The New Voices of Science Fiction collects stories by writers whom Hannu Rajaniemi and I believe will become increasingly important in the years to come. All the stories in this volume were published quite recently, after 2014, and the writers themselves for the most part are new to their success. Many of these writers will be writing and publishing their first novels in the next few years, while some, including Rebecca Roanhorse, Sam J. Miller, Sarah Pinsker, and Rich Larson, are already on their way.

Another talented group of up-and-coming writers was featured in The New Voices of Fantasy, which I co-edited with the legendary fantasist Peter S. Beagle. It came out in 2017 and won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology. The book collected stories by several authors whose careers have taken off, including Carmen Maria Machado, Brooke Bolander, and Hannu Rajaniemi, to name just a few.

In 1977, a youthful George R. R. Martin took up the mantle of anthologies dedicated to younger writers, publishing several volumes centered around the John W. Campbell Award, which is given at the annual Hugo Award ceremony to the best new writer. Martin published work by himself, Lisa Tuttle, George Alec Effinger, Suzy McKee Charnas, Spider Robinson, and John Varley, among others. Martin’s series ran five volumes in all, ending in 1987.

The New Voices of Science Fiction is very much of this particular moment in the genre. If we had commissioned it ten years earlier, you would perhaps have seen such now-famous stories as Charles Stross’s “Accerlando” (or my personal Stross favorite, “Tourists,” which Stross calls “a case of hit-and-run amnesia”). You may have found “Calorie Man” or “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi, early in his career. And, if the anthology had been truly attuned to what was happening at the time, you just may have discovered a truly breathtaking story, “Deus Ex Homine,” by an unknown writer named Hannu Rajaniemi.

So, what is the new generation of science-fiction writers up to? With Jamie Wahls, it’s the witty “Utopia, LOL??” about an everyman who finds himself in a future that he is incapable of comprehending. Alice Sola Kim takes Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” on a test drive through time, “One Hour, Every Seven Years.” In “Mother Tongues,” S. Qiouyi Lu shows to what new lengths a mother may go to sacrifice for her daughter. And with “Openness,” Alexander Weinstein demonstrates the ultimate potentials of social media.

With these twenty fabulous stories, writers Amal El-Mohtar, Kelly Robson, Lettie Prell, Suzanne Palmer, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, and others show that the future of science fiction is in sure hands—and that, like the real future, it’s only a brief matter of time before it arrives.

I certainly did not feel like a new voice when my first novel, The Quantum Thief, came out almost a decade ago. I only had the faintest idea that I even had a voice, except for the chorus of worry, self-doubt, and guilt in my head. I simply wrote about my obsessions—physics, gentleman thieves, chocolate, game theory—and filtered them through the idiosyncrasies of a second-language writer grappling with translating Finnish idioms into English. Somehow, that mess resonated with a wide readership across the world, and I am forever grateful for that.

But even now, several books and many stories later, I find the concept of a writerly voice elusive. The most adroit writers have the power to disappear, existing only as people and worlds conjured in our heads like waking dreams. And if the voice is the distillation of one’s worldview, an approximation of one’s consciousness, then finding it may be as difficult as locating the seat of the self—or its absence—in deep meditation.

But I do know what the writers who have shaped me sound like. What was novel in my own voice was a distorted echo of Finnish mythology, Jules Verne, Maurice Leblanc, Tove Jansson, Roger Zelazny; British space opera writers like Iain Banks and Charles Stross; and many more. I fell in love with them and was changed by them. The truly new voices—whether chronologically recent or simply discovered by the reader for the first time—do that, and more. A new voice says something previously unspoken and true about the world around us. A new voice makes us want to imitate it, to amplify it, to join it in a chorus. A new voice wakes us to the fact that things are no longer the same.

All the stories in this volume have that power of waking: an original thematic scope, a tonal freshness. They make you a little uncomfortable. These writers are native to a strange world where science-fictional inventions are injected into the veins of the mundane on a daily basis, and political reality out does satire. It is a world of contradictions: of vast slow-burning threats and sudden bone-cracking transformations. It is a world that mixes utopian dreams with brutal greed, that embraces diversity while walking over the weak. It is a complex world that cannot be defined by a single new perspective.

This anthology assembles a chorus of storytellers who are up to the task of capturing the essence of our world’s present and future. They refuse to be contained in one genre, but what they do is unmistakably science fiction. Yet they are not satisfied with using well-worn tropes of SF, such as time travel—or shinier speculative machinery, such as the Singularity—just as cold thought experiments, but they repurpose these ideas into deep explorations of gender, love, and identity. There are stories about contemporary nightmares like social media and climate change, but they have a clarity and attention to human detail that go beyond Black Mirror–esque cautionary tales. They don’t hesitate to confront pain and willingly walk into the dark, but they also guide us back from it—and sometimes to laugh uproariously at the absurdity of it all.

And finally, these authors show us the new new things, from global cataclysms to personal transformations that get us lost in entirely unprecedented landscapes. They will, no doubt, inspire fresh writerly talent, and make us readers hungry for new kinds of stories we did not even know we wanted.

They are here to wake us, by giving us new waking dreams. Read them, and be changed.

BEFORE I DECIDED to finally give up on New York, I subbed classes at a junior high in Brooklyn. A sixth grade math teacher suffering from downloading anxiety was out for the year, and jobs being what they were, I took any opportunity I could. Subbing math was hardly my dream job; I had a degree in visual art, for which I’d be in debt for the rest of my life. All I had to show for it was my senior collection, a series of paintings of abandoned playgrounds, stored in a U-Pack shed in Ohio. There was a time when I’d imagined I’d become famous, give guest lectures at colleges, and have retrospectives at MoMA. Instead, I found myself standing in front of a class of apathetic tweens, trying to teach them how to do long division without accessing their browsers. I handed out pen and paper, so that for once in their lives they’d have a tactile experience, and watched as they texted, their eyes glazed from blinking off message after message. They spent most of the class killing vampires and orcs inside their heads and humoring me by lazily filling out my photocopies.

The city overwhelmed me. Every day I’d walk by hundreds of strangers, compete for space in crowded coffee shops, and stand shoulder to shoulder on packed subway cars. I’d scan profiles, learning that the woman waiting for the N enjoyed thrash-hop, and the barista at my local coffee shop loved salted caramel. I’d had a couple fleeting relationships, but mostly I’d spend weekends going to bars and sleeping with people who knew little more than my username. It all made me want to turn off my layers, go back to the old days, and stay disconnected. But you do that and you become another old guy buried in an e-reader, complaining about how no one sends emails anymore.

So I stayed open, shared the most superficial info of my outer layer with the world, and filtered through everyone I passed, hoping to find some connection. Here was citycat5, jersygirl13, m3love. And then, one morning, there was Katie, sitting across from me on the N. She was lakegirl03, and her hair fell from under her knit cap. The only other info I could access was her hometown and that she was single.

Hi, I winked, and when I realized she had her tunes on, I sent off an invite. She raised her eyes.

Hi, she winked back.

You’re from Maine? I’m planning a trip there this summer. Any suggestions?

She leaned forward and warmth spread across my chest from being allowed into her second layer. I’m Katie, she winked. You should visit Bar Harbor, I grew up there. She gave me access to an image of a lake house with tall silvery pines rising high above the shingled roof. Wish I could help more, but this is my stop . As she stood waiting for the doors to open, I winked a last message. Can I invite you for a drink? The train hissed, the doors opened, and she looked back at me and smiled before disappearing into the mass of early morning commuters. It was as the train sped toward work that her contact info appeared in my mind, along with a photo of her swimming in a lake at dusk.

THE YEAR 2076 SMELLS like antiseptic gauze and the lavender diffuser that Dara set up in my room. It has the bitter aftertaste of pills: probiotics and microphages and PPMOs. It feels like the itch of healing, the ache that’s settled on my pubic bone. It has the sound of a new name that’s fresh and yet familiar on my lips.

The future feels lighter than the past. I think I know why you chose it over me, Mama.

My bedroom has changed in the hundred-plus years that have passed since I slept there as a child. The floorboards have been carpeted over, torn up, replaced. The walls are thick with new layers of paint. The windows have been upgraded, the closet expanded. The oak tree that stood outside my window is gone, felled by a storm twenty years ago, I’m told. But the house still stands, and our family still lives here, with all our attendant ghosts. You and I are haunting each other, I think.

I picture you standing in the kitchen downstairs, over a century ago. I imagine that you’re staring out through the little window above the sink, your gaze traveling down the path that leads from the back door and splits at the creek; one trail leads to the pond, and the other leads to the shelter and the anachronopede, with its rows of capsules and blinking lights.

Maybe it’s the afternoon you left us. June 22, 1963: storm clouds gathering in the west, the wind picking up, the air growing heavy with the threat of rain. And you’re staring out the window, gazing across the dewy fields at the forking path, trying to decide which way you’ll take.

My bedroom is just above the kitchen, and my window has that same view, a little expanded: I can see clear down to the pond where Dad and I used to sit on his weeks off from the oil fields. It’s spring, and the cattails are only hip high. I can just make out the silhouette of a great blue heron walking along among the reeds and rushes.

You and I, we’re twenty feet and more than a hundred years apart.

You went into labor not knowing my name, which I know now is unprecedented among our family: you knew Dad’s name before you laid eyes on him, the time and date of my birth, the hospital where he would drive you when you went into labor. But my name? My sex? Conspicuously absent in Uncle Dante’s gilt-edged book where all these happy details were recorded in advance.

Dad told me later that you thought I’d be a stillbirth. He didn’t know about the record book, about the blank space where a name should go. But he told me that nothing he said while you were pregnant could convince you that I’d come into the world alive. You thought I’d slip out of you strangled and blue, already decaying.

Instead, I started screaming before they pulled me all the way out.

Dad said that even when the nurse placed me in your arms, you thought you were hallucinating. “I had to tell her, over and over: Miriam, you’re not dreaming, our daughter is alive.”

I bit my lip when he told me that, locked the words “your son” out of sight. I regret that now; maybe I could have explained myself to him. I should have tried, at least.

You didn’t name me for nearly a week.

HE’S SHIVERING as he emerges from the pod. No surprise, he was frozen for like a billion years.

I do all the stuff on the script, all the “Fear not! You are a welcomed citizen of our Utopia!” stuff while I’m toweling him off. Apparently he’s about as good as I am with awkward silence ’cause it’s not three seconds before he starts making small talk.

“So, how’d you get to be a….” He waves his hand.

“A Tour Guide to the Future?!”

“Yeah.” The guy smiles gratefully at me. “I imagine you had a lot of training…?”

“None whatsoever!” I chirp. He looks confused.

“Allocator chose me because I incidentally have the exact skills and qualifications necessary for this task, and because I had one of the highest enthusiasm scores!”

He accepts my extended hand, and steps down from the stasis tube. He coughs. Probably whatever untreatable illness put him in cryo in the first place.

“Oh, hang on a second,” I say. My uplink with Allocator tells me that the cough was noticed, and nites are inbound to remove some “cancer,” which is probably something I should look up.

I’m confused and eager to get on with my incredible Tour Guide to the Future schtick but I have to close my eyes and wait because the nites STILL aren’t here.

Patience was one of your weakest scores. But you proved you can wait. This is just like that final test Allocator put you through, the impossible one, where you could choose between one marshmallow NOW, or two marshmallows in one minute.

I quietly hum to myself while checking my messages, watching friends’ lives, placing bets on the upcoming matches of TurnIntoASnake and SeductionBowl, and simulating what my life would be like if I had a longer attention span.

It would be very different.

#Allocator: Good job waiting!

#Kit/dinaround: :D thanks!

I beam at the praise, and check my time. I waited for eleven seconds!

Pretty dang good!

The old man clears his throat.

“You poor thing,” I gush. “Your throat is messed up too! Don’t worry, the nites are here.”

He looks at me. “The… knights? I don’t see anyone.”

I cover my mouth with a hand as I giggle. “Oh, you can’t see them. Well, you probably could with the right eyes, but we’re actually in universe zero right now so the physics are really strict. The nites are in the air.”

He looks up and around at the corners of the room. He’s frowning. It makes me frown too.

“In the air,” I explain. “We’re breathing them. They’re fixing your ‘cancer.’”

He looks downright alarmed. I’m not an expert but that’s not how I think a person should react to being cured of “cancer.”

“Wow,” he says. “Is that how far medical technology has come? Some kind of… medical nanobots?”

“They’re not medical,” I say. “They’re pretty all-purpose.”

On one hand I’m sort of tired of answering his questions because it’s all really obvious stuff but also it’s really fun! It’s always super neat to watch their eyes light up as I tell them about the world and that’s probably why I got picked for the position in the first place.

“Let’s have ice cream!” I demand.

“THANK YOU VERY MUCH,” you say, concluding the oral portion of the exam. You gather your things and exit back into the brightly lit hallway. Photos line the walls: the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu. The sum shines on each destination the images brimming with wonder. You pause before the Golden Gate Bridge.

“右拐就到了,” the attendant says. You look up. His blond hair is as standardized as his Mandarin, as impeccable as his crisp shirt and tie. You’ve just proven your aptitude in English, but hearing Mandarin still puts you at ease in the way only a mother tongue does. You smile at the attendant, murmuring a brief thanks as you make your way down the hall.

You turn right and enter a consultation room. The room is small but welcoming, potted plants adding a dash of green to the otherwise plain creams and browns of the furniture and walls. A literature rack stands to one side, brochures in all kinds of languages tucked into its pockets, creating a mosaic of sights and symbols. The section just on English boasts multiple flags, names of different varieties overlaid on the designs: U.S. English–Standard. U.K. English–Received Pronunciation. Singaporean English–Standard. Nigerian English–Standard… Emblazoned on every brochure is the logo of the Linguistic Grading Society of America, a round seal with a side view of a head showing the vocal tract.

You pick up a Standard U.S. English brochure and take a seat in one of the middle chairs opposite the mahogany desk that sits before the window. The brochure provides a brief overview of the grading system; your eyes linger on the A-grade description: Speaker engages on a wide variety of topics with ease. (Phonology?) is standard; speaker has a broad vocabulary… You take a quick peek at the dictionary on your phone. Phonology—linguistic sound systems. You file the word away to remember later.

The door opens. A woman wearing a blazer and pencil skirt walks in, her heels clacking against the hardwood floor, her curled hair bouncing with every step. You stand to greet her and catch a breath of her perfume.

“Diana Moss,” she says, shaking your hand. Her name tag also displays her job title: Language Broker.

“Jiawen Liu,” you reply. Diana takes a seat across from you; as you sit, you smooth out your skirt, straighten your sleeves.

“Is English all right?” Diana asks. “I can get an interpreter in if you’d prefer to discuss in Mandarin.”

“English is fine,” you reply. You clasp your hands together as you eye Diana’s tablet. She swipes across the screen and taps a few spots, her crimson nails stark against the black barrel of the stylus.

“Great,” she says. “Well, let’s dive right in, shall we? I’m showing that you’ve been in the U.S. for, let’s see, fifteen years now? Wow, that’s quite a while.”

You nod. “Yes.”

“And you used to be an economics professor in China, is that correct?”

You nod again. “Yes.”

“Fantastic,” Diana says. “Just one moment as I load the results; the scores for the oral portion always take a moment to come in…”

Your palms are clammy, sweaty; Diana twirls the stylus and you can’t help feeling a little dizzy as you watch. Finally, Diana props the tablet up and turns it toward you.

“I’m pleased to inform you that your English has tested at a C-grade,” she says with a broad smile.

Your heart sinks. Surely there’s been some kind of error, but no, the letter is unmistakable: bright red on the screen, framed with flourishes and underlined with signatures; no doubt the certificate is authentic. Diana’s perfume is too heady now, sickly sweet; the room is too bright, suffocating as the walls shrink in around you.

“I…” you say, then take a breath. “I was expecting better.”

“For what it’s worth, your scores on the written and analytical portions of the test were excellent, better than many native speakers of English in the U.S.,” Diana says.

“Then what brought my score down?”

“Our clients are looking for a certain… profile of English,” Diana says, apologetic. “If you’re interested in retesting, I can refer you to an accent reduction course—I’ve seen many prospective sellers go through the classes and get recertified at a higher grade.”

She doesn’t mention how much the accent reduction course costs, but from your own research, you know it’s more than you can afford.

“Ms. Liu?” Diana says. She’s holding out a tissue; you accept it and dab at your eyes. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re trying to accomplish? Maybe we can assist you.”

You take in a deep breath as you crumple the tissue into your fist. “My daughter Lillian just got into Stanford, early decision,” you say.

“Congratulations!”

“Yes, but we can’t afford it.” C-grade English sells at only a fraction of A-grade English; you’d rather keep your English than sell it for such a paltry sum that would barely put a dent in textbooks and supplies, never mind tuition and housing.

“There are other tracks you can consider,” Diana says, her voice gentle. “Your daughter can go to a community college, for instance, and then transfer out to Stanford again—”

You shake your head.

“Community colleges in the San Gabriel Valley are among the top in the nation,” Diana continues. “There’s no shame in it.”

You’re unconvinced. What if she can’t transfer out? You and Lillian can’t risk that; a good education at a prestigious school is far too important for securing Lillian’s future. No, better to take this opportunity that’s already been given to her and go with it.

Diana stands and goes over to the literature rack. She flips through a few brochures.

“You know,” Diana says as she strides back to you, “China’s really hot right now—with their new open-door policy, lots of people are (clamoring?) to invest there; I have people calling me all the time, asking if I have A-grade Mandarin.”

She sets a brochure down on the desk and sits back in the executive chair across from you.

“Have you considered selling your Mandarin?”

You trace your hands over the brochure, feeling the embossed logo. China’s flag cascades down to a silhouette of Beijing’s skyline; you read the Simplified characters printed on the brochure, your eyes skimming over them so much more quickly than you skim over English.

“How much?” you ask.

Diana leans in. “A-grade Mandarin is going for as much as $800,000 these days.”

Your heart skips a beat. That would be enough to cover Lillian’s college, with maybe a little bit left over—it’s a tantalizing number. But the thought of going without Mandarin gives you pause: it’s the language you think in, the language that’s close to your heart in the way English is not; it’s more integral to who you are than any foreign tongue. English you could go without—Lillian’s Mandarin is good enough to help you translate your way around what you need—but Mandarin?

“I’m… I’m not sure,” you say, setting down the brochure. “Selling my Mandarin…”

“It’s a big decision, for sure,” Diana says. She pulls a small, silver case out from the pocket of her blazer and opens it with a click. “But, if you change your mind…”

She slides a sleek business card across the table.

“…call me.”

CHILDREN ARE brought to the Sharing Place because a loved one has died.

You must always use the present perfect tense and passive voice: “A loved one has died.” Not “A loved one is dead,” and never “this killed a loved one” or “a loved one was killed by that” or even “a loved one died because of the other thing.”

The actual circumstances of the death are inconsequential. They have nothing to do with why children are brought (note the passive voice) to the Sharing Place, nor when they will leave the Sharing Place.

Children are brought to the Sharing Place because a loved one has died and, despite being young, they may very well still suffer Rejection if they fail to process this grief.

And just about the only thing we can do for our children now is help them avoid Rejection.

There are three rules at the Children’s Sharing Place. The first is that a child may leave at any time, provided they attest that they are ready to leave on two separate occasions.

The boy with the long hair that hangs over his eyes does not speak for his first two sessions in group. On the third session the first thing he says is that he is ready to leave.

He shouldn’t even be here, he explains. His father isn’t dead, he insists.

“Augie,” you say, “your father has died.”

Augie does not speak again for the remainder of the session.

The next day, he repeats that he is ready to leave.

You say nothing, because that is the therapeutic protocol. This protocol demands impartiality and discipline: A child who has self-selected to leave will not progress further if forced to stay in the Sharing Place. Worse yet, a non-progressing child could derail the others’ progress.

You remain silent, but the other children attempt to talk sense into him. They Bargain. This is appropriate.

They tell Augie he can’t go, because he just got there, because he hasn’t resolved any of his issues, because he hasn’t Said It yet, hasn’t even started to Say It. They say that if he goes into the Waiting Room now, he’s definitely going to get Rejected. They say that he can go but doesn’t have to: he can still just go back to the dorms and then have dinner and then go to bed and then get up and then go to class and then return to their next session. He doesn’t have to leave, even if he said he wants to leave. Fifty-seven minutes pass this way.

“Our time is almost up for today,” you say.

Augie stands without a word and opens the Waiting Room Door. Beyond the Waiting Room Door is a small waiting room—just a pair of upholstered yellow chairs and a side table with a fan of three magazines. The top magazine is Ranger Rick. You have never been in the waiting room, and so do not know what the other two magazines may be. There is also a potted plant. There must be a draft, because the potted plant nods rhythmically, like the quiet old lady knitting in the rocking chair in Goodnight Moon.

And, of course, there is the other door, the EXIT. The word “EXIT” glows above it in red. It probably isn’t even three long strides from the Waiting Room Door to the EXIT.

Augie steps through the Waiting Room Door and gingerly shuts it behind him. The door latch clicks, then there is the faint sigh of the EXIT door, followed by a big and sudden sound, like an alligator roaring and rolling in a swamp. And then silence.

“Our time is up for today,” you begin to say, but just after you say “time,” Augie’s scream interrupts you. It is a truly agonized scream, loud and long and ragged. It doesn’t end, so much as fade. There is whimpering and crying for a long time after. But this whimpering is quiet, and the other children in the Sharing Place understand your words this time. They file out the main door, back to the dorms and mess hall and everything else down here in their sheltered world.

The second rule is that a child must eventually, in their own words, explain how their loved one(s) died. They must Say It. There are many levels to Saying It. It may start with:

“My father has died.” And from there progress:

“My father is dead because of a gun.”

“My father fired the bullet that killed him.”

“My father committed suicide.”

“My father committed suicide, because something went wrong in his brain.”

“My father committed suicide, because something went wrong in his brain after the Event.”

“My father heard the Bad Song.”

“My father committed suicide after the Event, because he heard the Bad Song and listened.”

And so on.

It is not abnormal for children to become extremely emotional as they attempt to Say It in various ways. Do not let this alarm you. It is a natural stage of grief, and it will pass. Children have a natural tendency toward Resilience. If a child is consistently extremely emotional during their own or another’s act of grief, they may need to book Open Time in the Laughing Place or the Volcano Room. Open Time can be recommended (note the passive voice) in the “OTHER COMMENTS” section of the Incident Report.

Three days after Augie has gone through the EXIT, Tilly stands and Says It, succinctly and dispassionately. You tell her that she’s done a good job, and that you are proud of her. Other children do likewise. The shy boy next to her flashes her a quick smile, then looks away. He holds up his fist, and she bumps it. She smiles, relieved.

The boy begins to speak—perhaps to Say It himself, perhaps to say something else—and Tilly interrupts him without apology.

“I’m ready to leave,” she says.

This is her second time attesting. Her first was fourteen weeks earlier. It was the first thing she said, two minutes into her first session. Almost none of the children present today were at that session. Almost all of those children have Said It and gone, or just gone (as was the case with Augie). To these children, Tilly is as much a staple of their sessions as the chairs and canned fruit and well-worn fidget toys.

You say nothing.

Tilly stands.

The shy boy next to Tilly is clearly distressed, but he does not speak.

Do not attempt to dissuade Tilly. Do not Bargain with her. The children can—and should—Bargain with Tilly. It is part of their grief, and it is appropriate.

“You don’t have to go just ’cause you said it,” a tall girl, Marianna, says. “You can still stay. At least another day.”

“Marianna’s right,” another girl, Vanessa L., adds. “The Waiting Room will be there tomorrow, and next week, and forever.” Barring natural disaster, this is correct: The Waiting Room will likely be there forever. But that doesn’t mean one can wait forever: Food stores aren’t dire yet, but they are dwindling. There is plenty of water, though. Our well is deep. It would not be inappropriate for you to correct Vanessa L., but you let her statement stand unchallenged.

Vanessa Z., who sits next to Vanessa L., is nodding. “Announcing it is just saying that you’re gonna go. Like with Shane. He said it and Said It, but didn’t go for another six weeks.”

“It’s all bullshit anyway,” Bennie adds. He is small and young, but angry as an old cop. “Don’t do their crap their way. Keep coming to sessions with us.”

“You should at least stay until we’ve finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Jay Chen yips. He’s an excitable boy. “There’s only, like, one-third of the last season left. It won’t even be a week.”

Tilly shrugs. From prior sessions you know that she is a huge Buffy fan. But for many children their demeanor changes once they’ve Said It, and Tilly is one of those: Relieved of the weight of the things they haven’t been saying, they expand back to their normal size—like a sponge that’s had a cinderblock lifted off it—and in doing so draw into themselves. It’s natural. It is part of their process.

“Augie went.” This is Albert, with his chipmunk cheeks and glum Eeyore voice. “That didn’t go great.”

“Augie wasn’t ready,” Tilly says. “I’m ready.”

“Belinda said she was ready.” Belinda had been in the group for a month. She had Said It—and wept while doing so—and then over the next few sessions brightened, gaining strength and equilibrium, helping the other children talk their way forward in their grief. She’d announced her intention to leave, reaffirmed it the next week, and left that same day. Her nail polish had been a perfect robin’s egg blue that day, glossy and flawless. The door had snicked shut behind her, and the scream that had followed had been long and high and ended with a string of babbled begging that had finally devolved into two words repeated so quickly that they’d sounded like the chugging of a ragged, dying lawnmower:

“killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme…”

“Belinda wasn’t really ready,” Tilly says. “I am very ready. I’m gone.”

The shy boy next to Tilly—his name is Marcus, and he is new—speaks just to Tilly: “We could…”

Tilly stops and turns to him. He is knotting his fingers, twisting them against each other, digging painfully into his skin, but his voice is level and clear, if quiet. “We could… try that thing that you wanted to try, but that I was nervous about.” He chews his lip, looks up at the room, then locks on to Tilly. “We could do that. We could do whatever you want if you stay.”

His eyes are wide and desperate and lost. Tilly’s mouth twitches, but she shakes her head without speaking.

Tilly leaves. The Waiting Room door latches shut. You all hear the sigh and thunk of the heavy EXIT door. Then silence.

Silence is presumed to be indicative of Acceptance (note the passive voice).

The group is dour with Tilly gone. This is odd, because Tilly hadn’t been a ray of sunshine. She was usually morose and often irritable. Once, in the midst of an especially spirited session, Bennie had shouted at Tilly: “The only thing you like is stirring shit up and making everyone as miserable as you!”

Albert had called a Time Out and then, in his plodding voice, had taken Bennie to task: “That’s not fair to Tilly,” he’d said. “She doesn’t like stirring shit up and making people feel bad. She doesn’t like anything.”

Everyone had laughed, including Tilly. Then Vanessa Z. had begun to cry and had kept doing so for five minutes and thirty-eight seconds before simply saying, “My brother is dead. He was nine, but he was Rejected anyway because of how Auntie died. My brother is not nine anymore, because he’s dead.” Her spirits had steadily improved since then, but she has yet to ask to leave.

No one seems to have much to say during the session following Tilly’s exit, and so you say:

“My father had his grandfather’s axe. The axe was old and it hung in our garage. It had been used a lot : The handle was dry and splintered and cracked, and the head was pretty rusty, except for the working edge, which Dad dressed before and after each use. My dad and his dad were both the youngest from big families, so I’d presumed my great-grandfather’s axe was very old. Maybe a century? Maybe so. I always thought that was neat: A five-year-old smartphone was practically junk, but a hundred-year-old axe was as good as ever.

“Then one day Dad mentioned how often his dad had worn through axe handles—Dad grew up out in the country, and winter was harsh back then—and I realized that the handle on his grandfather’s axe wasn’t a handle my great-grandfather had ever even seen. On a hunch, I asked how long the head would last. ‘Oh,’ Dad had said, ‘I dunno. Generations. It’s hard steel. I only replaced this one once, when I first got the axe after Dad passed. The handle had dried and shrunk, hanging unused in his shed for so long, and the first time I hauled back to split some stove wood, the head went whanging off into the brush. Never found it.’”

You have never spoken to any of the children about your life before the bunker and the Sharing Place. None of them have ever asked. They are politely attentive now. You know they’ll start to lose focus soon.

“So, my father’s grandfather’s axe had neither the head nor handle of his grandfather’s axe. His grandfather had never seen or touched a single atom of that axe. I asked my dad how the heck the axe was his grandfather’s axe, and he gave me sort of a weird look. ‘Because it is.’ I explained about the atoms, about how the axe only has two parts, and both had been replaced, and so it wasn’t the same thing anymore. Dad was a physics professor. He’d worked at Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center, and he replied: ‘You know that thing people say, about your body having all new cells every seven years? That’s basically poppycock: Some cells are replaced very quickly, like the lining of your stomach, which is shed weekly. Others very rarely are replaced, like neurons. But atoms are swapped in and out constantly by your metabolic processes; from one year to the next almost every single atom in your body will be replaced. Since birth you’ve been a whole new girl over again more than two dozen times—but you’re still my little girl. If I’d saved all the hair from your haircuts growing up—the very atoms that had been you—and introduced it as ‘my daughter, the famous child psychologist,’ people would think I was nuts. The material is just dead stuff. If you’re going to be like that, then we’re all stars, because that’s where all our atoms started out. What counts isn’t the material, it’s the pattern. You aren’t your skin or hair or clothes or diplomas or New York Times bestseller; you are the pattern in your cells that causes those cells to keep gobbling up atoms and organizing them to be you.’

“That sticks in my head, because my dad died in his garage, and some of his blood and stuff splattered on that axe and handle. This was after the government realized that the Event had already started, when the National Guard was dynamiting radio stations so people couldn’t accidentally hear the Bad Song, but before people got really careful and started snipping the speakers out of their electronics. This was before the first deaf person ‘heard’ the Bad Song in the rhythmic buzz of a cellphone set on ‘vibrate,’ and long before people started smashing anything with a speaker in it.”

This was likewise long before the Advent, but you don’t mention the Advent, because the children don’t know about the Advent—don’t even know the word; they came to the shelter before the Advent—but also because you don’t really know anything concrete about the Advent: All you really know is that something has arrived. And, in stark contrast to everything you learned from your dad’s favorite movies, it isn’t going anywhere.

“This was before regular people got careful, but already the police wouldn’t answer the phone or use radio dispatch. You had to text them. So I texted them, staring at the blood spattered on the axe handle so I wouldn’t have to stare at Dad.”

You are no longer worried about the children getting impatient with your story. This is what they’ve been hungry to hear about, the things the “responsible adults” don’t talk about—as though it’s the children who need to be sheltered.

“When I’d come by after work, Dad hadn’t been expecting me. He was in the garage. He had the spigot on, running a trickle across the concrete to the floor drain. He’d do that when he was dressing out a deer in the fall, so the concrete would be easy to rinse off when he was done. But this was the early spring, not deer season. And there was no deer. He was standing over the drain, holding his pistol. A revolver.

“‘Oh,’ he said when I walked into the garage, ‘Jeez, Janey; you scared me. I didn’t think you were coming by.’

“I’d texted him, but he hadn’t noticed—he was ahead of the curve, and had already snipped out his cellphone’s speaker and vibrating motor.

“‘Listen,’ he said—and even then, so soon after we knew there’d been the Event, that word was already starting to get scary: Listen. Because what if someone had heard the Bad Song, just a little, and was about to hum it to you? The way you do when you have a jingle in your head and you say, ‘Hey, listen to this; what’s this stupid tune I’ve got stuck in my head?’ And then you hum a few bars.

“‘Listen, sweetie,’ Dad had said, ‘this isn’t your fault. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be separated from you,’”—you feel yourself smirk, noting the passive voice—“‘but I heard that song, and it’s in my head, and I know it’s changing my Pattern. It’s making me something new. Not just new atoms, but a new Pattern. I’m not the man I used to be.’

“As he said this, he unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve with his free hand. His right hand held the pistol, and his finger never left the trigger. He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a scatter-plot row of weeping boils that had sprouted up his forearm. Nestled in each boil was a small, wide eye. There were five of these eyes, bright as a baby’s. Each looked like his eyes, like mine, but each tracked independently, like five separate eyes in five separate darling baby faces. As I watched, they blinked in series, like a shiver of gooseflesh.”

The children do not react to this, and that’s good; their Resilience is all they’ll have, soon enough.

“My father said: ‘I’m scared about what happens next.’ He was crying then with his own eyes, his forearm eyes still looking around like fascinated toddlers. ‘I used to get anxious,’ he told me. ‘It was this constant feeling, like something awful was always just about to happen. Now the feeling has changed. I feel like something awful has already happened. And it’s me. I don’t want to do this, but the song… I thought it was Mick Jones singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” but now I realize it’s Sid Vicious covering Sinatra’s “My Way.” I can take a hint.’

“And then he put the gun in his mouth. And then he pulled it out with a grimace, and instead placed the barrel beneath the shelf of his chin. And he pulled the trigger twice. That impressed me. It still does: he’d done the job fine with the first bullet—the proof got all over his grandfather’s axe—but he so badly wanted to make sure the job was done right and final that he had the presence of will to keep pulling, even though he was already dead. That’s something. That was my dad, in a nutshell: he really did the job right and full.”

You take a breath, and you finish:

“My father committed suicide because he’d listened to the Bad Song on the radio—back before anyone even knew anything like the Event could happen—and the song had started to change him. He was insufficiently resilient and adaptive. This is a problem for adults: he could not cope with What Has Happened. To his mind, when your Pattern is gone, you’re gone: the head and handle aren’t just not the old head and handle; they aren’t heads or handles at all. He could not accept this, and so he was Rejected.”

You pause, and then say:

“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place.”

“You can’t,” Vanessa Z. gasps. Denial.

You ask if there’s a rule that you can’t. The children clearly don’t know. But you do, and there is not. No one ever conceived of the possibility that an adult might try to leave the “safety” of a federal continuity-of-operations shelter. No one older than fifteen is known to have survived outside any shelter, and everyone knows it.

“Bitch,” Bennie mutters under his breath, his eyes accusatory coals. Anger.

The other shelters ceased communicating weeks ago—their computer networks don’t even “reply to pings,” whatever that means. You don’t imagine this is because they’ve somehow found a way to eliminate Rejection.

“Who will help us work through our issues, Dr. Mikkelson?” Vanessa L. asks, slyly.

Bargaining.

You tell them that Dr. Bowersox is an excellent clinician, because she is. They will all be ready to leave sooner or later, you explain. They all have the capacity to be Resilient, Functional, and Adaptive. They are young, and it is still their world. They just need to trust in the therapeutic protocol and in themselves.

You do not say that we—the adults “protecting” you—won’t survive here. Small children are never Rejected; they can accept What Has Happened. These older children can process their grief and likely avoid Rejection, too. But what are the rest of us, the “responsible adults,” doing? Living like moles, breeding more children in order to steadily traumatize them in the sunless continuity of operations bunkers, only to someday send them out the Waiting Room Door, where they’ll sink or swim on their own—and all the while cutting our own rations further and further. What’s the point of that? What the hell are we clinging to?

You realize you are Bargaining with yourself, and you smile.

“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

The final rule is that when you leave the Children’s Sharing Place, you must leave through the Waiting Room.

As soon as the session begins, you stand. “I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat.

The group is silent. They do not Bargain because they are now in Depression.

But you’re past all that, and so you leave.

The Waiting Room Door snicks shut behind you, and you are finally in the Waiting Room, where the potted plant nods in the corner like the quiet old woman whispering, “Hush.”

The Waiting Room is small but not stuffy.

You wait. Nothing happens. And so you leave through the EXIT.

There is a shock of clear light and a distant dinging. The heavy EXIT door thunks shut behind you. Your eyes clear, and you discover that the door exits directly into a large parking lot: cracked, oil-stained asphalt full of weeds, a few cars parked indiscriminately around the blacktop. One car has its driver’s side door hanging open. That’s the source of the ding: the keys have been forgotten in the ignition.

Something bothers you about that dinging, but you can’t focus on what that might be.

You turn to look at the building that you came out of, and see that it’s a low-slung strip of little cinderblock office units skirted with ragged hedges, situated on the outskirts of a giant parking lot, which surrounds a distant shopping mall. There are more cars at the mall, but the parking is no more orderly. You’d originally been brought (note the passive voice) to a different building elsewhere in this office park, a warehouse with a loading dock. This was back when we thought we could hide long enough for What Has Happened to blow over. Back then the big concern was keeping the kids “developmentally on track” while they lived in the shelter, “so they’d be ready to kickstart the global economy.” The soldiers who brought you had spoken of critical infrastructure protection and continuity of operations planning. “The children are our future,” one had told you earnestly as she helped you down out of the truck, “our most precious natural resource.”

You had agreed, but you were still in Denial. Everyone was. Well, everyone older than fifteen.

You are absolutely terrified, standing out in the open in the parking lot.

But the day is beautiful—especially after so many months spent in tunnels and bunkers and shelters and conference rooms and gymnasia. It is sunny and clear, the breeze fresh and clean. It smells of hot tar and the tall sweetgrass left to grow undisturbed in the fields beyond the parking lot. There is no distant drone of traffic. There are no airplanes in the sky, nor the contrails that show their passing. Birds flit and swoop in enormous flocks.

You look down and see a child’s fingernail—a perfect ellipse of robin’s egg blue—crusted into the center of one of the “oil stains” that is not an oil stain. A scream gathers in your throat and you look away.

Tilly climbs out of the dinging car and stretches languidly, like a cat. She has a big, daffy grin.

“Oh, hey, Dr. Mikkelson!” she says. “How are you? Long time, no see.”

You tell her you’re scared. A coyote pads out of the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot. You startle and draw back, stepping toward the safety of the EXIT. Now you’re more than scared. You are terrified, bordering on petrified.

Two more coyotes come, trotting silently into the parking lot. You scurry back to the building and find that there is no knob on the exterior of the EXIT.

“It’s okay,” Tilly says, smile sparkling. She’s hardly herself at all. “It’s all good,” she says. “It’s all good from now on.” She isn’t herself at all.

The coyotes are mellow as old collies, their tongues lolling like friendly pups. One lazily laps Tilly’s hand as it trots past. The lolling tongue is not a tongue; it is a tentacle, the suckers cupping wide, curious eyes, some hazel, others blue.

High in the sky there is something beyond the clouds. At first you think it’s the Moon. But it’s too big, too close, too pink. You note that there are several of these not-moons, pale red, with wavering edges. One rotates slowly, like a curious bird, revealing an enormous three-lobed eye that blinks like a baby’s nursing mouth, pursing and relaxing.

Your heart pounds and pounds in your chest, sending shocked vibrations down your limbs, as if you are uselessly hammering a concrete floor with a hard steel axe.

“Dr. Mikkelson,” Tilly says, “it’s all good; just Listen.”

Tilly is quiet, beaming at you with her daffy smile. You listen to the car dinging, and it doesn’t sound quite right. It’s a little ragged and uneven—but more importantly: it’s been months since you were taken down into the bunker. That car’s battery must be entirely dead by now.

You abruptly remember something Dad showed you once. You’d been washing up after dinner, and had asked him why your guitar amp picked up AM when you had it cranked up with the cable plugged in, but no guitar. He explained that it was because AM transmission was powerful and simple and could infiltrate the amp—and since the amp would amplify any analog signal, it amplified that just the same as your guitar. The place he’d lived in college was near an AM station, he explained, and his toaster would pick up the broadcast on some nights. The appliance’s whisker-thin heating elements vibrated with the power of the AM transmission, singing in tinny harmony. Even unpowered items—unplugged stereos, radiators, people’s dental fillings—have been known to pick up high-output AM.

“AM’s powerful stuff,” he’d said, drying a plate. “If you’ve got the wattage, you can make just about anything sing your song.”

You imagine that this is precisely what the things up in the sky are doing, bathing us in their electromagnetic transmissions, suffusing our highly wired, intricately interconnected world with their perplexing, invasive song. And what is a song, if not a Pattern of signal and silence? God knows that a song can get “stuck in your head”—tricking your brain into reproducing it, over and over, the same as a virus tricks a cell into reproducing it until the cell bursts with those li’l hijackers. Was it so beyond imagining that there might be a song that was so catchy, it didn’t just seduce your brain into reproducing its Pattern, but also into fundamentally changing yours?

Tilly nods encouragingly, still smiling. There’s something odd about her eyes, her eyelids. They’re slitted—you assume because of the brightness of the day—but the corners of her slitted eyes curl up into smiles exactly matching her smile.

Her smile widens, as does the smiling of her eyes.

The car’s dinging isn’t dinging; it’s the Bad Song. It vibrates all through you, at first in harmony with the vibrant clangor of your heart, and then drowning it out. For a moment it is absolutely intolerable, a feeling like your guts being used to dangle you over an infinite and airless abyss, and you absolutely understand why your father put the gun in his mouth.

And then that feeling, whatever it might be called, releases, like a cramp loosening, and you hear the Song for what it is.

Tilly nods, and the coyotes nod, and the birds swirl, and the Eye of Heaven even seems to nod—although how could it be nodding at you? How could the Distant Traveler care at all about something so infinitesimal as you or Tilly or this parking lot or even this country or our species—except to care absolutely and without exception, as It cares about all things here, living on the newest addition to Its glorious collection of Worlds.

Peace and plenty is in the Song. Clean longevity is in the Song. In the Song we’ll be free of strife and free of disease and our slightly battered world will mend and go on and on and on.

The Song isn’t Bad; it’s actually pretty Good. It’s a Good Song, and you smile. You can feel that soon you’ll be smiling all over, in every pore. You’ll be something new, all seeing and all loving, omniscient and omnipresent. Coyotes lick your fingertips, and you taste their tongues on your skin as you taste your skin through their tongues, watching through the eyes that stipple the birds’ skin like morning dew.

The Song tells you that the Song Rejects no one, but some fail to Accept the Good Song and the One True Resonating Harmony that comes with it, here in the Vast Collection.

This is the true Sharing Place, you realize, and you share in it as it shares in you.

ALL KNOWN FORGERIES are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake checks, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.

The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life moldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.

Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fiber regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomize marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.

Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.

Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.

The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.

As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.

“Hi, Mr. Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”

“Nonsense!” Mr. Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us, they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent, and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”

“Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”

“You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that, I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to…” Mr. Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes—Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr. Chan’s relentless cheerfulness.

Helena has five missed calls by the time she gets back. A red phone icon blares at the corner of her vision before blinking out, replaced by the incoming-call notification. It’s secured and anonymized, which is quite a change from usual. She pops the earpiece in.

“Yeah, Mr. Chan?”

“This isn’t Mr. Chan,” someone says. “I have a job for Splendid Beef Enterprises.”

“All right, sir. Could I get your name and what you need? If you could provide me with the deadline, that would help too.”

“I prefer to remain anonymous,” the man says.

“Yes, I understand, secrecy is rather important.” Helena restrains the urge to roll her eyes at how needlessly cryptic this guy is. “Could I know about the deadline and brief?”

“I need two hundred T-bone steaks by the 8th of August. 38.1- to 40.2-millimeter thickness for each one.” A notification to download t-bone_info.KZIP pops up on her lenses. The most ambitious venture Helena’s undertaken in the past few months has been Gyuuzen’s strips of marbled sukiyaki, and even that felt a bit like pushing it. A whole steak? Hell no.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think my business can handle that. Perhaps you could try—”

“I think you’ll be interested in this job, Helen Lee Jyun Wai.”

Shit.

I HAVE BEEN activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.

“I serve,” the bot announced to the ship.

“I am assigning you task nine hundred forty-four in the maintenance queue,” Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”

“Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.

There was an Incidental on board. The bot would rather have been fixing something more exciting, more prominently complex, than to be assigned pest control, but the bot existed to serve and so it would.

SEDGEWICK HAD used his tab to hack Fletcher’s alarm off, but when he slid out of bed in the middle of the night his younger brother was wide awake and waiting, modded eyes a pale luminous green in the dark.

“I didn’t think you were actually going to do it,” Fletcher said with a hesitant grin.

“Of course I’m going to.” Sedgewick kept his words clipped, like he had for months. He kept his face cold. “If you’re coming, get dressed.”

Fletcher’s smile swapped out for the usual scowl. They pulled on their thermals and gloves and gumboots in silence, moving around the room like pieces of a sliding puzzle, careful to never inhabit the same square space. If there was a way to keep Fletcher from coming short of smothering him with a blanket, Sedgewick would’ve taken it. But Fletcher was fourteen now, still smaller than him but not by much, and his wiry modded arms were strong like an exoskeleton’s. Threats were no good anymore.

When they were ready, Sedgewick led the way past their parents’ room to the vestibule, which they had coded to his thumb in penance for uprooting him again, this time dumping him onto a frostbit fucking colony world where he was the only unmodded sixteen-year-old for about a million light years. They said he had earned their trust but did not specify exactly how. Fletcher, of course, didn’t need to earn it. He could take care of himself.

Sedgewick blanked the exit log more out of habit than anything, then they stepped out of the cold vestibule into the colder upstreet. The curved ceiling above them was a night sky holo, blue-black with an impossibly large cartoon moon, pocked and bright white. Other than Sedgewick and his family, nobody in New Greenland had ever seen a real Earth night.

They went down the housing row in silence, boots scraping tracks in the frost. An autocleaner salting away a glistening blue coolant spill gledged over at them suspiciously as they passed, then returned to its work. Fletcher slid behind it and pantomimed tugging off, which might have made Sedgewick laugh once, but he’d learned to make himself a black hole that swallowed up anything too close to camaraderie.

“Don’t shit around,” he said. “It’ll scan you.”

“I don’t care,” Fletcher said, with one of those disdainful little shrugs he’d perfected lately, that made Sedgewick believe he really truly didn’t.

The methane harvesters were off-cycle, and that meant the work crews were still wandering the colony, winding in and out of dopamine bars and discos. They were all from the same modded geneprint, all with a rubbery pale skin that manufactured its own vitamins, all with deep black eyes accustomed to the dark. A few of them sat bonelessly on the curb, laid out by whatever they’d just vein-blasted, and as Sedgewick and Fletcher went by they muttered extro, extros den terre. One of them shouted hello a few beats too late.

“Should run,” Fletcher said.

“What?”

“Should jog it.” Fletcher rubbed his arms. “It’s cold.”

“You go ahead,” Sedgewick said, scornful.

“Whatever.”

They kept walking. Aside from the holos flashing over the bars, the upstreet was a long blank corridor of biocrete and composite. The downstreet was more or less the same plus maintenance tunnels that gushed steam every few minutes.

It had only taken Sedgewick a day to go from one end of the colony to the other and conclude that other than the futball pitch there was nothing worth his time. The locals he’d met in there, who played with different lines and a heavy ball and the ferocious modded precision that Sedgewick knew he wouldn’t be able to keep pace with long, more or less agreed with his assessment in their stilted Basic.

Outside the colony was a different story. That was why Sedgewick had crept out of bed at 2:13, why he and Fletcher were now heading down an unsealed exit tunnel marked by an unapproved swatch of acid yellow hologram. Tonight, the frostwhales were breaching.

WHEN MARGOT IS NINE, she and her parents live on Venus. The surface of Venus, at that time, is one enormous sea with a single continent on its northern pole, perched there like a tiny, ridiculous top hat. There is sea below, and sea above, rain continually plummeting from the sky, endlessly self-renewing.

WE BE TOPPERS. Toppers we be. Hanging off Empire State as cement and limestone crumble and fall. Looking down the lines and pulleys strung between nearby buildings. Eying the green-growing plants and gardens on the tall tall roofs.

And below, the mists. The ever-flowing mists. They wait, patiently. As if time is theirs alone to worship.

I was born in a slug, an insulated bag of canvas strung to our high-rise’s limestone facade by people without the power to live inside. Momma always said life in a slug was the closest we toppers came to being free, and I believe that. But too much freedom is also bad, so Momma stitched our slug with care, making it last when others fell during winds or storms.

Momma was good. Even though she’d opened herself to the mists while pregnant with me, she resisted their siren call. Kept me safe and near fed until I was old enough to climb.

One day, like a true topper, she announced her time had come.

We climbed the stairs to Empire’s old observation deck and stood on the deck among the vegetable gardens and potato bins. As the gardeners eyed us to ensure we didn’t steal their precious food, I begged Momma not to go.

Momma hugged me tight. She whispered how her father had visited Empire State when he was a child, back before the city left the Days-We-Knew. He’d climbed to this very spot and saw the cities and oceans and lands of that now-gone time.

“He claimed it was the most beautiful sight he’d ever witnessed,” Momma said.

I leaned over the railing and watched the mists rolling into the city from the flat, endless horizons. No matter what my grandfather believed, nothing could look prettier than the mists on a sunny day.

Momma kissed me on the cheek before jumping over the railing and disappearing into the mists below.

Instead of the thump of her body hitting ground I heard a contented sigh rising on the wind.

As comfort, the gardeners gifted me with a tiny potato and a sickly carrot.

Blessed be the mists.

Curse their ever-waiting grasp.

ISSA LIVES IN a small prefabricated efficiency, tucked within the mouth of a concrete alley between two buildings. The kitchen in front connects to a hallway, leading past a bathroom and two bedrooms, to a storage unit in back. It’s cramped by adult standards but scaled for children by design.

All of the surfaces are institutional. The kitchen’s scratch-proof ceramics have tinted beige from a regimen of spraying and wiping spills and sneaker scuffs. The hallway carpet smells like burning plastic when it’s vacuumed. Mold regroups along the bathroom cabinet in little black stipples, never fully defeated. Chintzy towels embroidered with cartoon characters hang limp from crooked wall pegs. It’s a wonder that these objects deserve such refurbishment.

Issa’s bedroom is at the end of the hall. Trevor, her foster brother, has the bedroom closest to the kitchen. Both have an aluminum loft bed over a desk and a pressed-plastic chair. Pushed into the corners are particleboard dressers, mirrors, trundles. At night, the moon shines in through clerestory windows, dappling a mobile that hangs over Issa’s crib as she sleeps.

Mom pulls her chair down from the kitchen wall to sit and recharge her battery. Her face is flat and glossy and animates a loop of sheep jumping a fence. Over time, they fade into her nothing face, but she listens for Issa’s and Trevor’s voices in the dark. They’ve never seen her sleep and never will.

Baby Issa can stand. With the help of Teacup Bunny, she climbs upright. Holding the crib’s safety bar for balance, she coos to Mom and Trevor.

Trevor is still Good Trevor. His toys are spilled out across the brown jute rug. There are red cars, green cars, black and white. Mom makes her concentration face: a dash mouth, pink tongue sticking up from the corner. White pupil dots follow her hands as they fill Issa’s bottle and a sweat drop blinks near her temple as she spins the nipple cap tight.

“Mom, look. It’s a traffic jam. Mom.”

Mom turns and makes her smile face at Trevor. “That’s wonderful, Trev! How did it happen?”

Trevor points to the school bus in front. “Driver did it. He went pop and then went haywire.” Trevor bobbles his head, eyes crossed, and falls over buzzing, shaking his sneakers in the air.

Mom’s mouth makes a little doughnut. “Did someone call the repairman?”

Trevor points to a van behind a cement mixer. “He got stuck.”

“Where is Fast Oscar? Can he help?”

Trevor pulls him from the front of his overalls, a sports car with headlight eyes and a big yellow lightning bolt. He pushes Fast Oscar through the traffic jam toward the bus, knocking the other cars aside.

Issa squeaks. She reaches over the safety bar for Mom and bounces, ruffling her diaper.

“Ooh! Who is this? Does someone need to be picked up?” Mom puts the bottle down and lifts Issa from her crib.

Issa’s world spins. Mom cradles her against her padded chest and thumps a heartbeat for her. Bump-bump. She bounces gently, warms. Issa drools against her plastic shoulder and coos, satisfied.

Then she cries, pushes away, and Mom puts her back in her crib. Soon, she will reach for Mom again, and Mom will pick her up. This repeats. Mom will never know why and will never be frustrated.

Every four months, Uncle Georg visits. He doesn’t have a flat, blinky face like Mom. His face sticks out like Trevor’s, with a beard that moves like a scratchy blanket when he talks. His gray work shirt has tools like pens peeking out of the chest pocket. Sometimes he brings a brown satchel with presents when he plays Santa for Christmas, but he usually just stuffs things into the cabinets and the storage unit in the back (which stays locked).

When Trevor is still at school, Georg gives Mom a checkup. Issa lies in Mom’s lap, mouth red with a rash, hands wet from sucking her thumb. Mom strokes Issa’s hair and neck and Georg uses his pen things on Mom’s back.

“Momma’s going to be really still for five seconds. Can you stay still, too?”

Issa nods.

Mom’s hand falls flat against Issa’s back for a moment. Then her chest makes a musical sound.

“Momma and I are going to play a game. Want to play, too?”

Issa nods again.

Uncle Georg’s game is strange. It’s not like Mom’s games with music and lights. They only play once. Mom and Issa stand on one foot, then the other. Move around. Say weird words and then look at one of the pens. Stick another pen in Issa’s ear and she coughs.

Uncle Georg asks Mom questions that don’t make sense, but somehow Mom knows the answers. When it’s Issa’s turn, she knows the answers to the questions because they are about her. Do you have any new friends? What’s the grossest thing you ate? What’s the scariest thing around?

When Issa is four and Trevor is ten, Mom prints meatloaf with green beans and it’s better than usual.

“Five stars!” Issa rates dinner, and Trevor agrees. They know something special is planned.

When they’ve cleared their plates, Mom brings them strawberry freezies and says that the May Bees are going to visit. “They’re different May Bees than the last time,” Mom explains. “They’ll knock on the door like Halloween, but we can bring them inside. So, no stories tonight. It’s quiet time until they arrive.”

Shortly after Issa and Trevor go to their rooms, there comes the knock. A squat caseworker from Dewey with a badge on her shirt has brought the May Bees with her: a thin man with a mustache and a lady wearing a fancy yellow coat. The caseworker asks if the kids are inside. She waits in the kitchen, drinking from a thermos, as Mom brings the May Bees back to their rooms.

Trevor is bouncing up and down at his desk.

“Trev, may we come in?” Mom asks. “Our guests want to meet you.”

Trevor stands and nods vigorously with a toothy smile, hopping from one foot to the other.

The May Bee man with the mustache watches from the hallway as the lady with the yellow coat steps around Mom. She squats down at eye level and holds her hand out to shake.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Trevor.”

Trevor hugs her around her neck. Embarrassed, she gently pulls away and asks what subjects he likes at school. Trevor dances around his room, joking and showing off his possessions. He talks louder, faster, as if he always has been shouting to be heard. The man waves from the hallway and Trevor runs and clutches around his leg.

When it’s time to visit Issa, she is playing quietly with Teacup Bunny in her room. The May Bees ask her who her friend is. Does Bunny like having parties? The questions sound like tricks, because the lady’s face moves like Uncle Georg’s face. Not blinky like Mom’s.

Trevor skips around their line of sight, interrupting with inane questions, not really listening for answers. Issa won’t lift her gaze from Teacup Bunny to make eye contact. When nobody is looking, Trevor reaches behind his back and pinches Issa.

Once it’s time for the May Bees to leave, the lady notices that Issa looks shaken. She asks, “Is something wrong? What happened?” and Issa begins to cry.

Bad Trevor.

When Issa turns six and Trevor is twelve, he’s sent home from school again for hitting. Mom makes her mad face: downward chevron between her eyes, upturned frown line for a mouth.

“You’re in big trouble, mister. Straight to your room until dinner.”

Sullen, Trevor drops his book bag and leans his street hockey stick against the refrigerator.

Later, as Issa helps set the table, Mom pins a watercolor that Issa made in class to the refrigerator door. In the picture, there is Mom and Uncle Georg and Issa. Trevor is standing at a distance, painted scrawly in red. They are all under the roof of a house, with more people holding balloons.

“Is this your birthday?” Mom regards the picture through framing hands. “That’s definitely five stars! We’ve got another artist in the house.”

Trevor wanders past Issa and Mom and opens the fridge to grab a drink, blocking their view.

“Excuse me, Trevor. You’re being rude. Nobody called you for dinner yet.”

“I wanted a glass of water.” Trevor closes the refrigerator door and looks at Issa’s drawing. “Who’d want to have a party here anyway? This is a loser house.”

“Trevor!”

As he takes a sip of water, Trevor casually swats the drawing off the refrigerator.

Mom makes the mad face. “Trevor, that’s not your drawing.”

“It’s a stupid drawing anyway.”

“Put it back and apologize to your sister.”

“No!”

“Okay, that’s a timeout. Go to your room, mister.”

Trevor makes like he’s about to leave, but then picks up his hockey stick and gives Mom a whack on her leg. Mom is not allowed to retaliate. She reaches to grab the hockey stick with her plastic fingers, but Trevor wrenches it free and the chairs screech out of the way.

“Let go, it’s mine! I hate you!”

Trevor hits Mom again, harder this time, cracking her plastic casing. Mom’s chest emits a shrill beep and she collapses, first against the table and then the floor. Silverware rattles. Neither Issa nor Trevor has ever heard Mom make that sound, and Trevor steps back. Mom’s face is blank. Issa shrieks. Trevor begins to understand what he’s done. Drops his hockey stick. Runs out into the alley, knocking on neighbors’ doors.

Issa hoists Mom into her chair, lifts Mom’s hand, lets go. It clacks against her thigh. No response. She’s never seen Mom unresponsive. Now the home is just a square shed between two cold brick buildings. The spell has cracked. She begins to hyperventilate.

“Mom!” she squeals.

Nothing.

Then, at the end of the hall, a ruction behind the locked door to the storage unit; boxes falling from shelves, and a musical chime. Something stands upright, steps over what sounds like metal canisters rolling around the floor.

Issa grasps Mom’s sweatshirt and shakes, rattling her limbs. She taps and swipes Mom’s blank face with her fingers. “Wake up!”

Behind the door, clacking, deliberate footsteps resound. Then something thuds against the back of it and Issa shrieks. She kicks back under the table to hide, and again the door thuds. It smashes open and there, at the other end of the hall, is another Mom. This Mom is bald, missing part of her arm and her clothes.

“Issa, are you there?” This New Mom’s voice volume is up all the way and she is making the worried expression. Her face light is blinding. It swells in the hallway, beaming like a searchlight.

“Issa!”

Issa peeks over the kitchen table, looking from Old Mom to New Mom.

“There you are! I’m okay, Issa-boo. I just switched. Easy peasy!”

The caseworker from Dewey arrives to transition Trevor. She says that even though he’s going to a bigger house with other boys like him, Issa can draw pictures and write letters to him whenever she wants.

Issa doesn’t know if she should be sad that Trevor is leaving. She asks if he is going to come back, but nobody gives her a straight answer. She makes the blank face herself as they pack his clothes into a plastic bin. Before Trevor leaves, he is Good Trevor again, for a moment. “Maybe I’ll see you in school,” he supposes. He waves from the van as the door spelling D-E-W-E-Y slides shut. As it pulls onto the road, Trevor looks back through the windshield. Later in life, Issa will recall this as the last time she saw him.

It’s just New Mom and Issa in the kitchen and it’s really quiet now. New Mom wears Old Mom’s jumper. She printed the oatmeal-raisin cookies that Issa likes, but they’ve gone stale on the counter.

“Stealing clothes isn’t allowed,” Issa informs New Mom, who makes the question-mark face. Issa doesn’t know if New Mom is in charge now. Maybe she is.

Georg fixes her arm and brings her hair, but it’s different. Issa helps trim it to look like Old Mom’s hair. New Mom says it’s a five-star haircut and cleans the ends herself. When they come out of the bathroom, Old Mom is gone and there is just one Mom.

Issa sneak-tests this Mom sometimes, just to be sure.

“Remember when we made Easter eggs?”

“You made a piggy egg for Good Trevor and a rainbow one for me.”

“Remember when we had just ice cream for dinner?”

“Oooh, tricky Issa! You’re just making that up!”

Tickles. Laughing. Mom’s fingers are tickle spiders.

When she’s in fourth grade, Issa comes home to discover a baby sleeping in Trevor’s old room.

“That’s Mackenzie. You can poke your head in, but hush.” Mom has cleaned the room. The crib is set up with fresh bedding next to the changing station.

“It’s like my old room,” Issa whispers.

Baby Mackenzie lies with the backs of her tiny fingers resting against the corners of her eyes. She gives a sigh in her sleep, chest rising and falling. The mobile turns slowly overhead.

“Can she have Teacup Bunny?”

“Of course!” Mom makes her smile face, little heart fading in and out. “A big-sister present will make her very happy.”

An idea occurs to Issa and she winces. “Am I going to go away? Like what happened to Trevor?” She tries to keep quiet, but starts hiccupping, about to cry.

“No, Issa-boo. That’s different.” Mom leads her by the hand into the hallway and kneels beside her, holding her shoulders. “Trevor didn’t know how to not be mad. He wasn’t ready to be your big brother. It’s your turn, now, and I know you’re going to be great.”

Twelve-year-old Issa is allowed to walk home from school with a friend, so a girl from class joins her. They plan to do weekend homework together. But turning into the alley, the girl reads the plaque that says “Dewey Foster Home #12” and knows that foster means different, just not exactly how.

“Hey, why don’t we use the Wi-Fi at Corner Café instead?” she suggests. “The tables are empty after five. We can load up on macca frappés.”

“I dunno. How much does that cost?” Issa checks her empty pockets, pretending she has money.

Mom opens the door. “Oh, hello,” she greets the girl from class. “Are you Issa’s friend?”

“No way!” the girl exclaims. “You have a robot?”

“It’s my, um… this is my… this is Mom.”

The girl looks inside at the kitchen and her smile falls away. Then she pulls out her phone. “Oh, you know, I totally forgot. My dad said he wants me home early, because….” She tries to think of something, but then turns and just walks stiffly out of the alley.

Mom watches her leave, making her question-mark face.

Issa pushes past into the kitchen. “I wish you were normal,” she mutters, dropping her book bag and stomping down the hallway.

Mackenzie calls out, “Hey, Issa!” as Issa passes her door. “Issa?”

Issa pauses, pokes her head in.

“Look. Snakes.” Mackenzie holds up a picture of a tight bolus of snakes, snarling the paper from end to end. Just about every square inch is covered.

“Four ssstars. You misssed a ssspot,” Issa hisses, flicking her tongue.

“No I didn’t!” Mackenzie checks to see if it’s true.

“Hey, wanna see something?” Issa waves her over to her dresser. She pulls out one of the drawers and looks underneath. “Wait, I think it’s the other one.” She pulls the bottom drawer out all the way, emptying the contents onto the floor.

“Hey!”

“Shh. This is a Dewey secret.” Issa puts her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Mom or Georg will throw it away. Promise?”

Mackenzie nods, and Issa overturns the drawer. Props it up. The entire wooden bottom is carved end to end with a picture of a hurricane blowing through a city. Cars are flying through the air. Moms and dads holding dogs at the end of leashes. Shopping carts, telephone poles and traffic lights and street signs are up in the sky, flying in a circle. In the middle of the chaos is a small figure wearing a shirt with a capital T.

Mackenzie points. “Who’s that?”

“You know how I showed you how to draw? Well, he showed me. He lived here in your room, before you were here.”

“Why is he breaking everything?”

“No, that’s the eye of the storm, where everything is calm. Storms blow around in circles. I think he is trying to stay in the middle because it’s safe there, and things stay still.”

Issa leans under a bus shelter across from the alley to her old foster home. She is now twenty-three. The neighborhood feels smaller, like it shrank in a dryer. The street feels narrower. The walk from the corner was shorter than she remembered. The alley looks cleaner, too. Not as dark and foreboding as it used to be, and the buildings have been repainted. Someone repaved the sidewalk and installed a bike rack along the curb.

Issa hasn’t been back since she aged out at eighteen. The funds in her Dewey account, having accrued through the years for the very purpose of tiding her over, had helped when finding an apartment and securing job training as a nurse. It was enough momentum to never look back.

But one day, she saw Mom from the window of her laundromat. It wasn’t her Mom, but a different Mom, with different plastics.

Issa crammed her wet laundry into her hamper and ran after that Mom, tailing her for several blocks to a nearby neighborhood. There, she discovered another Dewey home built onto the roof of another building, accessible by a stairwell. It looked sort of like her old home, but with different windows, and a small plaque by the door with the Dewey logo and street number.

Then, a month later, she saw another Mom, this one in blue. She followed that one to a smattering of boutiques encircling a small neighborhood park, where all the buildings were prefabricated. That Mom carried a bag of groceries through the front door of another Dewey home tucked up against the back side of a Pilates studio. A mural of puppet monsters and balloons covered it in a field of blue.

These Dewey homes lure Issa’s attention when she isn’t on duty at the hospital. She finds new ones online every now and then, and rides past them on her bike. Sometimes she sees the other Dewey children. Quiet children who are alone. Loud, obnoxious children swarming the curb. She can’t see into their homes, but she can see how the light plays off the window shades when they move about within. Issa’s therapist says that her behavior makes sense. Issa wants to know if these kids are like her. As an adult, she is looking for patterns to know if her ways of relating with others developed differently as a child.

Her therapist says that they have, and that they come through in her bedside manner during her shifts. Like others who have grown up in the Dewey system, Issa’s speech patterns and mannerisms are more robotic—more “blinky.” Issa has a hard time trusting the faces that people make. She projects how she needs people to be, rather than letting them reveal how they actually are as human beings. Issa is also missing closure. She needs to go home again and shut the door behind her so that she can move forward, or the illusions of her past will follow her.

Now, Issa lingers at the mouth of the alley just before the door to her old home. The concrete is scrawled with pink and blue chalk and the cracks by the door are familiar. Being here feels to her like wearing an old pair of shoes that still fit.

Issa knocks.

“Just a minute!” Mom’s voice resounds from deep within and her heart leaps. There must be another child in there, perhaps Mackenzie’s younger brother or sister. She steps back, leans against a wall, and puts her hands in her pockets.

When the door opens, Mom’s neutral face greets her, a slight smile with two blush dots for cheeks.

“Hello, this is the Dewey home. Can I help you?”

Issa’s heart sinks.

“I… I’m sorry.” Issa speaks from her throat. “I must… I think I have the wrong address.”

Mom pulls a thinking face, question mark fading slowly in and out by her temple. “Issa?” Overjoyed face, now. Smiling eyes. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I must not have seen you for a second. Are you looking for Mackenzie? She’s at school.”

Issa breathes out fully, realizes she has been holding a portion of her breath this whole time. “Hi, Mom.” Her voice quavers. “That’s okay. I wanted to see you, too.”

Mom invites her in, but Issa declines. Seen from the outside, the kitchen is the same kitchen as before, but now seems to be just an arrangement of materials somehow. Issa peers down the hallway and can see how the Dewey home has been manufactured, easily deconstructed into an exploded view in her mind’s eye.

There’s another child inside. She can hear from the play sounds coming from the last bedroom that it’s a little boy. She realizes that this Dewey home is no longer just her past, but a continuum of pasts belonging to no single Dewey child entirely. Intruding might dispel what is now staged for that boy. He must need to believe in this as home, as she had.

They speak in the doorway about Mackenzie, Uncle Georg, and Trevor.

“Do you remember the party?” Issa does not.

Mom tells her to wait for a second. She goes back, retrieves something from the shady recesses of the storage, and returns with a piece of paper. It’s Issa’s drawing. The one that Mom had put up on the fridge.

“Are you still making art?”

“No. I work in the hospital now, actually. It’s not exactly a party, but there are birthdays.”

“I’m so glad!” Mom hugs Issa. Her plastics feel familiar and fragile and Issa can’t remember them ever having hugged each other at the same height. Mom’s chest warms up. The synthetic heartbeat patters bump-bump as it did before, but Issa pulls away.

There’s an awkward silence.

“Hey, Mom, will you give Mackenzie my new address? I’d like her to visit me, if that’s okay. I want her to know she can come over any time.”

“Of course, sweetie.”

“So… I should get back to work. My shift starts soon.”

“Issa-boo, wait! Before you go, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

Mom clasps her fingers together and her face changes to her hopeful face. “Was there anything I could have done to be a better Mom? Maybe something you wished I would have done differently?”

“Uh… I don’t….” Issa opens and closes her mouth, unsure of how to reply.

“How about on a scale of one to five? How many stars would you give me?”

YOU MAINTAIN A MENU of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most. That certainly makes your workday easy. All a Vision Quest requires is a dash of mystical shaman, a spirit animal (wolf usually, but birds of prey are on the upswing this year), and the approximation of a peyote experience. Tourists always come out of the Experience feeling spiritually transformed. (You’ve never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State, and who’s going to call you on the difference?) It’s all 101 stuff, really, these Quests. But no other Indian working at Sedona Sweats can do it better. Your sales numbers are tops.

Your wife Theresa doesn’t approve of the gig. Oh, she likes you working, especially after that dismal stretch of unemployment the year before last when she almost left you, but she thinks the job itself is demeaning.

“Our last name’s not Trueblood,” she complains when you tell her about your nom de rêve.

“Nobody wants to buy a Vision Quest from a Jesse Turnblatt,” you explain. “I need to sound more Indian.”

“You are Indian,” she says. “Turnblatt’s Indian-sounding enough because you’re already Indian.”

“We’re not the right kind of Indian,” you counter. “I mean, we’re Catholic, for Christ’s sake.”

What Theresa doesn’t understand is that Tourists don’t want a real Indian experience. They want what they see in the movies, and who can blame them? Movie Indians are terrific! So you watch the same movies the Tourists do, until John Dunbar becomes your spirit animal and Stands with Fists your best girl. You memorize Johnny Depp’s lines from The Lone Ranger and hang a picture of Iron Eyes Cody in your work locker. For a while you are really into Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man.

It’s Little Big Man that does you in.

For a week in June, you convince your boss to offer a Custer’s Last Stand special, thinking there might be a Tourist or two who want to live out a Crazy Horse Experience. You even memorize some quotes attributed to the venerable Sioux chief that you find on the internet. You plan to make it real authentic.

But you don’t get a single taker. Your numbers nosedive.

Management in Phoenix notices, and Boss drops it from the blackboard by Fourth of July weekend. He yells at you to stop screwing around, accuses you of trying to be an artiste or whatnot.

“Tourists don’t come to Sedona Sweats to live out a goddamn battle,” Boss says in the break room over lunch one day, “especially if the white guy loses. They come here to find themselves.” Boss waves his hand in the air in an approximation of something vaguely prayer-like. “It’s a spiritual experience we’re offering. Top quality. The fucking best.”

DarAnne, your Navajo co-worker with the pretty smile and the perfect teeth, snorts loudly. She takes a bite of her sandwich, mutton by the looks of it. Her jaw works, her sharp teeth flash white. She waits until she’s finished chewing to say, “Nothing spiritual about Squaw Fantasy.”

Squaw Fantasy is Boss’s latest idea, his way to get the numbers up and impress Management. DarAnne and a few others have complained about the use of the ugly slur, the inclusion of a sexual fantasy as an Experience at all. But Boss is unmoved, especially when the first week’s numbers roll in. Biggest seller yet.

Boss looks over at you. “What do you think?”

Boss is Pima, with a bushy mustache and a thick head of still-dark hair. You admire that about him. Virility. Boss makes being a man look easy. Makes everything look easy. Real authentic-like.

DarAnne tilts her head, long beaded earrings swinging, and waits. Her painted nails click impatiently against the Formica lunch table. You can smell the onion in her sandwich.

Your mouth is dry like the red rock desert you can see outside your window. If you say Squaw Fantasy is demeaning, Boss will mock you, call you a pussy, or worse. If you say you think it’s okay, DarAnne and her crew will put you on the guys-who-are-assholes list and you’ll deserve it.

You sip your bottled water, stalling. Decide that in the wake of the Crazy Horse debacle that Boss’s approval means more than DarAnne’s, and venture, “I mean, if the Tourists like it….”

Boss slaps the table, triumphant. DarAnne’s face twists in disgust. “What does Theresa think of that, eh, Jesse?” she spits at you. “You tell her Boss is thinking of adding Savage Braves to the menu next? He’s gonna have you in a loincloth and hair down to your ass, see how you like it.”

Your face heats up, embarrassed. You push away from the table, too quickly, and the flimsy top teeters. You can hear Boss’s shouts of protest as his vending machine lemonade tilts dangerously, and DarAnne’s mocking laugh, but it all comes to your ears through a shroud of thick cotton. You mumble something about getting back to work. The sound of arguing trails you down the hall.

You change in the locker room and shuffle down to the pod marked with your name. You unlock the hatch and crawl in. Some people find the pods claustrophobic, but you like the cool metal container, the tight fit. It’s comforting. The VR helmet fits snugly on your head, the breathing mask over your nose and mouth.

With a shiver of anticipation, you give the pod your Experience setting. Add the other necessary details to flesh things out. The screen prompts you to pick a Tourist connection from a waiting list, but you ignore it, blinking through the option screens until you get to the final confirmation. You brace for the mild nausea that always comes when you Relocate in and out of an Experience.

The first sensation is always smell. Sweetgrass and wood smoke and the rich loam of the northern plains. Even though it’s fake, receptors firing under the coaxing of a machine, you relax into the scents. You grew up in the desert, among people who appreciate cedar and piñon and red earth, but there’s still something homelike about this prairie place.

Or maybe you watch too much TV. You really aren’t sure anymore.

You find yourself on a wide grassy plain, somewhere in the upper Midwest of a bygone era. Bison roam in the distance. A hawk soars overhead.

You are alone, you know this, but it doesn’t stop you from looking around to make sure. This thing you are about to do. Well, you would be humiliated if anyone found out. Because you keep thinking about what DarAnne said. Squaw Fantasy and Savage Braves. Because the thing is, being sexy doesn’t disgust you the way it does DarAnne. You’ve never been one of those guys. The star athlete or the cool kid. It’s tempting to think of all those Tourist women wanting you like that, even if it is just in an Experience.

You are now wearing a knee-length loincloth. A wave of black hair flows down your back. Your middle-aged paunch melts into rock-hard abs worthy of a romance novel cover model. You raise your chin and try out your best stoic look on a passing prairie dog. The little rodent chirps something back at you. You’ve heard prairie dogs can remember human faces, and you wonder what this one would say about you. Then you remember this is an Experience, so the prairie dog is no more real than the caricature of an Indian you have conjured up.

You wonder what Theresa would think if she saw you like this.

The world shivers. The pod screen blinks on. Someone wants your Experience.

A Tourist, asking for you. Completely normal. Expected. No need for that panicky hot breath rattling through your mask.

You scroll through the Tourist’s requirements.

Experience Type: Vision Quest.

Tribe: Plains Indian (nation nonspecific).

Favorite Animal: Wolf.

These things are all familiar. Things you are good at faking. Things you get paid to pretend.

You drop the Savage Brave fantasy garb for buckskin pants and beaded leather moccasins. You keep your chest bare and muscled but you drape a rough wool blanket across your shoulders for dignity. Your impressive abs are still visible.

The sun is setting and you turn to put the artificial dusk at your back, prepared to meet your Tourist. You run through your list of Indian names to bestow upon your Tourist once the Vision Quest is over. You like to keep the names fresh, never using the same one in case the Tourists ever compare notes. For a while you cheated and used one of those naming things on the internet where you enter your favorite flower and the street you grew up on and it gives you your Indian name, but there were too many Tourists who grew up on Elm or Park and you found yourself getting repetitive. You try to base the names on appearances now. Hair color, eye, some distinguishing feature. Tourists really seem to like it.

This Tourist is younger than you expected. Sedona Sweats caters to New Agers, the kind from Los Angeles or Scottsdale with impressive bank accounts. But the man coming up the hill, squinting into the setting sun, is in his late twenties. Medium height and build with pale spotty skin and brown hair. The guy looks normal enough, but there’s something sad about him.

Maybe he’s lost.

You imagine a lot of Tourists are lost.

Maybe he’s someone who works a day job just like you, saving up money for this once-in-a-lifetime Indian Experience™. Maybe he’s desperate, looking for purpose in his own shitty world and thinking Indians have all the answers. Maybe he just wants something that’s authentic.

You like that. The idea that Tourists come to you to experience something real. DarAnne has it wrong. The Tourists aren’t all bad. They’re just needy.

You plant your feet in a wide welcoming stance and raise one hand. “How,” you intone, as the man stops a few feet in front of you.

The man flushes, a bright pinkish tone. You can’t tell if he’s nervous or embarrassed. Maybe both? But he raises his hand, palm forward, and says, “How,” right back.

“Have you come seeking wisdom, my son?” you ask in your best broken English accent. “Come. I will show you great wisdom.” You sweep your arm across the prairie. “We look to brother wolf—”

The man rolls his eyes.

What?

You stutter to a pause. Are you doing something wrong? Is the accent no good? Too little? Too much?

You visualize the requirements checklist. You are positive he chose wolf. Positive. So you press on. “My brother wolf,” you say again, this time sounding much more Indian, you are sure.

“I’m sorry,” the man says, interrupting. “This wasn’t what I wanted. I’ve made a mistake.”

“But you picked it on the menu!” In the confusion of the moment, you drop your accent. Is it too late to go back and say it right?

The man’s lips curl up in a grimace, like you have confirmed his worst suspicions. He shakes his head. “I was looking for something more authentic.”

Something in your chest seizes up.

“I can fix it,” you say.

“No, it’s all right. I’ll find someone else.” He turns to go.

You can’t afford another bad mark on your record. No more screw-ups or you’re out. Boss made that clear enough. “At least give me a chance,” you plead.

“It’s okay,” he says over his shoulder.

This is bad. Does this man not know what a good Indian you are? “Please!”

The man turns back to you, his face thoughtful.

You feel a surge of hope. This can be fixed, and you know exactly how. “I can give you a name. Something you can call yourself when you need to feel strong. It’s authentic,” you add enthusiastically. “From a real Indian.” That much is true.

The man looks a little more open, and he doesn’t say no. That’s good enough.

You study the man’s dusky hair, his pinkish skin. His long skinny legs. He reminds you a bit of the flamingos at the Albuquerque zoo, but you are pretty sure no one wants to be named after those strange creatures. It must be something good. Something… spiritual.

“Your name is Pale Crow,” you offer. Birds are still on your mind.

At the look on the man’s face, you reconsider. “No, no, it is White” —yes, that’s better than pale— “Wolf. White Wolf.”

“White Wolf?” There’s a note of interest in his voice.

You nod sagely. You knew the man had picked wolf. Your eyes meet. Uncomfortably. White Wolf coughs into his hand. “I really should be getting back.”

“But you paid for the whole experience. Are you sure?”

White Wolf is already walking away.

“But….”

You feel the exact moment he Relocates out of the Experience. A sensation like part of your soul is being stretched too thin. Then, a sort of whiplash, as you let go.

FISHERWOMAN MIKA SANDRIGAL WAS lost at sea. She knew where she was in relation to the Candorrean coastline and how to navigate back to her home city, Maelstrom. She knew the time of day. She knew the season. She knew the phase of the moon and the pattern of the tide.

She did not know the year.

Strange waters flowed beneath the hull of her fishing boat, illuminating the midnight darkness with phosphorescent swirls of yellow and green. The thick scent of pepper and brine tickled her nose, and she knew that a juggernaut swam far below, vast and merciless and consuming shield fish by the thousands.

Mika squinted up at a familiar night sky, at the Dancing Girl, the Triplets, the Mad Horse. She had fished off this coast for nearly twenty years, eight of them lost in time. She’d seen green waters, pink waters, blue. She’d been to Candorrea when it was a loose collection of fishing villages, and she’d been to Candorrea when the buildings were so tall she could hardly look at them without shaking. No matter what century she washed up in, however, the constellations were there to guide her home.

It was a windless night. Mika pulled out her oars and set course for Maelstrom, keen to find out when she had landed.

MY SON'S EYES were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness was there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

“Thede,” I said, grabbing him.

He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.

“You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said, on the phone, the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”

I hadn’t listened, then. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days’ work and five days’ pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers—and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.

“Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”

I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.

“You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discreetly into my palm. I watched her go with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he. What have you done with him. Who is this surly creature. Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.

Breathe, Dom, I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.

“How’s school?” I asked.

Thede shrugged. “Fine.”

“Math still your favorite subject?”

“Math was never my favorite subject.”

I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.

“What’s your favorite subject?”

Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.

I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.

“Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.

At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.

And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.

Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.”

His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities starting sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede I couldn’t.

“Why don’t you learn Swedish?” he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.

“I’m trying,” I said. “I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have—”

“Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them.” Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.

“Han one of your friends?”

Thede nodded, eyes escaping.

Han’s father would be Chinese, and not one of the laborers who helped build this city—all of them went home to hardship-job rewards. He’d be an engineer or manager for one of the extraction firms. He would live in a nice house and work in an office. He would be able to make choices about how he spent his time.

“I have something for you,” I said, in desperation.

I hadn’t brought it for him. I carried it around with me, always. Because it was comforting to have it with me, and because I couldn’t trust that the men I bunked with wouldn’t steal it.

Heart slipping, I handed over the NEW YORK F CKING CITY T-shirt that was my most—my only—prized possession. Thin as paper, soft as baby bunnies. My mom had made me scratch the letter U off it before I could wear the thing to school. And Little Thede had loved it. We made a big ceremony of putting it on only once a year, on his birthday, and noting how much he had grown by how much it had shrunk on him. Sometimes if I stuck my nose in it and breathed deeply enough, I could still find a trace of the laundromat in the basement of my mother’s building. Or the brake-screech stink of the subway. What little was left of New York City was inside that shirt. Parting with it meant something, something huge and irrevocable.

But my son was slipping through my fingers. And he mattered more than the lost city where whatever else I was—starving, broke, an urchin, a criminal—I belonged.

“Dad,” Thede whispered, taking it. And here, at last, his eyes came back. The eyes of a boy who loved his father. Who didn’t care that his father was a thick-skulled obstinate immigrant grunt. Who believed his father could do anything. “Dad. You love this shirt.”

But I love you more, I did not say. Than anything. Instead: “It’ll fit you just fine now.” And then: “Enough sea lions. Beam fights?”

Thede shrugged. I wondered if they had fallen out of fashion while I was away. So much did, every time I left. The ice ships were the only work I could get, capturing calved glacier chunks and breaking them down into drinking water to be sold to the wide new swaths of desert that ringed the globe, and the work was hard and dangerous and kept me forever in limbo.

Only two fighters in the first fight, both lithe and swift and thin, their styles an amalgam of Chinese martial arts. Not like the big bruising New York boxers who had been the rage when I arrived, illegally, at fifteen years old, having paid two drunks to vouch for my age. Back before the Fail-Proof Trillion Dollar NYC Flood-Surge Locks had failed, and 80% of the city sunk, and the grid cities banned all new East Coast arrivals. Now the North Americans in Arm Eight were just one of many overcrowded, underskilled labor forces for the city’s corporations to exploit.

They leapt from beam to beam, fighting mostly in kicks, grappling briefly when both met on the same beam. I watched Thede. Thin, fragile Thede, with the wide eyes and nostrils that seemed to take in all the world’s ugliness, all its stink. He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant. I put my hand on his shoulder and he did not shake it off. We watched men harm each other high above us.

THE NOON SUN was programmed to perfection—warming but not scorching—and the light breeze refreshed as it rearranged Lake’s hair. The black sand beach was soft to the feet, containing the right amount of exquisitely shaped shells planted in a manner that drew Jared down the beach, exploring. Lake had brought her son here because of the nature setting. He seemed to be enjoying himself, yet she watched with a wary eye, jaw and shoulders tight with anxiety. Her gaze darted restlessly to the endless scroll of must-haves to the right of her main view: spa getaways, mood boosters (completely safe!), and the latest fashions. At the upper right of her view were the icons for her own settings, as well as the parental access to her son’s space. Knowing she could always check his whereabouts should be reassuring, but it couldn’t warn her in advance, and that was the issue.

A small group had gathered a short distance away: two young men, three women in burkinis, and four children, all apparently older than Jared. Lake reached for her cover-up and slipped it over her head. She knew it wasn’t necessary, but still, the modesty wear made her self-conscious. Instantly, burkinis began scrolling through her feed, informing her brightly that they’re for anyone! She almost laughed.

One of the older girls, wearing a purple and black burkini, spotted Jared and ran up to him. They exchanged words, and then the girl threw back her head and laughed. Jared flung out his arms, theatrically, like his father used to when he was about to accomplish some minor feat like opening a stubborn jam jar. These small reminders always stabbed Lake with sweet daggers.

Having broadcast his intentions for greatness, Jared turned and did a cartwheel in the sand. His new friend clapped, and then did a handstand while Jared stared. The girl lowered expertly onto her feet again, and then gestured for Jared to try it. It took him a few tries to get his feet up high enough for her to catch them and help him balance.

Lake looked over at the rest of the group. Two of the women were watching the acrobatics, and one looked over at her and waved. Lake waved back. She dared to hope she could leave Jared with them while she went to her job. Even an hour in beta testing would earn her enough money to keep them both going for several more days. Only a small percentage of the fully instantiated opted for that type of work, and never the sequestered, until she’d come around. Most people didn’t want to be reminded of where they were. It was disorienting, but it paid well, and expenses here were minimal. Maybe Lake could sweeten the pot by offering the girl credits for babysitting.

All the children were at the shore now, playing. They’d made their way closer to where Lake sat. She waved at the girl who’d helped Jared with his handstand. The girl smiled and returned the gesture shyly. She had such a pretty smile.

Jared tapped his new friend on her arm to regain her attention. “Hey, look, Aminah! Look what else I can do!” His form suddenly slumped.

No. Lake sprang to her feet in alarm, but it was too late. Jared deflated like a popped balloon and then he was gone.

The girl gasped, and then stared wide-eyed at Lake.

Lake’s face grew hot with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry,” she shouted, to be heard above the waves. “He’s only eight. He… thinks it’s funny.”

But Aminah had started to back away. “Oh. That’s okay. Bye!” She took off running, and the other children followed. Lake watched as Aminah spoke to one of the women, and then pointed at Lake. The other children kept running down the beach, increasing their distance.

So much for the idea of babysitting. Lake burst into tears, which she quickly quelled. She closed her eyes and concentrated. Clap your hands, she told herself. Clap.

MY INTERN SCREAMED. That’s rarely a good sign. Near the starboard rail, Abigail clutched a dripping, freshly towed plankton net. The collection vial dangling from the muslin funnel glinted in the sun, as if filled with silver particles.

“Doctor!” she shouted. “Nanobotplankton!”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “They aren’t garbage?”

“Look!”

The collection vial was the size and transparency of a jam jar. Abigail thrust it at me, as if handing off a grenade. I activated the magnification on my protective goggles and peered at the murky seawater. Metal specks sloshed side to side, dizzying; they were shaped like pill boxes and propelled by nanocarbon flagella.

“Alert the captain,” I said. “It’s bad news.”

I’d heard horror stories about swarms of bots large enough to track and disable cruise ships; they reported either to governments or pirates or supervillains, and we were in the open ocean, well beyond any continental jurisdiction.

Pirates or supervillains, then. What did they want from us? The vessel was equipped for research, and our most expensive cargo was a really good microscope. Would they demand hostages? I glanced at Abigail’s back; she was nineteen, brilliant, and had joined my lab with a fellowship for low-income students. She reminded me of myself, twenty years back when, driven by hope, I studied geosciences because the world was hurting, and somebody had to diagnose it so something could done.

Since then, I’ve made plenty of diagnoses. But so little has been done.

I wondered how long it would take Abigail to become jaded or—like many of my colleagues—leave the field. It’s hard to make a career in geosciences unless you love the earth. Even harder to study its death in the kind of detail that withstands peer review. How many reefs had I watched die? Islands drowned by the rising sea? Primordial species extinguished in the span of one human lifetime?

Frustration drove my own advisor to early retirement. I was her last pupil; she left the moment I graduated. “They won’t listen to us, Maria,” she said. “They won’t fund us. And that means we can’t help them.”

As I watched the water around our ship darken with swarming bots, I wondered: “Who will help us?”

In the distance, a silver surface split the sea, but the vessel—an odd submarine?—dove before I could get a good look. One of the quick-thinking deckhands activated a distress drone. With an industrious whir, the tri-copter zipped over my head and attempted to escape the signal-blocking radius emitted by those damnable bots.

The ship’s emergency siren wailed, indicating that I should leave the deck and take shelter in my cabin. But I couldn’t turn away from the sea, which churned like boiling soup beneath the drone. Seconds later, a metal beast breached the water. Its great, crocodile-shaped mouth yawned open and snapped, crushing the drone mid-leap. Its four paddle-shaped flippers flapped, their surfaces sleek and their edges sharp as knives. When the whale-sized machine landed, the impact rocked our ship and sprayed my face with water that tasted of salt and metal.

“What is that?” a deckhand asked, dismayed.

“I… can’t believe this,” I said, “but it looks like a robo-Liopleurodon.”

The Liopleurodon head reared from the water, its jaws snapping, flourishing five-inch-long serrated teeth that could easily tear our hull to shreds. I took a step back, at once startled and fascinated. Its engineer had put exquisite care into the design, emulating the strength and form that once made the Liopleurodon the greatest carnivore in the Jurassic sea.

Far beyond the Liopleurodon, silver bobbed on the undulating sea. I zoomed in with my goggles and glimpsed a hatch protruding from a metal dome.

“Doctor!” Abigail said, tugging on my sleeve. “The captain wants us off the deck. Come with me! We can’t—”

“ATTENTION RV,” the Liopleurodon boomed. “SURRENDER ALL MICROSCOPES, CTDs, AND REAGENT-GRADE CHEMICALS, OR WE WILL DISABLE YOUR SHIP.”

There was something familiar about that voice.

“Dr. Barbara?” I asked. “Dr. Barbara, is that you?” I threw myself against the railing and waved at the Liopleurodon’s glassy black eye. “Hey! Hey, it’s me! Maria! Can you hear me? Holy schist, this can’t be happening!”

The Liopleurodon’s mouth opened wider, as if gasping. “MARIA!?”

“Are you piloting that robot dinosaur?” I asked.

“ER. WELL. A ROBOT MARINE REPTILE.”

“And robbing us?”

“FOR THE GREATER GOOD.”

“Greater good?”

“EARTH AND SCIENCE.”

I’d been wrong. My advisor never gave up. Although I wasn’t sure that joining a team of rogue scientist pirates was much better. And it had to be a team. Dr. Barbara might be a brilliant chemical oceanographer, but she wasn’t a paleontologist or an engineer.

“YOU MUST THINK I’M TERRIBLE. JUST—ER—NEVER MIND. WE CAN FIND SUPPLIES ELSEWHERE. I HOPE YOUR RESEARCH IS FRUITFUL.”

The Liopleurodon began to sink. “Wait!” I said.

It hesitated, half its head submerged. “YES?”

“Have you really accomplished anything with this… this criminal behavior?”

“OF COURSE. JUST THIS YEAR, WE HAVE ELIMINATED ONE MILLION TONS OF MICROPLASTICS FROM THE NORTH PACIFIC GYRE AND SAVED A WHALE SPECIES FROM EXTINCTION.”

“You’ll be caught someday, Dr. Barbara,” I said.

“PERHAPS.” The Liopleurodon winked. “TAKE CARE, MARIA.”

As our attackers vanished and the ocean cleared, Abigail asked, “Who was that?”

“Apparently, my graduate advisor.”

“Is she a supervillain, or something?”

“Or something,” I said. And I wondered if someday that something would be me.

Silver glinted against the horizon as the robo-Liopleurodon leapt one last time.

ON SUNDAY AFTER SERVICES, Jacob Esau Mwangi beat a hasty retreat from the crowd that descended upon his beaming parents and Mercy, who on this rare visit home between Lent and Easter terms was displayed between them like a tulip arrangement.

“What a daughter! Be a famous professor soon.”

“You have not forgotten about us common people? Cambridge makes all the children forget. They act so embarrassed when they come home—”

“Funny to think they both come from the same family.”

“It’s very strange, isn’t it?”

“Where did he go anyway, that Jacob boy?”

Jacob, outside the chapel’s blue acrylic domes, caught the first flying matatu without regard for where it went.

MADELEINE REMEMBERS being a different person. It strikes her when she’s driving, threading her way through farmland, homesteads, facing down the mountains around which the road winds. She remembers being thrilled at the thought of travel, of the self she would discover over the hills and far away. She remembers laughing with friends, looking forward to things, to a future.

She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all that’s left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.

THE NEEDLE ON THE VEGGIE oil tank read flat empty by the time we came to China Grove. A giant pink and purple fiberglass dragon loomed over the entrance, refugee from some shuttered local amusement park, no doubt; it looked more medieval than Chinese. The parking lot held a mix of Chauffeurs and manual farm trucks, but I didn’t spot any other greasers, so I pulled in.

“Cutting it close, Luce?” Silva put down his book and leaned over to peer at the gauge.

“There hasn’t been anything but farms for the last fifty miles. Serves me right for trying a road we haven’t been down before.”

“Where are we?” asked Jacky from the bed in the back of the van. I glanced in the rearview. He caught my eye and gave an enthusiastic wave. His microbraids spilled forward from whatever he’d been using to tether them, and he gathered them back into a thick ponytail.

Silva answered before I could. “Nowhere, Indiana. Go back to sleep.”

“Will do.” Without music or engine to drown him out, Jacky’s snores filled the van again a second later. He’d been touring with us for a year now, so we’d gotten used to the snores. To be honest, I envied him his ability to fall asleep that fast.

I glanced at Silva. “You want to do the asking for once?”

He grinned and held up both forearms, tattooed every inch. “You know it’s not me.”

“There’s such a thing as sleeves, you know.” I pulled my windbreaker off the back of my seat and flapped it at him, even though I knew he was right. In the Midwest, approaching a new restaurant for the first time, it was never him, between the tattoos and the spiky blue hair. Never Jacky for the pox scars on his cheeks, even though they were clearly long healed. That left me.

My bad knee buckled as I swung from the driver’s seat. I bent to clutch it and my lower back spasmed just to the right of my spine, that momentary pain that told me to rethink all my life’s choices.

“What are you doing?” Silva asked through the open door.

“Tying my shoe.” There was no need to lie, but I did it anyway. Pride or vanity or something akin. He was only two years younger than me, and neither of us jumped off our amps much anymore. If I ached from the drive, he probably ached, too.

The backs of my thighs were all pins and needles, and my shirt was damp with sweat. I took a moment to lean against Daisy the Diesel and stretch in the hot air. I smelled myself: not great after four days with no shower, but not unbearable.

The doors opened into a foyer, red and gold and black. I didn’t even notice the blond hostess in her red qipao until she stepped away from the wallpaper.

“Dining alone?” she asked. Beyond her, a roomful of faces turned in my direction. This wasn’t really the kind of place that attracted tourists, especially not these days, this far off the interstate.

“No, um, actually, I was wondering if I could speak to the chef or the owner? It’ll only take a minute.” I was pretty sure I had timed our stop for after their dinner rush. Most of the diners looked to be eating or pushing their plates aside.

The owner and chef were the same person. I’d been expecting another blond Midwesterner, but he was legit Chinese. He had never heard of a van that ran on grease. I did the not-quite-pleading thing. On stage I aimed for fierce, but in jeans and runners and a ponytail, I could fake a down-on-her-luck Midwest momma. The trick was not to push it.

He looked a little confused by my request, but at least he was willing to consider it. “Come to the kitchen door after we close and show me. Ten, ten thirty.”

It was nine; not too bad. I walked back to the van. Silva was still in the passenger seat, but reading a trifold menu. He must have ducked in behind me to grab it. “They serve a bread basket with lo mein. And spaghetti and meatballs. Where are we?”

“Nowhere, Indiana.” I echoed back at him.

We sat in the dark van and watched the customers trickle out. I could mostly guess from their looks which ones would be getting into the trucks and which into the Chauffeurs. Every once in a while, a big guy in work boots and a trucker cap surprised me by squeezing himself into some little self-driving thing. The game passed the time, in any case.

A middle-aged cowboy wandered over to stare at our van. I pegged him for a legit rancher from a distance, but as he came closer I noticed a clerical collar beneath the embroidered shirt. His boots shone and he had a paunch falling over an old rodeo belt; the incongruous image of a bull-riding minister made me laugh. He startled when he realized I was watching him.

He made a motion for me to lower my window.

“Maryland plates!” he said. “I used to live in Hagerstown.”

I smiled, though I’d only ever passed through Hagerstown.

“Used to drive a church van that looked kinda like yours, too, just out of high school. Less duct tape, though. Whatcha doing out here?”

“Touring. Band.”

“No kidding! You look familiar. Have I heard of you?”

“Cassis Fire,” I said, taking the question as a prompt for a name. “We had it painted on the side for a while, but then we figured out we got pulled over less when we were incognito.”

“Don’t think I know the name. I used to have a band, back before…” His voice trailed off, and neither of us needed him to finish his sentence. There were several “back befores” he could be referring to, but they all amounted to the same thing. Back before StageHolo and SportsHolo made it easier to stay home. Back before most people got scared out of congregating anywhere they didn’t know everybody.

“You’re not playing around here, are you?”

I shook my head. “Columbus, Ohio. Tomorrow night.”

“I figured. Couldn’t think of a place you’d play nearby.”

“Not our kind of music, anyway,” I agreed. I didn’t know what music he liked, but this was a safe bet.

“Not any kind. Oh well. Nice chatting with you. I’ll look you up on StageHolo.”

He turned away.

“We’re not on StageHolo,” I called to his back, though maybe not loud enough for him to hear. He waved as his Chauffeur drove him off the lot.

“Luce, you’re a terrible salesperson,” Silva said to me.

“What?” I hadn’t realized he’d been paying attention.

“You know he recognized you. All you had to do was say your name instead of the band’s. Or ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ He’d have paid for dinner for all of us, then bought every T-shirt and download code we have.”

“And then he’d listen to them and realize the music we make now is nothing like the music we made then. And even if he liked it, he’d never go to a show. At best he’d send a message saying how much he wished we were on StageHolo.”

“Which we could be…”

“Which we won’t be.” Silva knew better than to argue with me on that one. It was our only real source of disagreement.

The neon “open” sign in the restaurant’s window blinked out, and I took the cue to put the key back in the ignition. The glowplug light came on, and I started the van back up.

My movement roused Jacky again. “Where are we now?”

I didn’t bother answering.

As I had guessed, the owner hadn’t quite understood what I was asking for. I gave him the engine tour, showing him the custom oil filter and the dual tanks. “We still need regular diesel to start, then switch to the veggie oil tank. Not too much more to it than that.”

“It’s legal?”

Legal enough. There was a gray area wherein perhaps technically we were skirting the fuel tax. By our reasoning, though, we were also skirting the reasons for the fuel tax. We’d be the ones who got in trouble, anyway. Not him.

“Of course,” I said, then changed the subject. “And the best part is that it makes the van smell like egg rolls.”

He smiled. We got a whole tankful out of him, and a bag full of food he’d have otherwise chucked out, as well.

The guys were over the moon about the food. Dumpster diving behind a restaurant or Superwally would have been our next order of business, so anything that hadn’t made a stop in a garbage can on its way to us was haute cuisine as far as we were concerned. Silva took the lo mein—no complimentary bread—screwed together his travel chopsticks, and handed mine to me from the glove compartment. I grabbed some kind of moo shu without the pancakes, and Jacky woke again to snag the third container.

“Can we go someplace?” Silva asked, waving chopsticks at the window.

“Got anything in mind on a Tuesday night in the boonies?”

Jacky was up for something, too. “Laser tag? Laser bowling?”

Sometimes the age gap was a chasm. I turned in my seat to side-eye the kid. “One vote for lasers.”

“I dunno,” said Silva. “Just a bar? If I have to spend another hour in this van I’m going to scream.”

I took a few bites while I considered. We wouldn’t be too welcome anywhere around here, between our odor and our look, not to mention the simple fact that we were strangers. On the other hand, the more outlets I gave these guys for legit fun, the less likely they were to come up with something that would get us in trouble. “If we see a bar or a bowling joint before someplace to sleep, sure.”

“I can look it up,” said Jacky.

“Nope,” I said. “Leave it to fate.”

After two-thirds of the moo shu, I gave up and closed the container. I hated wasting food, but it was too big for me to finish. I wiped my chopsticks on my jeans and put them back in their case.

Two miles down the road from the restaurant, we came to Starker’s, which I hoped from the apostrophe was only a bar, not a strip club. Their expansive parking lot was empty except for eight Chauffeurs, all lined up like pigs at a trough. At least that meant we didn’t have to worry about some drunk crashing into our van on his way out.

I backed into the closest spot to the door. It was the best lit, so I could worry less about our gear getting lifted. Close was also good if the locals decided they didn’t like our looks.

We got the long stare as we walked in, the one from old Westerns, where all the heads swivel our way and the piano player stops playing. Except, of course, these days the piano player didn’t stop, because the piano player had no idea we’d arrived. The part of the pianist in this scenario was played by Roy Bittan, alongside the whole E Street Band, loud as a stadium and projected in StageHolo 3D.

“Do you want to leave?” Jacky whispered to me.

“No, it’s okay. We’re here now. Might as well have a drink.”

“At least it’s Bruce. I can get behind Bruce.” Silva edged past me toward the bar.

A few at leasts: at least it was Bruce, not some cut-rate imitation. Bruce breathed punk as far as I was concerned, insisting on recording new music and legit live shows all the way into his eighties. At least it was StageHolo and not StageHoloLive, in which case there’d be a cover charge. I was willing to stand in the same room as the technology that was trying to make me obsolete, but I’d be damned if I paid them for the privilege. Of course, it wouldn’t be Bruce on StageHoloLive, either; he’d been gone a couple of years now, and this Bruce looked to be only in his sixties, anyway. A little flat, too, which suggested this was a retrofitted older show, not one recorded using StageHolo’s tech.

Silva pressed a cold can into my hand, and I took a sip, not even bothering to look at what I was drinking. Knowing him, knowing us, he’d snagged whatever had been cheapest. Pisswater, but cold pisswater. Perfect for washing down the greasy takeout food aftertaste.

I slipped into a booth, hoping the guys had followed me. Jacky did, carrying an identical can to mine in one hand, and something the color of windshield wiper fluid in a plastic shot glass in the other.

“You want one?” he asked me, nudging the windshield wiper fluid. “Bartender said it was the house special.”

I pushed it back in his direction. “I don’t drink anything blue. It never ends well.”

“Suit yourself.” He tossed it back, then grinned.

“Your teeth are blue now. You look like you ate a Smurf.”

“What’s a Smurf?”

Sometimes I forgot how young he was. Half my age. A lifetime in this business. “Little blue characters? A village with one chick, one old man, and a bunch of young guys?”

“Like our band?” He shook his head. “Sorry. Bad joke. Anyway, I have no idea what was in that food, but it might have been Smurf, if they’re blue and taste like pork butt. How’s your dinner sitting?”

I swatted him lightly, backhand. “Fine, as long as I don’t drink anything blue.”

He downed his beer in one long chug, then got up to get another. He looked at mine and raised his eyebrows.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick with one. I get the feeling this is a zero-tolerance town.”

If twenty-odd years of this had taught me one thing, it was to stay clear of local police. Every car in the parking lot was self-driving, which suggested there was somebody out on the roads ready to come down hard on us. Having spent a lot of time in my youth leaving clubs at closing time and dodging drunk drivers, I approved this effort. One of the few aspects of our brave new world I could fully endorse.

I looked around. Silva sat on a stool at the bar. Jacky stood behind him, a hand on Silva’s shoulder, tapping his foot to the Bo Diddley beat of “She’s the One.” The rest of the barstools were filled with people who looked too comfortable to be anything but regulars. A couple of them had the cocked-head posture of cheap neural overlays. The others played games on the slick touchscreen bar, or tapped on the Bracertabs strapped to their arms, the latest tech fad. Nobody talking to anybody.

Down at the other end, two blond women stood facing the Bruce holo, singing along and swaying. He pointed in their general direction, and one giggled and clutched her friend’s arm as if he had singled her out personally. Two guys sat on stools near the stage, one playing air drums, the other watching the women. The women only had eyes for Bruce.

I got where they were coming from. I knew people who didn’t like his voice or his songs, but I didn’t know anybody, especially any musician, who couldn’t appreciate his stage presence. Even here, even now, knowing decades separated me from the night this had been recorded, and decades separated the young man who had first written the song from the older man who sang it, even from across a scuzzy too-bright barroom, drinking pisswater beer with strangers and my own smelly band, I believed him when he sang that she was the one. I hated the StageHolo company even more for the fact I was enjoying it.

Somebody slid into the booth next to me. I turned, expecting one of my bandmates, but a stranger had sat down, closer than I cared for.

“Passing through?” he asked, looking at me with intense, bloodshot eyes. He brushed a thick sweep of hair from his forehead, a style I could only assume he had stuck with through the decades since it had been popular. He had dimples and a smile that had clearly been his greatest asset in his youth. He probably hadn’t quite realized drinking had caught up with him, that he was puffy and red-nosed. Or that he slurred a bit, even on those two words.

“Passing through.” I gave him a brief “not interested” smile and turned my whole body back toward the stage.

“Kind of unusual for somebody to pass through here, let alone bother to stop. What attracted you?” His use of the word “attracted” was pointed.

If he put an arm around me, I’d have to slug him. I shifted a few inches, trying to put distance between us, and emphasized my next word. “We wanted a drink. We’ve been driving a while.”

His disappointment was evident. “Boyfriend? Husband?”

I nodded at the bar, letting him pick whichever he thought looked more like he might be with me, and whichever label he wanted to apply. It amused me either way, since I couldn’t imagine being with either of them. Not at the beginning, and especially not after having spent all this time in the van with them.

Then I wondered why I was playing games at all. I turned to look at him. “We’re a band.”

“No kidding! I used to have a band.” A reassessment of the situation flashed across his face. A new smile, more collegial. The change in his whole demeanor prompted me to give him a little more attention.

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. Mostly we played here. Before the insurance rates rose and StageHolo convinced Maggie she’d save money with holos of famous bands.”

“Did she? Save money?”

He sighed. “Probably. Holos don’t drink, and holos don’t dent the mics or spill beers into the PA. And people will stay and imbibe for hours if the right bands are playing.”

“Do you still play for fun? Your band?”

He shrugged. “We did for a while. We even got a spot at the very last State Fair. And after that, every once in a while we’d play a barbecue in somebody’s backyard. But it’s hard to keep it up when you’ve got nothing to aim for. Playing here once a week was a decent enough goal, but who would want to hear me sing covers when you can have the real thing?”

He pointed his beer at one of the women by the stage. “That’s my ex-wife, by the way.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s okay.” He took a swig of beer. “That’s when Polly left me. Said it wasn’t ’cause the band was done, but I think it was related. She said I didn’t seem interested in anything at all after that.”

He had turned his attention down to his drink, but now he looked at me again. “How about you? I guess there are still places out there to play?”

“A few,” I said. “Mostly in the cities. There’s a lot of turnover, too. So we can have a great relationship with a place and then we’ll call back and they’ll be gone without a trace.”

“And there’s enough money in it to live on?”

There are people who ask that question in an obnoxious, disbelieving way, and I tend to tell them, “We’re here, aren’t we?” but this guy was nostalgic enough that I answered him honestly. Maybe I could help him see there was no glamour left for people like us.

“I used to get some royalty checks from an old song, which covered insurance and repairs for the van, but they’ve gotten smaller and smaller since BMI v. StageHolo. We make enough to stay on the road, eat really terribly, have a beer now and again. Not enough to save. Not enough to stop, ever. Not that we want to stop, so it’s okay.”

“You never come off the road? Do you live somewhere?”

“The van’s registered at my parents’ place in Maryland, and I crash there when I need a break. But that isn’t often.”

“And your band?”

“My bassist and I have been playing together for a long time, and he’s got places he stays. We replace a drummer occasionally. This one’s been with us for a year, and the two of them are into each other, so if they don’t fall out it might last a while.”

He nodded. The wolfishness was gone, replaced by something more wistful. He held out his beer. “To music.”

“To live music.” My can clinked his.

Somebody shouted over by the bar, and we both twisted round to see what had happened. The air-drum player had wandered over—Max Weinberg was on break, too—and he and Jacky were squaring off over something. Jacky’s blue lips glowed from twenty feet away.

“Nothing good ever comes of blue drinks,” I said to my new friend.

He nodded. “You’re gonna want to get your friend out of here. That’s the owner behind the bar. If your guy breaks anything, she’ll have the cops here in two seconds flat.”

“Crap. Thanks.”

Blue liquid pooled around and on Jacky, a tray of overturned plastic shot glasses behind him. At least they weren’t glass, and at least he hadn’t damaged the fancy bar top. I dug a twenty from the thin wad in my pocket, hoping it was enough.

“You’re fake-drumming to a fake band,” Jacky was saying. “And you’re not even good at it. If you went to your crash cymbal that much with the real Bruce, he’d fire you in two seconds.”

“Who the hell cares? Did I ask you to critique my drumming?”

“No, but if you did, I’d tell you you’re behind on the kick, too. My two-year-old niece keeps a better beat than you do.”

The other guy’s face reddened, and I saw him clench a fist. Silva had an arm across Jacky’s chest by then, propelling him toward the door. We made eye contact, and he nodded.

I tossed my twenty on a dry spot on the bar, still hoping for a quick getaway.

“We don’t take cash,” said the owner, holding my bill by the corner like it was a dead rat.

Dammit. I squared my shoulders. “You’re legally required to accept U.S. currency.”

“Maybe true in the U.S. of A, but this is the U.S. of Starker’s, and I only accept Superwally credit. And your blue buddy there owes a lot more than this anyway for those spilled drinks.” She had her hand below the bar. I had no clue whether she was going for a phone or a baseball bat or a gun; nothing good could come of any of those options.

I snatched the bill back, mind racing. Silva kept a credit transfer account; that wouldn’t be any help, since he was already out the door. I avoided credit and devices in general, which usually held me in good stead, but I didn’t think the label “Non-comm” would win me any friends here. Jacky rarely paid for anything, so I had no clue whether he had been paying cash or credit up until then.

“I’ve got them, Maggie.” My new friend from the booth stepped up beside me, waving his phone.

He turned to me. “Go on. I’ve got this.”

Maggie’s hand came out from under the bar. She pulled a phone from behind the cash register to do the credit transfer, which meant whatever she had reached for down below probably wouldn’t have been good for my health.

“Keep playing,” he called after me.

HALFWAY UP THE WINDING cliff-side guideway, Zhang Lei turned his bike around. He was exhausted from three days of travel and nauseated, too, but that wasn’t the problem. He could always power through physical discomfort. But the trees, the rocks, the open sky above, and the mountains closing in—it was all too strange. He kept expecting something to drop on his head.

He pinged Marta, the social worker in Beijing Hive who’d orchestrated his escape from Luna seventy-two hours earlier. Forget Paizuo, he whispered as his bike coasted the guideway’s downslope. This is too weird.

Hannu Rajaniemi is the author of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, The Causal Angel, and a stand-alone novel, Summerland. Rajaniemi was born in Finland and completed his doctorate in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh. His works have received Finland’s top science-fiction honor, the Tähtivaeltaja Award, and The Quantum Thief was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science-Fiction Novel. He is the CTO of HelixNano, a synthetic biology startup based in the Bay Area, where he currently lives.

Jacob Weisman is the publisher at Tachyon Publications, which he founded in 1995. He is a World Fantasy Award winner for The New Voices of Fantasy (co-edited with Peter S. Beagle) and is the series editor of Tachyon’s critically acclaimed novella line, including the Hugo Award–winning The Emperor’s Soul, by Brandon Sanderson, and the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award–winning We Are All Completely Fine, by Daryl Gregory. Weisman has edited the anthologies Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (with David G. Hartwell), and The Treasury of the Fantastic (with David M. Sandner). He lives in San Francisco.

The Treasury of the Fantastic (with David Sandner, 2001, 2013)

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (with David G. Hartwell, 2012)

Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature (2016)

The New Voices of Fantasy (with Peter S. Beagle, 2017)

Summerland (2018)

The Quantum Thief (2010)

The Fractal Prince (2012)

The Causal Angel (2014)

Words of Birth and Death (2006)

Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction (2015)

The New Voices of Science Fiction

Copyright © 2019 by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman

This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

Introduction copyright © 2019 by Jacob Weisman

Foreword copyright © 2019 by Hannu Rajaniemi

Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

Cover art “Interval” copyright © 2015 by Matt Dixon

Tachyon Publications LLC

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.tachyonpublications.com

tachyon@tachyonpublications.com

Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

Project Editor: Jaymee Goh

Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-291-3

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-341-5

First Edition: 2019

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“Calved” © 2015 by Sam J. Miller. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2015.

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“The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi” © 2019 by E. Lily Yu. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May/June 2019.

“Openness” © 2016 by Alexander Weinstein. First appeared in Children of the New World: Stories, September 2016. Reprinted by permission of Picador.

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