

The teen felt a little blush of embarrassment, having been assigned the role of the female character, but he resolved to continue on regardless..

”O beloved, beloved, wherefore art thou be loved?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be an enemy.”

Waiting for his classmate to fnish their lines, the teen continued on.

“’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Thou art thyself, though not an enemy.

What’s enemy? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face. O, be some other name

Belonging to a man. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet. So beloved would, were he not beloved called, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. beloved, doff thy name, And, for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.”

The teen was struck by a slight bit of confu sion sparked by this passage. By now, he knew more than the confused, silly boy he once was and had learned what a name was. It was simply just an archaic term that only meant “word.”

But that defnition did not seem to work in this passage.

After class, he hung around in order to ask the literature teacher a question about the passage.

“This might be a silly question, but what does the female lover mean when she says, ‘tis but thy name that is my enemy’? Why does she ask him to doff his name?”

A brief pause, and then one more attempt. “Actually, can you just explain this whole passage to me?”

The teacher hesitated, and the teen saw a familiar look fash across her face; a look of un ease, but also nostalgia and regret. It was the same look he had seen on his grandmother’s face all those years ago. There was just something about names that seemed to catch the adults off-guard.

The teacher regained her composure. “No, it’s not a silly question at all. The female lover is just saying that the male lover should not have ignored his parents’ orders, and had they followed the rules, maybe they could be to gether.”

This clearly wasn’t what the passage was about and the teacher really should have tried harder

to at least attempt a believable lie, but the teen, noticing how clearly uncomfortable the teacher was, decided not to press further. He thanked her for her help and biked home, the passage repeating in his mind.

The teen had never really seen this guarded reaction from the adults in his life before. They were always so sure of what they had to say, so perfect in their delivery of language. Indeed, the adolescent had spent his life trying to master the art of always knowing what to say and when to say it, and had distinguished himself from his peers in diction tests at school. So how could his teacher now suddenly waver? His grandmother, sure, was old and always stuck in her distant memories. His teacher, though?

Once he had gotten home, the teen decided enough was enough. This was no longer any other day. This time he would fnally seek real answers, real reasons as to why this “names” subject was such a touchy topic that all the adults wanted to avoid discussing.

“Mother, father. What name belongs to you?”

His mother’s face turned ash, perhaps so pale that she didn’t even need to have applied paint that morning, while his father fdgeted nervously.

“Son, where did you hear this?”

The teen could sense that something was clearly wrong, but he couldn’t backtrack now, no, not after he had set his mind to discovering the truth. He knew that adherence to authority was one of the most important parts of living in the town, the one thing that made sure things did not crumble during wartime, and ordinarily this reaction would have told him to drop the topic. However, this was no longer any other day.

“What name belongs to you?”

“Where did you hear this?”

So on went the exchange, with neither father nor son relenting, each guarding their

Paper Town by Chris Barber

information as if to spill the secret were to leave them vulnerable to some unspeakable danger. The teen himself did not understand why he was so wary about revealing the passage from his literature class, but he was, and so remaining guarded was the only thing to do.

“I need to know. Please.”

Finally, his father caved in, clearly realizing that the teen would not give in so easily, and perhaps relieved even that the burden of having to keep the secret was being lifted.

“Son, do you know how we live in the town?”

The teen nodded his head, not sure where this was going.

“Imagine now that this town and this country weren’t the only ones. That there were other towns and other countries with differ ent people from us.”

“You mean like aliens?”

The father furrowed his brow and frowned. “No, not quite. People like us, but also not like us. People whose faces aren’t painted white, but instead just expose their bare skin underneath, skins of all different colors. People who don’t talk in the language like us, but in stead some strange other language which we couldn’t even begin to understand. People who worship not the deity, but some other deity or even no deity.”

The forceful tone from the father made it clear that he was not joking at all, but it was hard for the teen to take this seriously at all.This was more far-fetched than his grandmother’s stories. An alien group of people who did not observe the same customs as the town, but yet were somehow still humans? Surely, if such a strange group were to exist, the teen would have encountered them already.

“Once upon a time, this was the world.There were many countries with many towns with many people in them. No painted skin, no effort to standardize. People usually grouped together with those who were similar to them,

but every now and then, some ventured off to be in a land with different people. Your an cestors were some of those people, coming from a land of brown-skinned people who did not paint their face to live with white-skinned people who did not paint their faces either.”

The mother noticed her son’s puzzled ex pression.

“You’ve taken art classes, right? What happens if, on a canvas that should be blue, someone spills a drop of orange? Then adds a drop of red? Then dumps an entire bucket of pink? The canvas would be destroyed, right? It is no longer the canvas it once was, now it’s just a swimming pool of chaos.”

The father nodded gratefully at his wife for chiming in. “This is what the world was. People kept trying to be different from each other, and that is no way for a society to run. There was violence, particularly between dominant cultures with shared characteristics and sub altern cultures with different characteristics. No one could understand or relate to each other. The violence could never end either, as each country was simply equally powerful and equally constrained by the fear of the other countries potentially wiping them out.”

“Finally, it took the courage of our government using their own technology to start the war that would end all wars. Sure, some per ished, but in the end, we had taken control.We could start over, but this time everyone would be on the same page, speaking the same language, wearing the same paint, and united as citizens of one town.”

Stories from the teen’s grandmother came swirling into his mind. He remembered her talking about her parents and how, as a child, she had eaten foods that she couldn’t even describe to the teen because they simply did not exist in the world today. How she had celebrated more than just the seasonal holidays, but special extra days of personal signifcance

to her family. How at one point — ah, what was the point of going through each story, his grandmother had been telling the truth all the time.

As a boy, the teen had viewed these tales with an almost mythical quality, like the story of the president who chopped a fruit tree and could not lie, but it all started to come together that there was indeed another world just as his father had described. What he could not wrap his mind around, though, was that this difference could somehow have been so dan gerous as his father worried. And his question was still unanswered.

“What is a name?”

His mother picked up where her husband had left off.

“Names were the most evil of all the differences. There was no practical purpose for them after the confict as our government could identify citizens biologically if need be anyway. They simply served as reminders of the inherent differences between each person and a group of people. Even after citizens began speaking the same language and paint ing their faces white, their names would point out who they had been and what their former selves were. It is impossible to enforce unity when the name would out those as others.”

Her husband nodded. “It is a much better system that we have now. Each person only exists in relation to others and our society. No one is superior or inferior. We never have to worry about losing our culture to an invading minority or being oppressed by an existing majority. “

“Really, we should not have told you all this. It would have been best if you grew up free from all this nonsense, so that this generation could fnally bring the united culture that the town has been striving for. Say, where did you hear all this about names again?”

The teen, unsure of his father’s intentions, yet

a little proud that he was special now amongst the kids, that his parents trusted him in a way none of the other students’ parents trusted them, mumbled something about his literature class and the play they were reading.

His father raised an eyebrow and put two fngers to his head, muttering something about an incomplete translation. After sending the message, he took his fngers off and offered a hug and a warm, welcoming smile to his son as if the previous tense conversation had never happened. It was just like any other day. The teen relaxed, and any worries or questions he may have had seemed to vanish.

“Excellent. Now are you ready for your evening meal?”

Future is Grayscaled by Olivia Foster Rhoades

To Understand by Aarya A. Kaushik

And I thought How am I supposed to keep on? because you don’t just experience something like this and continue to be — the shadows hiding from the piano told me I would never hear that g minor 11 again, not in the same way. (why me, why you? why that chord? why today?)

Teachers will keep on teaching and I will keep on loving, fowers will yearn for the sun and the old moon will keep dragging us after him, though I worry about his fatigue. But only the ravens will unabashedly scream; only they will have the courage to remind us (shameful hoarders of memory) of the anguish that will inexorably keep on in our hearts.

Cycle of Dreams by Cole French

When I grow up I want a tree

To stick in my backyard, To show the possibilities If you simply work hard.

I want to make the road a glade, A grassy, green haven.

I want to breathe as my tree trades Water for oxygen.

When I grow up I want my dad

To stop working so hard. I want him here in blankets clad By my tree in the yard.

I want to have water to spare, Not having to ration.

I want a world that’s full of air, A breathable nation.

I won’t go up north ice mining— Won’t work my body thin.

I won’t be stuck up there trading Water for oxygen.

1 & 2: North Carolina by Karl Dudman 3: Sky by Amanda Duckworth

Hilton Simmet

Humans”

Hilton Simmet with artwork by Florence & Magnolia Rea