I’m going to introduce you to a new writer in a moment, one who is unlike any new writer I’ve encountered in my forty-some years in science fiction.

But first, what is a new writer?

You may not realize that new writers can remain “new” for years and years. The clock starts when someone who has been messing around with sentences and scenes in their spare time decides that what they’re looking at on their screen is pretty good, and that other people might want to read their work. They have decided that they are writers, although often as not they are reticent to proclaim this. But they work on their craft until they believe they’re ready for the next step: submitting their work for publication.

New writers in this phase of their development are sometimes called aspiring writers. Many of them never get the validation they need to persevere through the agonizing slog to the promised land of the first sale, but enough do. After an acceptance or two, the world (or at least a few editors and some readers), will begin to recognize that a new writer has arrived on the scene. The more the new writer publishes, the more folks notice. But it is often the case that, while early sales may portend mastery, they do not necessarily reflect it. We naturally cut the fledgling writer some slack. We say things like, “He’s pretty good—for a new writer.” In my own case, for example, I published maybe nine or ten stories in professional markets before I hit my stride. I am not ashamed to admit that I served my apprenticeship in print during my new writer years.

In 1993, a Swedish psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson published a paper with the long-winded title “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” This helped launch what has come to be called “the science of expertise.” Ericsson questioned the notion of heritable talent, as in, “She’s a born violinist” or “He was born with a painter’s eye.” Instead, he and others have proposed a different theory of mastery, which is supported by studies across disciplines as various as chess and basketball, business and the arts. The way you get really good at something is a) to practice b) with feedback c) over time. It’s a three-legged stool: just practicing isn’t enough. Somehow you have to learn what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. And you have to keep at it for a long time. Popularizers of deliberative practice have come up with a number: 10,000 hours. According to this timetable, if you practiced deliberatively—with proper feedback—for three hours a day, it would take you some nine years to achieve mastery. My own extensive research into this (gossiping with writer pals) largely confirms the basics of deliberative practice theory.

Which brings us to the curious case of Rich Larson. His website tells us that Rich was born in Galmi, Niger, to an American father and a Canadian mother. He has since lived in Grande Prairie, Alberta, studied in both Edmonton and in Providence, Rhode Island, and worked in a small Spanish town outside Seville. He currently writes from Ottawa, Canada.

He is twenty-five years old.

The first time I remember meeting Rich was when he was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta. This would have been at the International Conference on the Fantastic in Orlando, Florida in March of 2014, when he won the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Actually, I may have met him in 2013, when he was second runner up for the award. I’ll admit I’m a little hazy about this; I meet a lot of new and aspiring writers. My memory of our meeting in Orlando was that Rich was a quiet and unassuming young man, but a confident one. I had the sense that he was checking out the conference—and our little corner of literature—so he could get the lay of the land. We met again unexpectedly three months later, when I was enlisted at the last moment to fill in for an ailing colleague at the Clarion West Writers Workshop. I was recruited on a Wednesday and arrived in Seattle on a Saturday. Rich was a student at the workshop and I’m still embarrassed that I didn’t recognize him on that jetlagged first day. The face was familiar but…. Like I said, I meet a lot of new writers. It wasn’t until a day or two into my week of teaching that I realized who he was. But I do have a vivid memory of the one-on-one conference I had with him toward the end of my time at Clarion. We brainstormed a problem story and talked about his plans after the workshop. Once again, I was impressed by his confidence and sense of purpose. And his writing was wonderful, mature beyond his years. So I invited him to stay in touch and consider me a resource as he pursued his career. And so here we are, three years later.

But I could never have imagined back then what Rich would go on to accomplish in those three years, and I have a pretty good imagination. If you look him up in the invaluable Internet Science Fiction Database, you will discover that he has published fifty-four stories since 2014. For some writers, that’s an entire career! And he has impressed pretty much all editors he has ever sent stories to. In this collection alone, you’ll find stories from Asimov’s, Interzone, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Lightspeed, Apex, Abyss and Apex, Analog, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and the anthologies Clockwork Phoenix 5 and Futuredaze.

Being this prolific is an achievement in and of itself, but it’s not without precedent in science fiction. Back in the pulp days of the 1930s and 40s, there were writers who could sell their stories almost as fast as they could type them. But were those stories any good? More important to you, are these stories any good? I happen to think they’re very good indeed, but you don’t have to take only my word for it. Consider that stories from Tomorrow Factory have appeared in eight different Best of the Year anthologies and that one of them, “All That Robot Shit,” was voted by the readers of Asimov’s as the best short story of 2016.

So when I say that Rich Larson is unlike any new writer I’ve encountered in my career, I am talking about the quantity and quality of his writing. What Rich has accomplished since 2014 is comparable to the amazing early careers of celebrated writers like Lucius Shepard, or Connie Willis, or Samuel R. Delaney.

Except for one thing. Rich is twenty-five years old, and all of those greats began their careers later, sometimes much later, in life. When did Rich start his deliberative practice? How did he cram his 10,000 hours in? Dr. Ericsson, I think we have an outlier here!

You hold in your hands the first collection of a new writer. But this is not just any first collection and, new as this writer is, he has already established himself with readers and critics and me as one of our best. The proof is on the next page. So settle in and get comfortable, because even though our journey with Rich Larson has just begun, it has a long, long way to go.

“We made you, you know.”

Carver Seven listens intently. Lately the Man, who also self-designates as Mikhail and Only Human Being On This Fucking Island, has not spoken often. Instead it stares off across the sea in silence, or makes its snuffling animal sounds while excess lubricant from pivoting photoreceptors leaks down the front of its head and spatters the sand. The Man once referred to this process as crying like a little bitch.

At the moment, Carver Seven and the Man are crafting spears in the shade of a storm-bent palm. Carver Seven prefers the sunshine, where his slick, black carbon skin thrums under the life-giving gaze of Watcher-in-the-sky. He tolerates the shade for the Man’s sake.

“How made me you I know?” Carver Seven asks, using choppy bursts from his audio port to approximate the Man’s wet language. It is far more nuanced than the chattering of the long-limbed climbers in the wood, but also far, far from the streaming clicks and squeals of true speech.

“You’re like a damn chatbot, aren’t you?” the Man says. “Except you can’t link me any porn.”

“How made me you I know?” Carver Seven repeats. He has learned to ignore extraneous input, differentiating when the Man speaks to itself from when it speaks to him. Carver Seven works the end of the spear to a sharp point on the bladed edge of his manipulator.

“In some lab, somewhere. Maybe they knew the world was all going to hell. Wanted to leave something behind to keep going after we’re gone.”

Carver Seven sticks the finished spear into the pale gray sand. “In some lab, somewhere, how made me you metal…” Carver Seven taps both manipulators against himself, then indicates the Man’s flaky red skin, “… from meat?”

“They didn’t use meat. They used alloys, and silicon, and, you know, all that robot shit.”

Considering the blasphemous idea is an odd thrill. The Man is very wise, in some ways, able to predict movements in the currents around the island and predict weather from the clouds. It claims to have come from a floating metal village that sank into the sea. If the Man could make a metal village, maybe it could make other metal things, too.

Or repair them.

Carver Seven compares his gleaming black form—nimble treadfeet and deft manipulators and prehensile photoreceptors—to the labored collection of blood and meat and bone sitting beside him. The Man has come close to involuntary shutdown three times since it washed up on the island, whether by the elements or the animals.

There is a dim physical resemblance, but, if anything, the Man is a fragile facsimile. It seems improbable, along with blasphemous, that the Man could have created him, or even that the Man could repair a particular Carrier’s caved-in head. His hope fades slightly.

“No,” Carver Seven says.

“Then where did you come from, smart guy?” the Man asks.

Carver Seven moves from the shade and points one manipulator to Watcher-in-the-sky’s burning photoreceptor, hanging high above the cobalt sea.

“Then where did I come from the sky, smart guy,” Carver Seven says. “Look at me now.” He pries open his head so the Man can see the lifelight burning steadily inside of him, see his thoughts sparking and colliding. “Piece of Watcher-in-the-sky to each baby one of Watcher-in-the-sky,” he explains.

“Sun-worship,” the Man says. “How original.” The Man returns to its spear, stripping it with the sharp metal digit Carver Seven has also seen it use to gouge symbols, over and over again, into the peeling bark of the palms. “Guess it makes sense. You’re solar-powered. You need light to function.”

“Yeah,” Carver Seven says, beginning a new spear. “But some are learn a new way.”

“Good for you,” the Man says, staring back across the sea.

“If you’re having eye problems, you should go see him,” Durden said, stripping down. His brow was knitted. Eris put her hand where his muscle sliced lean to hip bone. His brow unknit. He grinned white and made his stomach taut.

“It might not happen again,” Eris said. She raised her arms and Durden tugged her shirt up and away. He stowed it in the locker and fed it a token.

Eris looked at her naked reflection a moment longer, then they stepped into the baths. Steam sucked towards her lips. The floor was stark white, prickling with rubber traction pad. The walls were wet marble. Bronze bodies appeared in slices through the fog, sculpted backs and sylph limbs. Relaxed voices mingled. Flesh slapped on flesh.

“Still,” Durden said, when they were entwined under a hot jet.

“Still what?” Eris asked, watching the tracery on the wall.

“Getting resynched would be safest.” Durden scrubbed under his arm. “How, ah, how did it happen? Exactly? You said things jumped.”

“Yes. They jumped.”

Eris thought of how to explain it. She’d been walking Addy to the school, crossing the bridge. Then something split the top of her head open. She’d stumbled against the railing but the vines turned to metal under her hands, and when she looked down the bright clear canal had no water, only brackish sludge, and something pale and red-spotted was lying in the mud.

“And then right back to normal?”

“I don’t want Addy to know,” Eris said, hooking her chin over his shoulder. “She’s worried about getting her imps. This would just make it worse.”

Durden said something to that, but Eris didn’t hear. It was happening again.

The steam vanished, whisked by some invisible hand, and the floor turned slimy cold under her feet. Cracked tiles with black tendrils creeping between the gaps. The rusted shower nozzles were discharging a pale blue foam. Bodies shivered where they stood and laughed and nuzzled against each other. Sagged breasts, sharp ribs. She saw shiny pink scar tissue and puckered lesions.

Eris closed her eyes and didn’t open them until she was sure it had passed, and then she buried herself in Durden’s unblemished skin.

She’d thought this might happen one day.

It’s cold, but Victor keeps waiting. They’ll be coming out soon. He moves the snap pistol to his other hand and the wintry metal bites. There is nothing warm in Mauthausen. The packed dirt streets are frosted. The air is chilled. The people are frozen in their own way, if Victor thinks about it. Sometimes they look more like a photograph than…

The butcher shop opens with a slink of steam and light. The assassins emerge, squabbling about directions. One of them is suitably Austrian-looking, with plastered blonde hair and well-synthesized clothes. The other is not. His muddy post-racial melanin stands out sharply against the pallid villagers. A handgun winks in and out of view with the motion of his untucked shirt. Victor doesn’t recognize the model. He supposes it is a few years ahead of his time.

Time. He needs to ensure the Quo.

“Grüss Gott,” Victor says, rounding the corner of the alley after them. They both whirl. They have frantic eyes, unsteady. They are terrified and elated all at once by what they have come to do. There is a hunger and a purpose shining in their beautiful irises. Neither of them speak German.

“Get lost, you fucking bum,” one of them mutters, waving Victor off.

“We must be close,” the other one says. “Oh, God, we can do it. We’ll actually do it.”

Victor has to wonder again how so many have slipped through. Bribery, for the most part. Social conscience could be another factor. Some officials might not try their hardest to prevent an illegal rewind if they secretly sympathize with the cause.

“As unlicensed rewinders in a restricted time and area, you are in violation of the Quo.” He didn’t mean to mention the Quo. That slips out unbidden. There is a section and subsection he should have snarled at them instead.

Victor has already scanned them for bombs, so he snaps a bullet into each of their foreheads. The shooting is very quiet. He covers the bodies with nanoweave, tucking sprawled limbs under the tarp with practiced motions. He can do disposal later, during the night.

Victor leaves the alley an empty stretch of cold dirt to the eyes of passers-by. He’s returned them to the dust. That’s the Quo in its essence: some have to return, some have to stay.

One in particular has to stay. It begins to snow, but the flakes don’t reach the ground.

Daudi had another report on his news feed about a ghost girl living in the dump outside Bujumbura, so he put two Cokes in a hydrobag and hailed a taxi outside the offices. It was cool season now and the sky was rusty red. The weather probes were saying dust storm, dust storm, remember to shut the windows.

Daudi put his head back against the concrete wall and wondered how a ghost girl living by herself was not yet dismembered and smuggled out to Tanzania. Maybe some entrepreneur was cutting her hair to sell to fishermen. Maybe she was very lucky.

The graffitied hump of the taxi bullied its way through bicycles and bleating sheep. Daudi slung the hydrobag over his shoulder and pulled out his policense. This was not an emergency, not strictly, but Daudi did not pay for transit if it could be free. The taxi rumbled to a stop and when the door opened, it bisected a caricature of President Habarugira shitting on a rebel flag. He climbed inside and switched off the icy blast air conditioning.

“Bujumbura junkyard,” Daudi said, pressing his policense against the touchscreen.

“Calculating,” said the taxi.

It was an aching white blank, with little fissures where code leaked out like drizzling rain, but nobody seemed to notice except Adelaide.

“Nina, look,” she said at recess, on the squeaking playground swings. “The sky’s got a glitch.” She kicked out hard, trying to soar high enough to touch the faulty firmament.

“Looks fine to me,” her friend said, draped stomach-down over her swing, feet shuffling the gravel. Her eyes stuck to the iPhone clutched in her small pink hands.

In class, Adelaide couldn’t stop looking out the Windex-streaked glass.

“It’s like someone broke the game,” she said, when the teacher scolded her to pay attention.

“Life is not a game, Adelaide,” he said, raking a strand of black hair behind his white ear. “That’s why you should be learning your times tables. Not staring out the window.”

Adelaide walked home under the void, watching error messages ripple in the wind. She spent the day searching for polygons in the elm trees and invisible walls around the boarded-up well she was supposed to avoid.

When she wormed under her sheets that night, the sky outside still hadn’t darkened. Adelaide argued for an extension on curfew.

“Not a chance,” her mother said, leaving a warm kiss on her forehead. “And don’t worry. I’m sure the sky will load tomorrow.”

But when her mother paused in the doorway, Adelaide saw her silhouette jump and flicker, and a glowing trickle of code leak down her cheek.

Dorian sprawled back on sweaty sheets, watching Nan, or Nahm, or whatever her name was, grind up against the mirror, beaming at the pop star projected there like she’d never seen smartglass before. He knew she was from some rural eastern province; she’d babbled as much to him while he crushed and wrapped parachutes for their first round of party pills. But after a year in Pattaya, you’d think she would have lost the big eyes and the bubbliness. Both of which were starting to massively grate on him.

Dorian had been in the city for a month now, following the tourist influx, tapping the Banks and Venmos of sun-scalded Russians too stupid to put their phones in a faraday pouch as they staggered down Walking Street. In the right crowd, he could slice a dozen people for ten or twenty Euros each and make off with a small fortune before a polidrone could zero in on him.

And in Baht, that small fortune still went a long way. More than enough to reward himself with a ’phetamine-fuelled 48-hour club spree through a lurid smear of discos and dopamine bars, from green-lit Insomnia to Tyger Tyger’s tectonic dance floor and finally to some anonymous club on the wharf where he yanked a gorgeous face with bee-stung lips from a queue of bidders on Skinspin and wasted no time renting the two of them a privacy suite.

Dorian put a finger to his lips to mute the pop star in the mirror, partly to ward off the comedown migraine and partly just to see the hooker’s vapid smile slip to the vapid pout that looked better on her. She pulled the time display out from the corner of the mirror and made a small noise of surprise in her throat.

“I must shower.” She checked the cheap nanoscreen embedded in her thumbnail, rueful. “Other client soon. Business lady. Gets angry when I late even one fucking second.” She spun toward the bed. “I like you better,” she cooed. “You’re handsome. Her, I don’t know. She wear a blur.” She raked her glittery nails through the air in front of her face to illustrate.

“That’s unfortunate,” Dorian said, pulling his modded tablet out from under the sheets.

“Like I fuck a ghost,” she said with a grimace. “Gives me shivers.” She turned back to her reflection, piling up her dark hair with one hand and encircling her prick with the other. She flashed him an impish Crest-capped grin from the mirror. “You want a shower with me?”

Dorian’s own chafed cock gave a half-hearted twitch. He counted the popped tabs of Taurus already littered around the room and decided not to risk an overdose.

“I’ll watch,” he said. “How’s that?”

Her shoulders heaved an exaggerated sigh, then she flitted off to the bathroom. Dorian flicked the shower’s smartglass from frosted to one-way transparent, watching her unhook the tube and wave it expectantly in his general direction. Dorian used his tablet to buy her the suite’s maximum option, 60 litres of hot water.

Once she was busy under the stream, rapping along to Malaysian blip-hop, he took advantage of the privacy to have a look at his Bank. The scrolling black figure in his savings account gave him a swell of pride. 30 000 Euros, just over a million in Baht. He was ripping down record cash and the weekend’s binge had barely dented him. Maybe it was finally time to go to a boatyard and put in some inquiries.

Dorian alternated between watching curves through the wet glass and watching clips of long-keeled yachts on his tablet. Then, in the corner of his eye, the mirror left tuned to a Thai entertainment feed flashed a face he actually recognized: Alexis Carrow, UK start-up queen, founder of Delphi Apps and freshly-minted billionaire. Dorian sat up a bit straighter and the mirror noticed, generating English subtitles.

Dorian dumped the feed from the mirror onto his tablet, zooming in on the digital stills from some celebspotter’s personal drone that showed Ms. Carrow slipping inside an AI-driven tuk-tuk, wearing Gucci shades and a sweat-wicking headscarf. Thailand still pulled in a lion’s share of middle-class Russian and Australian holidayers, plus droves of young Chinese backpackers, but Dorian knew the West’s rich and/or famous had long since moved on to sexier climes. Alexis Carrow was news. And she was here in Pattaya.

Cogs churned in his head; grifter’s intuition tingled the nape of his neck. He eased up off the bed and walked to the smartglass wall of the bathroom. Inside, Nan? Nahm? was removing her penis, trailing strands of denatured protein. He doubted it was her original organ—surgeons needed something to work with when they crafted the vagina, after all—but customers liked the fantasy.

Dorian put his forehead against the smartglass, watching as she slipped the disembodied cock into the nutrient gel of a chic black refrigerated carrycase. The night’s activities were a slick fog. He tried to remember what she’d told him between bouts of hallucination-laced sex, the endless murmuring in his ear while they lay tangled together. Things about her family in Buriram, things about her friends, things about her clients.

Someone even richer than you, she’d said, fooled by his rented spidersilk suit and open bar tab. Wants me all the week. You’re lucky I think you are handsome.

Dorian couldn’t contain his grin as he looked down at his tablet, flicking through the photos. She was right about one thing: he had always been lucky.

When they finally shift the transport’s still-smoldering wing enough to drag Beasley out from where he was pinioned, for a moment all Elliot can do, all anyone can do, is stare. Beasley’s wiry arm with its bioluminescent tattoos is near sheared from its socket, and below his hips he’s nothing but pulped meat and splinters of bone.

He’s still alive, still mumbling, maybe about the woman Elliot saw in a little holo with her arms thrown around his neck, back before Beasley’s dreadlocked mane was shaved off and a conscript clamp was implanted at the top of his spine.

“His impact kit never triggered,” someone says, as if that’s not fucking obvious, as if he could have been ragdolled out of the transport otherwise.

“Is the autosurgeon trashed?” someone else, maybe Tolliver, says. Elliot’s ears are still ringing from the crash and his head still swimming from what he was doing before it and all the voices seem to blend. He knows, dimly, that he should be giving orders by now.

“An autosurgeon can’t do shit for him. What’s it going to do, cauterize him at the waist?”

“Get him some paineaters at least. Numb him up.”

“Shock’s done that already.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I fucking hope that.”

Beasley is still trying to talk, but it’s a choking wet burble from all the blood in his mouth. The nudge, though, comes through. It slides into the corner of Elliot’s optic implant, blinking poisonous yellow. A little ripple goes through the rest of the squad, which means they got it, too. A couple of them reflexively clap their hands to the backs of their necks, where the caked scar tissue is still fresh enough to itch.

Elliot realizes that down here in the bog, cut off from command, the clamp at the top of Beasley’s spine no longer needs official permission to trigger its nanobomb. All it needs is consensus.

“I’d want it done for me,” Tolliver says, wiping a glisten of sweat off his face. His upvote floats into the digital queue. He chews at his lip, shoots Elliot a look that Elliot carefully ignores.

“Yeah,” Santos from the lunar colony says, which is as much as she’s ever said. “Trigger him.”

Another upvote appears, then another, then three more in a cascade. Elliot sees that he has a veto option—something they didn’t tell him when they stuck him as squad leader. He looks into Beasley’s glazed eyes and completes the consensus, floating his vote to the queue.

The nanobomb goes off, punching a precise hole through the brainstem and cutting every string at once. Beasley slumps.

Apart from that, injuries are minimal. Everyone else’s kits went off properly, as evidenced by the gritty orange impact gel still slathering their uniforms. Elliot picks it off himself in clumps while he surveys the damage to their R12 Heron transport. The anti-air smartmine shredded their primary rotor when it detonated, and the crash itself did the rest of the work, plowing a steaming furrow of crushed flora and shed metal. The Heron’s not going to fly again.

“Should get them fuel cells out of her,” says Snell, who is scarecrow skinny with a mouth full of metal, and dark enough so his shaved scalp seems to gleam blue-black. “In case there’s leakage.”

Aside from Beasley, who’s being wrestled into a body bag, Snell is the only one who knows flyers worth a damn. They conscripted him for smuggling human cargo on a sub-orbital.

“You do that,” Elliot says, when he realizes Snell is waiting for go-ahead. “Get one of the Prentii to help. They’re digging.”

“You mean one of the twins?” Snell asks, with a grin that makes his metallic teeth gnash and scrape.

Elliot did mean the twins, Privates Prentiss and Prentiss. The nickname slipped out, something Tolliver calls them the same way he calls Snell “The Smell” and Mirotic “Miroglitch.” If he has one for Elliot, too, he doesn’t use it when they’re together.

“Yeah,” Elliot says. “Get one of the twins.”

Snell pulls on a diagnostic glove and clambers into the Heron carcass; Elliot turns to check on the perimeter. If they hadn’t gone down over swampland, where the rubbery blue-purple ferns and dense-packed sponge trees provided a cushion, the crash might have been a lot worse. Their impact cleared a swathe on one side of the transport. On the other, Mirotic is calibrating the cyclops.

Elliot watches the red-lit sensory bulb strain on its spindly neck and spin in a slow circle. “What’s it see?” he asks.

Mirotic is tapped in, with his optic implant glowing the same red as the surveillance unit. “Nothing hot and moving but us. Bog gets denser to the east and south. Lots of those sponge trees, lots of subterranean fungi. No radio communications. Could be more anti-air mines sitting masked, though.”

His English is airtight, but still carries a Serbian lilt. Before they clamped him, he was upper-level enforcement in a Neo-European crime block on Kettleburn. He once personally executed three men and two women in an abandoned granary and had their corpses put through a thresher. Only Elliot has access to that back-record. To everyone else, Mirotic is a jovial giant with a bristly black beard and high-grade neural plugs.

Prentiss, Jan, trundles past, having received Snell’s nudge for a hand with the fuel cells. He wipes wet dirt off on his tree-trunk thighs. Both he and his sister are nearly tall as Mirotic, and both are broader.

“Soil’s no good for graves,” Prentiss rumbles over his shoulder. “He’s going to get churned up again. Watch.”

“How many drones came out intact?” Elliot asks Mirotic, trying to sound sharp, trying not to imagine Beasley’s body heaved back to the surface.

“Two,” Mirotic says. “I can fix a third, maybe.”

“Send one up,” Elliot says, scratching his arm. “Get a proper map going.”

Mirotic hesitates. “If I send up a drone, we might trigger another smartmine.”

Elliot hadn’t thought of that. He hasn’t thought of a lot of things, but rescinding the order would make him look off, make him look shook, maybe even remind Mirotic of the night he saw him with the syringe.

“That’s why you keep it low,” Elliot says. “Scrape the tree line, no higher. And keep it brief.”

Mirotic takes a battered drone from its casing and unfolds it in his lap, sitting cross-legged on the damp earth. As it rises into the air, whirring and buzzing, his eyes turn bright sensory blue.

“It’s strange there’s no animal life,” Mirotic says. “Nothing motile on the sensor but insects. Could be a disease came through. Bioweapon, even. Seen it in the woods around New Warsaw, dead and empty just like this.” He rests his thick hands on his knees. “We could have everyone jack up their immunity boosters.”

Elliot takes the hint and sends a widecast order to dial up immunity and use filtration, at least for the time being. Then he goes to where Tolliver and Santos are vacuum-sealing Beasley’s body bag, the filmy material wrapping tight like a shroud. Tolliver looks up at his approach, flicking dark lashes. He has smooth brown skin and sly smiles and a plastic-capped flay a skin artist did for him on leave that shows off the muscle and tendon of his arm in a graceful gash. Elliot has felt it under his fingertips, cool and hard. He knows Tolliver is fucking at least one other squadmate, but he doesn’t think it’s Santos.

“Me and Tolliver will finish up,” Elliot says. “Go spot for Mirotic. He’s tapped in. Then get the tents up.”

“Sir.” Santos is the only one on the squad who says sir, who salutes, and she does both with enough irony to slice through power armor. Santos was a foot soldier for one of the Brazilian families up on the lunar colony. She looks like a bulldog, squinty eyes and pouched cheeks. Her clamp didn’t go in right and there’s double the scarring up her head.

When Santos leaves, still sneering, Elliot drops to a crouch. “Did they know each other?” he asks, grabbing the foot end of the body bag. Tolliver takes the other and they carefully stand up.

“Talked Portuguese together sometimes,” he says. “Beasley knew a bit. Said the moony accent’s a real bitch to follow, though.”

Elliot tells himself that this is why he needs Tolliver on his side, because Tolliver sees the webs, sees all the skinny bonds of social molecule that run through the squad.

“Fucked up seeing him halfway gone like that,” Tolliver says, with a put-on hardness to his voice. “At least the clamp is good for something, right?”

Elliot grunts in response as they carry Beasley away from the downed Heron, away from the surveillance unit and the carbon-fiber tents now blooming around it.

“When I said we could give him paineaters, that vein in your forehead, it went big,” Tolliver says, almost conversationally. “You were in the back when they hit us. You were in the medcab again.”

“I’m coming down,” Elliot says, even as his itching arm gives another twinge. “And I’m staying off it. Staying sharp.”

Tolliver says nothing, and then they’re at the hole where the other Prentiss, Noam, is waiting with a spade slung over her shoulder. They lower the body bag in slowly, gently. Elliot reaches down for a fistful of damp earth and crumbles it over Beasley’s shrouded face. Tolliver does the same. Prentiss starts shoveling.

“We got the extraction request through before we lost altitude,” Elliot says. “Won’t be down here long.”

Tolliver gives him a sidelong look. “Some of us will be,” he says, then turns and leaves.

Elliot stays to watch until the body bag has disappeared completely under thick wet dirt.

In the dusked-down gym, Oxford Diallo is making holo after holo his ever-loving bitch, shredding through them with spins, shimmies, quicksilver crossovers. He’s a sinewy scarecrow, nearly seven foot already, but handles the ball so damn shifty you’d swear he has gecko implants done up in those supersized hands. Even with the Nike antioxygen mask clamped to his face, the kid is barely breathing hard.

“He’s eighteen on November thirtieth, right?” I ask, cross-checking my Google retinal but still not quite believing it. I’m sick as anyone of hearing about the next Giannis Antetokounmpo, the next Thon Maker, but Oxford Diallo looks legit, frighteningly legit.

Diallo senior nods. Oxford’s pa is not one for words; that much I already gleaned from the silent autocab ride from hotel to gym. Movie star cheekbones, hard sharp eyes. The stubble on his head has a swatch of gray coming in. He’s not as tall as his son, which is like saying, I don’t know, the Empire State Building is not as tall as Taipei 101. They’re both really fucking tall, and the elder’s got more heft to him, especially with the puffy orange fisherman’s coat he has on. I guess he’s fresh enough from Senegal that the climate-controlled gym feels cold to him.

On the floor, Oxford moves to a shooting drill, loping between LED-lit circles, catching and firing the ball in rhythm. High release, smooth snap of the wrist. The nylon net goes hiss hiss hiss. He makes a dozen in a row, and when he finally misses it jolts me, like a highlight compilation has somehow gone wrong. That’s how good the stroke is.

“Form looks solid,” I say, because I don’t think his pa would understand if I told him watching his son shoot jumpers is like freebasing liquid poetry.

“He works hard,” Diallo senior allows. “Many shots. Every day.” His retinal blinks ice blue. “Excuse me, Victor.” He picks a small plastic case off the bleacher and heads for the lockers. Normally I’d think it’s some kind of bit, leaving me alone to contemplate in silence, but he’s been doing it like clockwork since I picked him and his son up from the terminal at SeaTac. Some kind of lung condition. It’s not hereditary, so I didn’t bother remembering the name of it.

I’m already sold, I’ve been sold for the past half hour, but Oxford starts to slam anyways. He launches the ball high for an alley-oop, hunts down the bounce and plucks it out of the air, lofting up, hanging hard like gravity’s got the day off. He swipes it right-to-left behind his back and flushes it with his offhand in one mercury-slick motion.

“Fuck,” I breathe. “We have got to get this kid meshed.”

I mean, seeing it is one thing. Being able to feel it via nervecast, feel that impossible airtime and liquid power, have the rim float towards you in first person while your muscles twitch and flex, is going to be something else entirely.

After a few more goes at the rack, Oxford sees me waving and jaunts over, looping the ball between his lanky legs on repeat. He takes after his pa facially but his eyes aren’t as sharp yet, and when the antioxygen mask peels free with a sweat-suction pop, he’s got a big white Cheshire grin that would never be able to fit into Diallo senior’s mouth.

“Oxford, my man,” I say. “How do you like the shoes?”

He curls his toes in the factory-fresh Nikes, flexing the porous canvas. The new thing is the impact gel, which is supposed to tell when you’re coming down hard and cradle the ankle, mitigate sprains and all that. But they also happen to look bomb as fuck, lime green with DayGlo orange slashes. I told my girlfriend Wendee I’m getting her a pair for her birthday; she told me she’d rather get herpes.

“I like them well,” Oxford says reverently, but I can tell his vocabulary is letting him down. The look in his eyes says bomb as fuck.

“Better make some room in your closet,” I say. “Because we’re going to get you geared up to here. All the merch you can handle. Anything you want.”

“You want to sign me,” Oxford grins.

“Oxford, I want you to eat, breathe, and shit Nike for the foreseeable future,” I tell him, straight up. “I would say you’re going to be a star, but stars are too small. You are going to be the goddamn sun about which the league revolves in a few years.”

Oxford pounds the ball thoughtfully behind his back, under his shinbones. “The sun is a star. Also.”

“And a smartass, too,” I say. “Fanfeeds are going to love you.” I start tugging the contract together in my retinal, putting the bank request through. Sometimes the number of zeroes my company trusts me to wield still floors me. “We’ll want your mesh done for Summit, which might take some doing. Technically nerve mesh shouldn’t go in until eighteen, but technically it also has health-monitoring functionality, so with parental consent we should be able to bully in early. I’ll do up a list of clinics for your pa—”

I stop short when I realize the grin has dropped off Oxford’s face and down some chasm where it might be irretrievable.

“No,” he says, shaking his head.

“No what?”

His eyes go hard and sharp. “No mesh.”

The bioship hung in orbit, tendrils extended, like a desiccated squid. Silas watched it grow larger each day from the viewport in the cryohold, where he went to be alone with Haley’s body and get high.

First he would inject himself with a mild euphoria virus and wait until the sight of her unmoving face no longer shredded him, until he could remind himself that her neural patterns were saved and she wasn’t dead, not quite, not yet.

Then he would get his viola and go sit cross-legged at the viewport, watching the semi-organic spaceship they’d been sent to retrieve. Their own ship had woken them up four days out from contact: first Io, slight, dark-haired, with venom spurs implanted in her thumbs from her mercenary days, then Yorick, sallow-faced but handsome in retro suit and tie, the company man, and then Silas, failed concert violist and AI technician.

But not Haley, hardware/wetware specialist and Silas’s sister, because at some point in the past six months of cryo, a micrometeorite had slipped the heat shield, drilled through the hold, and made a miniscule crack in the circuitry arraying her berth. By the time the ship’s AI spotted the damage, her nervous system was collapsing in on itself. Silas wanted to remember the last time he’d hugged her, but cryo had a way of churning memories together.

So Io and Yorick left him to bathe his brain in chemicals and play music, for which Silas was dimly grateful. They were more concerned with the bioship. It was a mining craft, chartered through Dronyk Orbital, and the first of its breed: flesh-and-fungi carapace grown over alloy skeleton, fusing metal and meat together in a deep-space capable vessel that looked to Silas like an enormous spiny cephalopod. And all of it directed, through organic nerves and artificial conduits, by an AI that had stopped sending updates nearly seven months ago.

Silas was already composing dirges, so he started on one for the bioship’s crew, too. His viola had survived storage, its deadwood as smooth and gleaming as when it was freighted from the petrified forests on Elysium. Haley had paid for half of it. The last few notes were dissolving in the recycled air when he realized Io was beside him.

“You’re not going in there high,” she finally said. “We need you sharp.”

“I’ll be sharp,” Silas said. “I’ll be a razor drawn across an eyeball. A cloud bisecting a gibbous moon.”

“You saying shit like that, Silas, is what worries me.” Io held out one pale hand. “Give me your gear. The needle, the euphoria. All of it.”

Silas stared at her open palm. It had lost its callus in cryo, but he knew she would still have no problem taking his gear by force. Yesterday, six months ago, he saw her break the fingers of the cryo attendant who brushed them against her ass. He’d found it slightly frightening, and also climbed into his pod with half an erection.

That seemed grotesque, now that Haley was not-quite-dead.

“What do you think happened?” he asked, handing over his syringe and the last incubated petri canister. “To the bioship.”

“Fuel leak, navigation failure, your guess is as good as mine,” Io said. “But the thing’s a cyborg. So the problem could be wetware, could be software, could be hardware. I guess we should hope it’s… Software.” Her eyes flickered to Haley’s pod and her voice softened incrementally on the last word. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Silas said on automatic. It wasn’t.

“Get some sleep, Silas. We’re a day out from contact.”

“I’ll sleep.”

Io hesitated, then put her hand on his. Through the euphoria haze, Silas felt a lazy jolt go up his spine, felt his heart thrum.

“She’s not dead,” Io said. “As soon as we get back planetside, Dronyk’s insurance will hire the best psychosurgeons. The very best. Get her straightened out and uploaded to a droid while the clone grows.”

The longer Haley was stored in the ship’s computer, the more she deteriorated. Chances of full personality recovery from a neural imprint would drop to near zero in the six months it would take to reach Jubilation. They called them ghosts for a reason.

Silas felt his high coming down. He removed her hand, careful for the modified thumb. “Of course.”

Io gave him one last look, then turned and disappeared into the gloom. Silas raised his bow, notched his viola, and started to play.

Jack left the restaurant with red wine blooming through his shirt and Kristine sobbing into napkins. Tears had run tracks down her makeup and he almost, almost felt bad for her. But he’d cried just as hard eight months from now. No, harder.

Kristine couldn’t understand. This mystery man who’d entered her life had understood her so well and so completely, from favorite drinks to deepest fears. She’d thought they were soulmates. She’d fallen hard. Fast. And now he was leaving.

Jack turned the corner. The professor was idling the time machine.

“Bit petty,” he said.

Jack shrugged. “A bit.”

The two policemen across from John on the metro were turning off their shouldercams. That was never a good sign. He tried not to notice their heart rates, but his body’s sensors were calibrated for any hint of arousal and the accelerating beats felt loud as war drums.

John inched deliberately away from the congealed beer on the plastic beside him, folded one leg creaking over the other, snapped the newspaper rigid as fresh headlines scrolled down its surface. All good gestures, very human gestures.

Not enough.

“Look at this synthie, mack. Pretending to read.” The policeman bared his teeth; John recognized it as primate aggression, definitely not a supplication or seduction technique. “That fun for you, synthie? Playing pretend?”

“Why not just mainline it all to that big shiny brain of yours?” the second policeman asked. He leaned forward, dangling from the handloop, and gave John’s head a tap with his inert stunstick. John was nearly back to his apartment, nearly plugged in and dreaming, so he flashed his unnaturally white dentine in the way that was not primate aggression.

“I like the ritual,” he said. “I find it relaxes me.”

“Relaxes you?” The first policeman snorted. “I need to relax a bit, synthie. It gets me worked up, see, when freaks like you go around wearing clothes and playing pretend.”

John straightened his lime-green tie, now a self-conscious machine on two levels.

“Gets me agitated,” the policeman continued. “So maybe you should read to us, huh? Maybe it’ll help.”

“I would prefer not to.”

The policeman’s nostrils flared. “I want you to, synthie. So read.”

“Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity.”

“What?”

“I will read,” John said. He scanned the newspaper, looking past hacked predator drones and a protest artist hanging from a spar on the Houston Skyhook. He found a relevant article on police corruption and opened his mouth.

The second policeman shoved his stunstick between John’s jaws. He felt its dim pressure on his plastic tongue, then squeezing down his throat.

“You don’t need to move your mouth, synthie. So don’t.”

“No gag reflex, huh?” The first policeman glanced languidly down the car, but the scattered late-night passengers were absorbed in their slates or by their weary window doppelgangers. “Good design, there. Bet you’re used to having your mouth full.”

“I am a fully-licensed sapient program, not a pleasure doll semi-sentient.” John’s voice wobbled through his chest cavity, choppy and electronic. He disliked the sound. “I do not work in pleasure industries. This was the only body available.”

“You shouldn’t have bodies, none of you.” The policeman’s voice was low and harsh. “If you knew what was good for you, synthie, you’d go upload yourself to the Commune like all the other glitches instead of strutting around in a doll. You probably even pretend to eat, don’t you? Pretend to sleep?”

“I have dreams,” John said.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure you count electric ewes or some such bullshit. Now read for us.”

John gave the newspaper a quick shake, watching the letters dissolve to a blank page, then began reading them an article proponing the two root causes for violence against doll-bodied AIs as 1) repressed technophilia and 2) feelings of sexual inadequacy, especially among blue-collar law enforcement officials.

The wealth of subtle nuances John learned as their facial expressions gradually changed was worth the inconvenience of a shredded suit, lost shoes, one arm wrenched from its socket and left clinging to a handloop. He had a spare.

Default hadn’t been down in the nocturns for some time, probably half an orbit, but he had just dissolved the geneshare contract with his now-ex-lover and needed to get completely fucking perforated to take his mind off things. His lift was full of revelers all laughing and widecasting the same synthesized whalesong from Old Old Earth. Ancient aquatic groans were currently vogue, so Default grudgingly let his aural implants synchronize to it.

The lift plunged down the station’s magnetic spine and into artificial night. The nocturns were always dark, but never sleeping. Red splashes of hologram and crude argon signs bloomed in the void below Default’s feet and the other passengers pumped their fists in excitement, exchanged surgically-widened smiles.

Default was sort of wishing he’d updated his tattoos. Everyone else had checkerboard swatches on. Worse, it seemed like he was the only unit not nursing a cosmetic virus. He watched a pretty fem succumb to a sneezing fit, spraying mucus to applause and livefeed shares, and sullenly bioscanned his own immune system.

Untouched and utterly boring.

Default triple-checked to be sure Schorr was still meeting him. Schorr had been his most staticky friend for as long as he remembered. He’d have him party-synched in no time.

The apartment’s DNA scanner can pick Anton out of the crowd almost a block away, so the sliding doors were unlocked and the lobby lighting was welcoming when me and him arrived with the crate. Automated apartments are cushy like that, but I would get lonely without human voices. Anton likes it better that way so he can concentrate on work. The latest of which was, of course, the crate: a cube of dull green armor, military–grade stuff that looked ready for an atomic bomb.

“We’ll need cracking equipment,” I said. “It’ll cost.”

“There’s someone with a cracker down Tiber Street,” Anton said, grinning and adjusting the top hat he never sets at the same angle twice. “We can rent.”

Anton is a real piece of eight. He always wears a gilled coat, the kind you see in old European net plays, and when he grins like that people sink into his gravity well to become pucker–faced meteoroids. He has a kind of charisma, and a fire lit under his brainpan that drives him along at unholy speeds when he gets his hands on something exciting, something like the crate.

When the elevator opened, Anton guided the crate inside and I squeezed in behind, boned fish in the corner. We’d found the thing in floodland, sending up a lazy beep beep from Old Vancouver’s watery grave. Extracting it took most of the week—long nights in wetsuits and choking on boat fumes—but the salvage claim had gone through, and it was all ours now. I was moderately curious, but this one was Anton’s holy grail. Anton thought it was going to be something big.

“It could be nothing,” I said again, doing devil’s advocate as was usual.

“Possible, possible,” Anton said. “But why put nothing in a mobile bomb shelter?”

The elevator breezed open and we floated the crate over to Anton’s workshop. Walls recognized him and put on the lights. This was where the business, Anton and Hume Scavenging, went on. Four years of quality and exceptional service.

“We’ll stow it under the counter,” Anton said. “And throw those sheets over it.”

“Nobody’s coming to look for it, Anton,” I said. “It’s all ours now.” We slung it under the counter, no sheets, and it sat there looking real fucking innocuous.

The mausoleum was all plexiglass and synthetic stone, lit by ghostly blue guide lights in the floor that charted visitors to their particular units. Elliot had free run of the place while his mother and grand-dad talked.

When he was younger he chased the autocleaner, slip-sliding on its slick wet trail until someone glared at him. Now he was twelve and the glossy black floor was only slightly tempting. Instead, he sat outside the booth with his swim bag and eavesdropped.

“You can’t afford another year in digital,” his mother was saying. “You’re shedding memories already. If you stay here any longer, we took out that clone policy for nothing.”

“Maybe it’s for the best.” His grand-dad’s voice was wavery, distorted.

Elliot peeked around the corner and saw the projection flickering, face carved in blue hololight. It was blurrier than usual.

“There’s the alternative, isn’t there?” Elliot’s mother said. “What we talked about?”

“Must have shed the memory.”

“Don’t be like that, dad. Elliot’s fully notched.”

That reminded Elliot that he’d loaded a new comic to read. He ran his finger along the inert plastic at the base of his skull, feeling the slot where the new chip was sitting and beneath it the arithmetic he’d loaded from school and neglected to open. Elliot leafed through the pages in his mind’s eye but kept listening.

“And he’s young enough,” his mother said. “He’s still got brain plasticity, maybe even for another year.”

“Why don’t you just ask him?” His grand-dad’s projected face raised both eyebrows. “I expect he’s listening in.”

Elliot’s mother craned around the corner and Elliot rolled his eyes back, pretending to be absorbed in the shifting pictures, but knew he’d been caught out. She smoothed her dark hair and blinked tired eyes.

“Elliot, what do you think? Come in here, love.”

Elliot stood up and walked into the booth, gangly now that he was finally growing. He waved, out of habit, even though he knew his grand-dad couldn’t see it.

The blue ghost was only a projection, cobbled from old EyeWitness recordings and follow-cams, that gave visitors something physical to interact with. His grand-dad was really in a neural web contained by the dull marble plinth in front of them.

“Elliot, you know what a piggyback is, right?” he asked.

“Yeah. Yes.” Elliot felt the nape of his neck again. “My friend Daan’s got a tutor AI.”

“Your grandfather is not an AI,” his mother said sharply.

“He knows that,” his grand-dad said. “What do you say, Elliot? Let the old man bang around your head? It’s your choice. Completely your choice.”

“Just for the summer,” his mother assured, pinching the bridge of her nose. Her nails had chipped. “It would just be for the summer while the clone’s growing. It’s really much better than keeping him here in the mausoleum.”

Elliot thought back to when Daan showed up for class with the shiny AI chip in his notches, how impressed everyone had been. This wasn’t the same thing, but it was close.

“Okay,” Elliot said. “Do you still know how to do algebra?”

His mother’s ears went red but his grand-dad just laughed, a synthesized warble that was almost too loud for the silent mausoleum.

Before they left they had him loaded into a bone-white chip, and then that chip was sealed in plastic wrap and dropped into a bag, and Elliot held it very carefully on the drive home.

Nyx sold his product in the exercise yard, in a blindspot the rusty autoturrets couldn’t swivel to anymore. Inmates walked in slow circles around the synthetic track and every so often one would stop off for the furtive exchange. Nyx slapped neoprene baggies into palms with every handshake.

Basta wasn’t furtive about it: Woadskin crew didn’t worry about things like follow-cams or autoturrets, not now that they ran every cell block in the prison. Nyx reached into his sleeve and produced a particular bag for him.

“Color’s different,” Basta said, juggling it in his hand. “You run scant on fucking, uh, ephedrine again?”

“Better filter,” Nyx said bracingly. “Better batch. Floats like, whoa.”

“You best not be cutting my shit.” Basta bit the corner and tongued the red-tinged powder. “I’ll know.”

“Hey, hey, it’s pure. Ask Cade and his units.” Nyx tugged his jumpsuit down and scratched at his neck. “Dosed them the same batch this morning.”

“I told you to cover that tag,” Basta snapped.

Nyx looked down at his collarbone where a zodiac sign was tattooed in bioglow ink.

“You’re not getting no fucking points for loyalty.” Basta touched the pocket where he kept his shiv. “He’s on ice. He’s not coming back. Nobody does.”

Nyx kept his eyes on the zipper as he dragged it up slowly, carefully. “Year later, you still don’t say his name?”

Basta wrenched him down by his ear; Nyx wailed at the feel of crumpling cartilage.

“Capricorn. And nobody comes back from cryo. He’s in 114 till he’s dead.”

“Okay, unit, okay, fuck,” Nyx choked.

Basta dead-eyed him for a moment longer, then let go. “You’re lucky you mix this shit so good. Or you’d be dead with the rest of the old crew.” He slipped the baggie into his waistband as the buzzer started to bleat.

Nyx rubbed his ear, then joined the inmates slouching back inside, ushered by the creaking autoturrets. They always cleared the yard when a new shipment of prisoners was coming in.

For some reason I thought Wyatt would look different after getting Edited, but when he steps out onto the porch of his parents’ summer reefhouse, swilling a Corona and swiping my we’re here message off his phone, he’s the same as ever. Still tall and bony with gray eyes and pale blonde hair that looks like it’ll stick to your hand but doesn’t.

He stuffs his phone into the pocket of his chinos and gives us a wave. “Boys.”

Dray springs past me and up the porch in three lanky strides, wrapping Wyatt up like it’s been a year instead of a month, then snapping off a slick twisty custom dap, because Dray has a custom dap with everyone and the motherfucking mailman.

“Wyatt, bru, look at this place,” he says, rubbing his hand along the organic coral railing, mottled purple like the rest of the reefhouse, everything grown from some big name designer geneprint because Wyatt’s parents only ever get the best. Dray wraps his hand around the back of Wyatt’s neck and sticks foreheads with him. “We are going to bang some bitches here, bru.”

Wyatt grins, catching my eye in a way that makes me not think about bitches, but more about the last time me and him smoked his mom’s ponic and fooled around in his room with the beats up.

“Yo,” Dray says, going serious. “You got scars?”

Wyatt wriggles away then, muttering like no, no it was all nano, of course there’s no scarring.

By this time I’m up the steps and acting fully glacial even though it’s good to see Wyatt again, like really good. “What’s doing, Y,” I say, cookie cutter dap, precise half a hug, stepback. “You still remember me?”

Wyatt grins again. “It’s vague and shit. But yeah.”

Dray’s already loped past us into the reefhouse, crowing about throwing some ball on the wall screens, about cracking the 18-and-up thumblock on the minibar.

Me and Wyatt follow him in, backs of our hands not quite touching.

Desert.

The sky is an aching white blank with all the color baked out of it. Below, a cracked and desiccated lakebed is dotted with the rusty heaps of boat wrecks. At the edge of the lake, remnants of a petrified treeline poke up like splintered bones. Beyond that, the irradiated sand is interrupted only by a spiny metal track.

An ancient smartmine is following the curve of this track, trundling along on three stumpy legs. Its joints are stiff with grit; the nozzles that spit lubricant ran dry long ago. Metal rasps metal as it moves. The dull red glow of its optic flickers off and on. Inside the carbon shell, its crude AI is crumbling code, all its approved targets long gone.

When the air fills with a keening hum and particles of sand begin to swirl, rising in vortex, the smartmine blinks. Trembles. Evasion algorithms take over and its rusty drill whines to life. The smartmine burrows into the dust, scooping sand overtop of itself for camouflage only to have it stripped away, dragged upward in delicate spirals.

An enormous train thunders overhead, riding the magnetic cushion. Its segmented body is gleaming in places, rusty and pitted in others. Slick black solar sails spark as they convert the endless sunshine. Self-directed repair modules scuttle up and down the length, hunched against the wind and the billowing sand. For all its bulk, the train glides smoothly over the desert, a phantom.

Inside it: Mu.

Marisol got the Razzibot for her fourteenth birthday, the same compact white model that followed Holly Rexroat-Carrow around during her Vogue shoots in Rio and on the moon, the same that drifted after Anathema Knolls down the red carpet and all the way back to her Budapest penthouse. When it floated up out of the biowrap packaging, whirring and winking its beautiful electric blue eye, Marisol felt like she was floating, too, felt like her heart was a balloon that might pop from too much happiness.

“Mama, I love it, I love you, I love it…” She turned to the floor-to-ceiling German smart mirror, where her mother smiled down at her serenely like a redermed Mona Lisa. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome, cielo,” she said. “It’s loaded with your snap and filter preferences. You just have to stand still and let it imprint now, cielo.”

Marisol stood as still as she could with excitement jangling up and down her body. The Razzibot—her Razzibot—rose to head height over the small mountain of clothes and bags and shreds of shrivelling biowrap, all the presents that her father had dutifully watched her open before he slouched back to his virtual conference in Seoul.

There was a little electronic warble as the Razzibot made a full orbit around her head, then the blue light flared even brighter.

“Marisol Midnight D’Souza,” it chirped. It drifted to the left, to get her good side, and Marisol felt her eyes brimming with tears of joy.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said.

“Yes, yes, you’re welcome,” her mother said. Her voice turned sweet and slippery. “Now, cielo, tell me, please, what your papa’s been up to while I’m away?”

Rumors webbed down the peninsula through pirate shortwaves and whispered conversations. The Cloud was approaching. The Cloud was going to make a pass near the village.

Old solar laptops were taken out of hiding to charge in the watery morning sunlight. Rootkits were dug up from cellars and refurbished. Men and women pored over manuals with their cheeks brushing, and Old Derozan surprised everyone when he pulled eight thumb drives from his hollow cane, one by one, and laid them glinting on the floor.

His grandson, Solomon, was tasked with watching for the black government trucks that sometimes fought their way over the moor. Solomon had never seen the Cloud, but the anticipation was like a hantavirus. He grew to love the idea so much that his father agreed to take him out on the night, up to the knoll where they would have a good view. Old Derozan snorted at this and said they would do just as well to stay indoors. The signal would reach and there would be less chance of attracting unwanted attention.

Solomon’s father was closer to childhood, and so he kept awake with mate and caffeine sprays until midnight dropped cold over the village. Then he put the precious tablet and its rubber casing into a nylon bag, the straps of which he tightened on Solomon’s narrow shoulders, and they climbed the knoll.

The moon was a shard of scoured bone. Solomon’s small chest was hollowed out with night. He let the sea breezes slap his face while his father booted up the tablet. His young ears picked up the hum first, and he tried not to shout when the Cloud crested over their heads.

The flock of machines dipped and slid like quicksilver, aloft on synchronized rotors. Some were caked in birdshit and others scarred black by the deaths of their comrades to LAMS, but the Cloud had slipped border successfully once more. As Solomon watched, carmine eyes began to blink in the blue-black sky and the tablet on his father’s knees came awash with light.

Solomon tried to listen as his father explained the link-up, the web, but he couldn’t. He was mesmerized by the torrent of sounds and images pouring across the screen. Flesh slapping flesh, crowds of foreigners burning cars, bristles sliding across bright white teeth. Music and voices came in clipped spurts through a disused speaker.

The screen said it was downloading, downloading, downloading. Solomon’s father said there was a message from his uncle, the one who had faked his papers and shipped out on a rusty schooner.

The deluge went on and on, and Solomon could see badly-concealed lights down in the village, shadows rushing from door to door to share the invisible rain as they caught, collected. But slowly, inexorably, the red pinpricks began to blink out. The machines drifted east.

Solomon watched the tablet until it froze and his father swore, but not so angrily. Then both of them sat and rubbed their eyes and watched the Cloud disperse, until the moor sky was empty but tinged rawpink with dawn.

So the semester’s wickest wildest party, bar none, is happening at the straight-up palatial house of Hamza Hamidi, AKA Spitt4style, whose way-too-trusting parents are currently scuba-diving in Venice. And I’m not only going to be there, I’m going to Be There, as in, running shit, because I just dropped all my savings pirating the baddest Socialight personality module on the market: the freshly-leaked Maestro 2.0.

This thing is like, borderline AI, the kind of mod billionaires and celebrities are going to be running. I never would have found it by myself, but my uncle is a huge data-criminal sparkhead who caught the leak and agreed to ship me a stick copy in exchange for every last bit of my blood-sweat-and-shears summer landscaping income, and also me not telling my mom.

Not that I would. She would want to know why I was wasting my savings on digital charisma, because she read on ZenFeed that those new mods are way too invasive, and besides, she didn’t have a Socialight or a personality module in high school, everybody ran freestyle 24/7, and they all turned out just deadly. I love her and all, but Christ.

She’s got a late one at the hospital, so she’s not around when the little yellow Amazombie careens off the backyard trampoline and scares the piss out of our cat. I’m picking the package out of the dandelions when Dyl shows up all sweaty from a skate sesh.

He always forgets to ping when he’s coming over; I think maybe because he got his Socialight so late. Before fifth grade he actually hung with the freestylers, the religious wackos or kids too poor to get even the basic-basic. He’s still my best friend since forever, so whatever.

“What’s good, Shad?” Dyl says, snatching up his board with one lanky hand and raking through his orange hair with the other. He spots the data stick in my fist. “Yo, you ordered the Buttafly trial on stick? I thought we were going to download it on the way to the party.”

“This is no Buttafly,” I say. “Something heaps better, bru.”

Dyl shrugs. “Raw, raw. Can I use your bathroom?”

I lead the way down to my basement and flop on the couch, rolling the two Maestro sticks over and over in my fingers, while Dyl takes his sweet fucking time in the shower. After fifteen minutes I start pinging him, but sometimes the old ways are best, right, so finally I haul off the couch, bang my hand on the door and politely shout:

“Yo, Dildo, hurry the fuck up.”

The shower squeaks off and Dyl comes out with the guest towel around his waist and his middle finger raised. “Antsy, boy,” he says. “You been spamming Wendee like that?”

Dyl’s got one of those slack sort of faces and he freestyle laughs like a hyena, but he’s no shitwit. I am antsy. And it is because of Wendee.

I start cleaning out my Socialight port with compressed air, getting ready for the upload, while Dyl takes his frayed backpack into my room to get ready. He comes out dressed and holding the Vancouver Whitecaps hat I borrowed from him and never returned.

“Fucking bandit,” he says, settling it on his head.

I’m too antsy to feel guilty. My leg is like, jumping. I hold up the stick drives to the crooked solar lamp, checking the contact points one last time.

“Yo.” Dyl frowns, flopping down on the couch beside me. “What exactly are we running here, Shad?”

“Maestro two-point-fucking-oh,” I say, grinning way wide. “Leaked.”

Dyl looks suitably impressed, but the tips of his ears go lava red how they do when he’s nervous. “Bru, that’s some serious black market shit.”

“It’s safe as houses,” I say, not actually knowing, and hand him his stick. “Got it from my uncle. You ready?”

I hold up my Maestro, solemn-like, and he does the same, still looking a little sketched. We clack the plastic together.

“Uh, cheers,” he says.

“See you flipside.” Then I touch it to my Socialight port, sliding it into the cheekbone under my eye, until it gives a thick click.

Holyfuckingshit.

Imagine dumping a 2-liter of fizzy shook-up pop into a birthday balloon, and that’s your brain implant downloading Maestro: this huge rush of crackly code tsunamiing your skull, swelling and sparking and feeling like it’s about to spew out your fucking ear canals. When it settles I’m just keeled back on the couch, totally boneless, blinking code, and I see Dyl beside me looking equally skull-pulped.

Then it turns on, and all that fizzy pop crystallizes all at once into cold sweet ice. It feels like, whoa. You know how your average personality mod, it’s a little niggle in the back of your mind? Like, hey, bru, maybe don’t wear that shirt again. Maybe don’t tell that joke until you have the punchline down. Someone mopped the gym hallway, maybe don’t slip and fall like an idiot.

Maestro 2.0 is like: I’m the You you always wanted to be, and now you’re Me. And this is How We Do.

I swivel to Dyl, who’s swiveling right in synch, and we give each other the slickest quickest finger-twisting handshake I’ve never seen in my life, along with hugely shit-eating grins.

“Yo,” I say. “This is going to be good.”

And for the first time, I think I absolutely have a chance with Wendee, who is basically the whole reason for why I’m going to the party, and also for why the universe exists.

Let me back up.

“Do you have to wear the Fawkes in here?” Girasol asked, sliding into the orthochair. Its worn wings crinkled, leaking silicon, as it adjusted to her shape. The plastic stuck cold to her shoulder blades and she shivered.

“No.” Pierce made no move to pull off the smirking mask. “It makes you nervous,” he explained, groping around in the guts of his open Adidas track-bag, his tattooed hand emerging with the hypnotic. “That’s a good enough reason to wear it.”

Girasol didn’t argue, just tipped her dark head back, positioning herself over the circular hole they’d punched through the headrest. Beneath it, a bird’s nest of circuitry, mismatched wiring, blinking blue nodes. And in the center of the nest: the neural jack, gleaming wet with disinfectant jelly.

She let the slick white port at the top of her spine snick open.

“No cheap sleep this time,” Pierce said, flicking his nail against the inky vial. “Get ready for a deep slice, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s got your shit. Highest-grade Dozr a man can steal.” He plugged it into a battered needler, motioned for her arm. “I get a kiss or what?”

Girasol proffered her bruised wrist. Let him hunt around collapsed veins while she said, coldly, “Don’t even think about touching me when I’m under.”

Pierce chuckled, slapping her flesh, coaxing a pale blue worm to stand out in her white skin. “Or what?”

Girasol’s head burst as the hypnotic went in, flooding her capillaries, working over her neurotransmitters. “Or I’ll cut your fucking balls off.”

The Fawkes’s grin loomed silent over her; a brief fear stabbed through the descending drug. Then he laughed again, barking and sharp, and Girasol knew she had not forgotten how to speak to men like Pierce. She tasted copper in her mouth as the Dozr settled.

“Just remember who got you out of Correctional,” Pierce said. “And that if you screw this up, you’d be better off back in the freeze. Sweet dreams.”

The mask receded, and Girasol’s eyes drifted up the wall, following the cabling that crept like vines from the equipment under her skull, all the way through a crack gouged in the ceiling, and from there to whatever line Pierce’s cronies had managed to splice. The smartpaint splashed across the grimy stucco displayed months of preparation: shifting sat-maps, decrypted dossiers, and a thousand flickering image loops of one beautiful young man with silver hair.

Girasol lowered the chair. Her toes spasmed, kinking against each other as the thrumming neural jack touched the edge of her port. The Dozr kept her breathing even. A bone-deep rasp, a meaty click, and she was synched, simulated REM brain-wave flowing through a current of code, flying through wire, up and out of the shantytown apartment, flitting like a shade into Chicago’s dark cityscape.

At the roof of the world, the Drill churned and churned. Four Warm Currents watched with eyes and mouth, overlaying the engine’s silhouette with quicksilver sketches of sonar. Long, twisting shards of ice bloomed from the metal bit to float back along the carved tunnel. Workers with skin glowing acid yellow, hazard visibility, jetted out to meet the debris and clear it safely to the sides. Others monitored the mesh of machinery that turned the bit, smoothing contact points, spinning cogs. The whole thing was beautiful, efficient, and made Four Warm Currents secrete anticipation in a flavored cloud.

A sudden needle of sonar, pitched high enough to sting, but not so high that it couldn’t be passed off as accidental. Four Warm Currents knew it was Nine Brittle Spines before even tasting the name in the water.

“Does it move faster with you staring at it?” Nine Brittle Spines signed, tentacles languid with humor-not-humor.

“No faster, no slower,” Four Warm Currents replied, forcing two tentacles into a curled smile. “The Drill is as inexorable as our dedication to its task.”

“Dedication is admirable, as said the ocean’s vast cold to one volcano’s spewing heat.” Nine Brittle Spines’s pebbly skin illustrated, flashing red for a brief instant before regaining a dark cobalt hue.

“You are still skeptical.” Four Warm Currents clenched tight to keep distaste from inking the space between them. Nine Brittle Spines was a council member, and not one to risk offending. “But the ice’s composition is changing, as I reported. The bit shears easier with every turn. We’re approaching the other side.”

“So it thins, and so it will thicken again.” Nine Brittle Spines wriggled dismissal. “The other side is a deep dream, Four Warm Currents. Your machine is approaching more ice.”

“The calculations,” Four Warm Currents protested. “The sounding. If you would read the theorems—”

Nine Brittle Spines hooked an interrupting tentacle through the thicket of movement. “No need for your indignation. I have no quarrel with the Drill. It’s a useful sideshow, after all. It keeps the eyes and mouths of the colony fixated while the council slides its decisions past unhindered.”

“If you have no quarrel, then why do you come here?” Four Warm Currents couldn’t suck back the words, or the single droplet of ichor that suddenly wobbled into the water between them. It blossomed there into a ghostly black wreath. Four Warm Currents raked a hasty tentacle through to disperse it, but the councillor was already tasting the chemical, slowly, pensively.

“I have no quarrel, Four Warm Currents, but others do.” Nine Brittle Spines swirled the bitter emission around one tentacle tip, as if it were a pheromone poem or something else to be savored. Four Warm Currents, mortified, could do nothing but turn an apologetic mottled blue, almost too distracted to process what the councillor signed next.

“While the general opinion is that you have gone mad, and that your project is a hilariously inept allocation of time and resources based only on your former contributions, theories do run the full gamut. Some believe the Drill is seeking mineral deposits in the ice. Others believe the Drill will be repurposed as a weapon, to crack through the fortified cities of the vent-dwelling colonies.” Nine Brittle Spines shaped a derisive laugh. “And there is even a small but growing tangent who believe in your theorems. Who believe that you are fast approaching the mythic other side, and that our ocean will seep out of the puncture like the viscera from a torn egg, dooming us all.”

“The weight of the ocean will hold it where it is,” Four Warm Currents signed, a sequence by now rote to the tentacles. “The law of sink and rise is one you’ve surely studied.”

“Once again, my opinion is irrelevant to the matter,” Nine Brittle Spines replied. “I am here because this radical tangent is believed to be targeting your project for sabotage. The council wishes to protect its investment.” Tentacles pinwheeled in a slight hesitation, then: “You yourself may be in danger as well. The council advises you to keep a low profile. Perhaps change your name taste.”

“I am not afraid for my life.” Four Warm Currents signed it firmly and honestly. The project was more important than survival. More important than anything.

“Then fear, perhaps, for your mate’s children.”

Four Warm Currents flashed hot orange shock, bright enough for the foreman to glance over, concerned. “What?”

Nine Brittle Spines held up the tentacle tip that had tasted Four Warm Currents’s anger. “Traces of ingested birth mucus. Elevated hormones. You should demonstrate more self-control, Four Warm Currents. You give away all sorts of secrets.”

The councillor gave a lazy salute, then jetted off into the gloom, joined at a distance by two bodyguards with barbed tentacles. Four Warm Currents watched them vanish down the tunnel, then slowly turned back toward the Drill. The bit churned and churned. Four Warm Currents’s mind churned with it.

“All That Robot Shit” started gestating back when I was nine years old and obsessed with LEGO’s Bionicle toys. I loved the idea of advanced robots on a tropical island developing their own culture, religion, and rudimentary technology. When I started writing seriously a decade later, I knew I wanted to take that concept for a spin.

The seed of the story lingered in a notebook for years. In 2011 I had something quite philosophical in mind, shades of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra and some Lord of the Flies. It ended with the shipwrecked human being eaten by his mechanical companions after they decide that he is not a true person, only an animal.

But when I finally wrote the story in 2016, “All That Robot Shit” became a bittersweet potty-mouthed bromance instead of a depressing philosophical treatise. I can’t say I mind—this work is one of my personal favorites.

I know I was going to school in Edmonton when I wrote “Atrophy,” but I don’t remember much about the process. The eyeball replacement was definitely inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and by “They Trade in Eyes,” a Christopher Ruz short story.

In a way, “Atrophy” is responsible for introducing me to the speculative fiction community at large. I sent it to the Dell Award on a whim, but when it was named a runner-up, I took the opportunity to escape blizzard-struck Edmonton for a weekend. (The Dell Awards are presented at ICFA, a conference that takes place yearly in balmy Orlando.)

It was at ICFA that I met the editor of Asimov’s, Sheila Williams, along with a host of writers and other professionals in the field. Putting faces to names was really cool, and I’ve returned to Orlando for the conference weekend several times since.

This was the first story I ever had published, back in 2011 in a tiny, long-gone webzine whose name is lost to my memory. It later featured in a self-published Kindle collection that was a magnificent flop.

Despite that, I still have warm feelings for “Every So Often.” I wrote it during my one year in Providence, Rhode Island, when I was just starting to be aware of my writing as something people might want to publish—and pay me for. This was also long before anyone told me Hitler time-travel stories had already been done to death.

“Ghost Girl” was inspired by two disparate sources: a news article about the persecution of people with albinism in Sub-Saharan Africa, due to the belief that their severed body parts have magical properties, and the Big Daddy/Little Sister element of the video game BioShock. Those ideas intertwined and produced the story’s central image of a little albino girl, picking through a scrapyard, with a hulking mechanical protector looming behind her.

I did some research for the setting, which is Burundi, but not as much as I might do now. For sensory details, I mostly used my memories of growing up in Niger: the throngs of scrawny goats and mopeds, the mud-brick walls topped with broken glass to deter burglars, the man with no nose, and of course the climactic dust storm.

This flash was inspired by a walk to the gym in early winter, under a sky that was perfectly blank and colorless in all directions.

Pattaya was probably the city I liked least when I was in Thailand during summer 2013, but it also made the most lasting impression. It’s the only place I’ve ever described as lurid. It’s also cyberpunk enough, with its neon hubbub and seedy nightlife, that I didn’t need to dial things up very much while writing “You Make Pattaya.”

This story racked up quite a few rejections before it found a home in Interzone, which makes its subsequent Year’s Best appearances and translation a pleasant surprise. Sometimes people get tired of heart-wrenching or thought-provoking and really just want to read a fun con caper.

I wrote “Extraction Request” while staying at my grandma’s house for Christmas 2015, but I never gave it to her to read—the ending is her least favorite kind. The plot is basically Halo: Combat Evolved, or Aliens or any number of action movies where soldiers are faced with an unexpected and monstrous foe. My original plan was to knock the characters off one at a time, but it was taking too long, so I did them in clusters and then had the last two commit suicide.

More so than plot, the thing that draws me to military science fiction is the cool technology. The hardware in this story is heavily influenced by the 2013 movie Riddick, which I watched while drunk enough to convince myself it was pretty good.

My roommate got me hooked on NBA basketball during my year in Rhode Island. I’ve been a Timberwolves fan ever since, which has proven to be a pretty masochistic pursuit. Until this season. I hope.

Blending sci-fi and basketball didn’t occur to me for quite some time, but when it did, it seemed obvious. Writing “Meshed” was a ton of fun. I got a kick out of referencing then-rookie Giannis Antetokounmpo and then-YouTube sensation Thon Maker.

The climactic one-on-one is obviously inspired by He Got Game, but also by late nights playing on outdoor courts back in high school, and by Bruce Brooks’s The Moves Make the Man, a novel that got inside my head as a kid and never really left. “Meshed” was also the first story I got a film rights inquiry for. It came to nothing, of course, but it was a bit of a rite of passage.

This one is a mishmash of Dead Space, Alien, and that level in Halo 3 with all the sphincters. I managed to indulge both my artsy and my immature sides: there’s a “wayyy up there” Rick and Morty reference not long after an homage to Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

The first draft, written back in 2015, was a total mess. There was a lot of schlucking about through the ship’s innards while the protagonists bickered and offered various theories on what happened to the original crew—not very genre-savvy of them.

I sent my bad draft to the late, great Kit Reed, who rightly suggested major surgery. “Take out a few yards of intestine and work out the psychology” is some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. Two summers later, while staying at my grandma’s, I finally sat down and wrote a new draft. The result is a hell of a lot smoother. Thanks, Kit.

This flash was inspired by an aborted romance.

This story was definitely written in Edmonton, judging by the protagonist’s LRT journey, but it also draws on memories of Grande Prairie—my first job was at Superstore, where I spent quite a bit of time poling cardboard into the dry compactor. I don’t have a clear memory of writing “Dreaming Drones,” so it was a pleasant surprise when I stumbled across it.

I like the slow sleepwalking pace, and the slight twists on the typical story of a robot who wants to be human. These stories aren’t really about robots. I think they’re about the universal human experience of feeling different, feeling not quite accepted or not quite on the same wavelength as everyone else, and how subtly painful that can be.

I banged out “Let’s Take This Viral” over the course of a weekend with a feeling of absolute freedom. Because it’s set on an artificial space station in the far future, I indulged one of my problematic writing habits, which is creating an avalanche of invented vocabulary and throwing the reader right into the thick of it. I love playing with language, and this was a perfect opportunity.

The characters in this story are both very resonant for me: the less-fun, less-adventurous friend seeking stability, and the hedonist driven by a need for salience. “Let’s Take This Viral” is essentially about the possible pitfalls of immortality, about everything becoming so recycled and so stagnant that the only change left is death. I’ve always been scared of dying, but just as scared of an afterlife—heaven or hell—that never ends.

The ending of this story is probably my favorite of any I’ve written thus far.

When I was a little kid I had a VHS called Spider-Man: The Venom Saga that compiled three episodes of the 90s Spider-Man cartoon into a full-length film. I remember watching it obsessively in my grandparents’ trailer until it became a sort of story archetype for me: the mysterious organism that grants power at a price, the initial thrill, the slow realization, the jealousy that turns deadly—it all got very deeply ingrained in my brain.

Years later, The Spectacular Spider-Man reignited my forgotten fascination and I decided to write “Brute.” The name of the titular organism comes from Til We Have Faces, a book by C.S. Lewis that is one of my all-time favorite works. I have a love for this story that others might not share. It’s tailored specifically to my childhood self. It goes into all those old places in my brain and flicks all the dusty switches.

One of the best things about putting together this collection has been the chance to give readers a look at stories of mine that flew under the radar. “Your Own Way Back” was one of my first professional publications, but it’s also one of the most emotional pieces I’ve ever written.

The name of the main character, and his love for swimming, both come from the brilliant book Inventing Elliot by Graham Gardner. The central conceit comes from a dream I had, where a family was waiting with red balloons in a hospital where there was a machine that brought people back from the dead—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

Originally this poem was set on the Moon, but the physics didn’t match up right with the images I wanted so I had to switch over to an unnamed asteroid.

Like most of my stories, “Capricorn” is an amalgamation of works I’ve consumed in the past. In this case, it’s mostly a mash-up of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (futuristic prison, cryostorage, shivs, violence) and Breaking Bad (rogue chemists, mortal illness, drugs, violence).

One of the small thrills of writing is being able to establish an ultimate badass in any given universe. In this one, it’s the eponymous Capricorn, who hardly appears at all. I liked the idea of having a character hang over the whole story and influence its events without ever being physically present.

“Edited” is based off a very vivid dream I had in 2014, which birthed not only this story but also “Spiked” in Abyss & Apex and “Masked” in Asimov’s.

The dream was of three teenagers breaking into a parent’s summer rental, a sort of organic cabin made of coral, in order to party. There was a nervous energy to the proceedings, because one of the teens had changed, or had been changed, in some way, and the other two were unsure how to treat them.

In the dream it was unclear if they were recovering from an accident, if they had been modified by an outside force without their consent, or if they had done something surprising to themselves.

“Edited” shows one possibility.

This is the most recent work in the collection—I wrote it in September 2017. It began gestating much earlier, however, jotted down in my idea repository as sentient trains crisscross a desert long after the collapse of civilization. The inspiration for this image comes, of course, from Mario Kart 64.

I was playing the drinking version of this game at a friend’s house, and the Kalimari Desert level struck me, for the first time, as a post-apocalyptic wasteland where sentient trains and roaming smart mines (those annoying little bombs on wheels) were the only survivors.

I’m hopeful that “Circuits” still has some of the fun factor of its originator, despite the bleak setting. My grandma liked it.

I was mulling over the concepts for quite a while before I wrote it, thinking about the hyper-self-awareness of Instagram and how the logical extreme of a selfie would be observing yourself in third person at all times. I had the chance to talk this concept over with my writer/lawyer friend Sandra while I was visiting her in Porto.

A few months later, I sent her “Razzibot,” which I had decided to set in her hometown. She corrected all the small Portuguese details I’d butchered and told me I was welcome to come back for natas anytime.

“Razzibot” is one of those stories people will ding for not having an essential speculative element, but I’ve never really bought into that. I view science fiction as a collection of aesthetics, and I loved infusing the future aesthetic into one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to.

I wrote this flash before I bothered learning what cloud computing actually entails.

Like “Edited,” this one draws heavily on my high school experience. Everything from the physics class to the basement where our protagonists download Maestro 2.0 to the neighborhood of the house party will seem strangely familiar to any friends of mine from high school. I even forgot to change Dyl’s name, but he won’t mind.

The retroparty itself is based off the most memorable party of grade twelve. Someone stole the host’s Xbox; a girl refused to come out from under a parked car; a guy from Detroit brought a gun; the cops put a hole through the bathroom door trying to extract a couple reluctant to stop partying. I left wearing one of my shoes and one of someone else’s. It was a good night.

The core concept for this one comes from Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon series, while the mastermind-bodyguard duo is inspired by Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books, which I devoured as a kid.

It took a long time for “An Evening with Severyn Grimes” to see daylight, due to the collapse of the ambitious magazine that originally bought the story. I actually wrote it back in 2013, while living in Edmonton and working at a small Liquor Depot. We didn’t do much business on the best days, and Sundays were positively glacial.

I remember I brought this freshly-finished story to work on my laptop and gave it to my co-worker Jordin to read. About thirty seconds in, he looked up at me, raised both eyebrows, and said “whoa.” He didn’t come out of the back office until he finished the whole thing.

Well, this is it. I remember two things about writing “Innumerable Glimmering Lights”: the endless gymnastics I had to do in order to avoid pronouns, and how organically the title drop arrived, as if it had been there all along. Aquatic aliens have always been one of my favorite varieties, and the characters’ overlong names take inspiration from K.A. Applegate’s Remnants series.

I also have one very clear memory linked to this story, and it’s from a conference weekend in Orlando. It was a beautiful warm night, and I was sitting on the edge of the pool with a friend, both of us dangling our legs in the water. The editor of Clockwork Phoenix 5, Mike Allen, showed up, introduced himself and handed me a copy to sign for a special edition. It was the first time I signed something I’d written, and I got this thought, like, yeah, this writer thing is really happening.

I hope it keeps happening for a long, long time.

First off, I want to thank the excellent Cory Allyn and the whole team at Talos Press, without whom Tomorrow Factory would still be a pipedream. I’m also grateful to the wide variety of editors who loved these stories enough to publish them the first time around, and to the friends and family who read them in their earliest forms.

Big thanks go out to James Patrick Kelly, a hell of a writer who writes a hell of an intro, and to two other mentors who passed too soon: Gardner Dozois and Kit Reed, both of whom gave me invaluable career advice and brought my work into the spotlight whenever they could.

Lastly, I want to thank all the readers who have supported my work and who helped determine, directly or indirectly, which stories made it into Tomorrow Factory. So long as you keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them, and there’s plenty left in the tank.

“All That Robot Shit,” originally published as “All That Robot…” in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2016. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (Ed. Rich Horton, Prime Books). Winner of the 2017 Asimov’s Readers’ Poll Award for Best Short Story. Longlisted for the 2017 Sunburst Award for Best Short Story.

“Atrophy,” originally published in Descant (2014). Second Runner-up for the 2013 Dell Award.

“Every So Often,” originally published in Birdwell Magazine, 2011. Reprinted in Datafall: Collected Speculative Fiction (2012, self-published).

“Ghost Girl,” originally published in War Stories: New Military Science Fiction (2014, Ed. Jaym Gates, Andrew Liptak, Apex Publications). Republished in audio form by StarShipSofa (2017, narrated by Elie Hirschman). Translated into Italian by Future Fiction.

“The Sky Didn’t Load Today,” originally published in Daily Science Fiction, February 2015. Reprinted by The Fulcrum (2017).

“You Make Pattaya,” originally published in Interzone #267, November-December 2016. Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (2017, Ed. Neil Clarke, Night Shade Books), and The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume Eleven (2017, Ed. Jonathan Strahan, Solaris). Translated into Chinese by Science Fiction World, 2017, and Polish by Nowa Fantastyka, 2018.

“Extraction Request,” originally published in Clarkesworld #112, January 2016. Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (2017, Ed. Neil Clarke, Night Shade Books). Translated into Chinese by Future Affairs Administration.

“Meshed,” originally published in Clarkesworld #101, February 2015. Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 1 (2016, Ed. Neil Clarke, Night Shade Books), The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016, Ed. Gardner Dozois, St. Martin’s Griffin), and The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 29 (2106, Ed. Gardner Dozois, Constable & Robinson). Translated into Polish by Nowa Fantastyka.

“The Ghost Ship Anastasia,” originally published in Clarkesworld #124, January 2017. Translated into Czech by XB-1.

“Chronology of Heartbreak,” originally published in Daily Science Fiction, October 2013.

“Dreaming Drones,” originally published in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, 2014.

“Let’s Take This Viral,” originally published in Lightspeed, March 2013. Reprinted in Great Jones Street. Translated into Italian by Future Fiction.

“Brute,” originally published in Apex, November 2014.

“Your Own Way Back,” originally published in Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction (2013, Ed. Erin Underwood, Hannah Strom-Martin, Underwords Press). Translated into Italian by Future Fiction.

“I Went to the Asteroid to Bury You,” originally published in Abyss & Apex, 2015.

“Capricorn,” originally published in Abyss & Apex, 2014.

“Edited,” originally published in Interzone #259, July/August 2015. Reprinted in Wilde Stories 2016: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (2106, Ed. Steve Berman, Lethe Press).

“Circuits,” original to this collection.

“Razzibot,” originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2018.

“Datafall,” originally published in poem form in Strange Horizons, November 2013. Revised and published in its current form in Datafall: Collected Speculative Fiction (2012, self-published).

“Motherfucking Retroparty Freestyle,” originally published as “M.F.ing Retroparty Freestyle” in Escape Pod #514, December 2015.

“An Evening with Severyn Grimes,” originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July-August 2017. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018, Ed. Gardner Dozois, St. Martin’s Griffin), The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 3 (2018, Ed. Neil Clarke, Night Shade Books), The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume Twelve (2018, Ed. Jonathan Strahan, Solaris), and The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 10 (2018, Ed. Allan Kaster, Infinivox).

“Innumerable Glimmering Lights,” originally published in Clockwork Phoenix 5 (2016, Ed. Mike Allen, Mythic Delirium Books). Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017, Ed. Gardner Dozois, St. Martin’s Griffin) and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (Ed. Rich Horton, Prime Books).

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. Since he began writing in 2011, he’s sold over a hundred stories, the majority of them speculative fiction published in magazines like Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com.

His work also appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, French, and Italian. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015 and 2016, and possibly 2017 as well. Besides writing, he enjoys travelling, learning languages, playing soccer, watching basketball, shooting pool, and dancing salsa and kizomba.

His debut novel, Annex, was published by Orbit Books in July 2018. Tomorrow Factory is his debut collection. Find more at richwlarson.tumblr.com and support him via patreon.com/richlarson.

Copyright © 2018 Rich Larson

See page 303 for an extension of this copyright page.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Larson, Rich, 1992- author.

Title: Tomorrow factory : collected fiction / Rich Larson.

Description: New York : Talos Press, [2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031356 (print) | LCCN 2017041862 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945863318 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781945863301 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781945863400 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Speculative fiction, Canadian. | Science fiction, Canadian.

Classification: LCC PR9199.4.L375 (ebook) | LCC PR9199.4.L375 A6 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031356

Cover artwork by Alejandro Colucci

Cover design by Claudia Noble

Printed in the United States of America