Fiction

The Green Workbook For Refugees From Earth

…in the Order in Which a Female Refugee Read It and Filled It Out

by F. B. Hughes

BEFORE YOU BEGIN:
1. This reconfigurable document registers responses and provides the appropriate worksheet pathway. Please use blue or black ink.
2. This GREEN workbook (in BOOK ENGLISH) is for Anglophones who departed North America from the years CE 2206-2250 and arrived on the planet Avunculus, one of the “Fifteen Colonized Worlds.” Please see a white-suited ERA worker if you prefer a post-2250 NA English dialect.

A warm welcome to Earth’s refugees!

We are the Earth Refugees Authority (ERA), a government authority whose mandate is to provide food and water, temporary shelter, medical care, and security for refugees from Earth to this world of Avunculus.

At the time you left Earth, Avunculus was a nascent colony, one of 15. As your intake counselor likely informed you, 512 years have passed between the time you entered the copula on Earth and disembarked on Avunculus.

Effectively, your civilization is long dead to you. If you have not already been assigned a grief counselor, one will be appointed to you during your stay. We are experiencing a shortage of trained personnel in this area; the current wait time is 301 days.

The copulae gates that brought you here were damaged when Earth attempted to shut them down. The gates now only transmit matter and light one way—from Earth to these Fifteen Worlds. Because we cannot send messages to Earth, there is no way to stop this refugee-producing situation. You can neither return to Earth nor enter Avunculus proper. Strict laws governing citizenship and residency restrict entry to holders of certain service roles.

The ERA is committed to peaceful, local solutions to this ancient multiplanetary migrant crisis. For 70 years, we have administered camps on Avunculus. This one is called the Armstrong Temporary Camp for Earth Refugees (ATCER). You are now a legal resident of ATCER and must remain inside it unless authorized to travel elsewhere. Because you are stateless, we provide your legal representation in courts of local, planetary, and inter-planet jurisdiction.

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If you are traveling with minor children, and they are currently under your care, see section 15.

(from Section 15e) Children 10-14 (age determined by follicle analysis) are entitled to a food ration equaling 6500 kilojoules per day. Rations are nutritionally maximized for growth and health.

(from Section 15i) The Armstrong Temporary Camp for Earth Refugees operates two schools for children 7-18. Enrollment is mandatory for all children 7-15.

Point of pride!
Despite resource scarcity, ATCER students have steadily narrowed the score gap with native-born Avunculan children on standardized academic examinations. Many of our teachers were once pupils in the same schools.

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For brief explanations of chronological displacement effects that you have experienced, see Section 2.

Important to know!
This planet, like each of the Fifteen Worlds, contains an autonomous terraforming actant (locally called godplanet) that exerts will through systems of non-living and living things. The actant grants select humans (approximately 1 in 1,000,000) various abilities of input (“permissions”) into its matter and energy transforming systems. Sensitives provide our governments an avenue of communication and influence with the actant. For unknown reasons, Earthborn experience a slightly higher rate of sensitivity. See Form 201B for a checklist of signs that you may have permissions.

(From Section 2) In CE 2206, Earth disabled all traffic from the Fifteen Worlds to Earth, while leaving intact the ability to send traffic here. We call this the De-Coupling. As you may be aware, Earth authorities disabled the copulae out of concern that the terraformers would use them to access Earth.

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The De-Coupling resulted in chronological effects. Since CE 2206, Earth-originating travelers have been dispersed across the past five centuries. Millions of travelers who entered the copulae together found themselves separated by great expanses of time.

If you have experienced family or party separation, please invoke Section 99.

If you wish to report missing children, please invoke Form 99B.

(from Form 99B) How many dependents/children do you wish to report missing? 2

Please enter your dependents’ names, ages, and description below.

Conrad Tyler, 10, male

Olivia Tyler, 8, female

Unfortunately, because of the De-Coupling, persons sought may have disembarked at an earlier point in time. Where records do not exist, this may indicate that persons sought arrived at a time downstream (the future). In such cases, records of your arrival here will be provided to them upon their arrival, assuming record keeping and refugee-recovery infrastructure remain intact.

Research teams are understaffed and records continue to accrue. This causes considerable delay. The current wait time to return complete record searches to people inside the camps is 164 months.

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(Section 200: Methods of Normalizing Status) Refugees are not permitted to exit the camp without authorization. Refugees who leave the camp without permission face arrest and prosecution under local planetary law. Camp residents also face a heightened risk of robbery and assault. Unfortunately, the ERA has limited security capability outside the camp.

If you think you may be eligible for a special status that will allow travel outside the camp, such as temporary residency or asylum, please see Section 201.

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(Section 201) If you wish to apply for temporary residency status as someone who can “hear” the godplanet, please request Form 201P.

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(Form 201P) This form tells our intake personnel that you have some facility to perceive semantic manifestations of the godplanet.

(Excerpts from checklist)

Name: Daria Tyler

Camp ID: 2291-094344-701

Age (at time of departure, rounded up: 35

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Symptoms Checklist:

yes no

[x] [ ] At night or while sleeping, I hear someone not present giving me clear directives.

[x] [ ] I sometimes see places I have never been.

[x] [ ] I can hear the conversations of people who are not there.

[ ] [x] I would like to make a mountain.

[…]

[x] [ ] I often wake up feeling like I spent the night working out an important problem.

[ ] [x] I wish I were a tree.

Health Conditions:

yes no

[x] [ ] Asthma:

[ ] [x] Heart Condition

[ ] [x] Cancer or history of cancer

[…]

[x] [ ] Currently pregnant; if yes, how many weeks, if known: 27

Refugees determined to have matter and energy altering permissions gain access to a pathway to permanent residency on Avunculus. Any sensitivity to the godplanet must be verified through potentially invasive medical testing and long periods of quarantine. Positive results will obligate you to a period of state service currently set by statute as lifetime.

Signature: DARIA TYLER

Date (use Earth standard): 23 Sept CE 2744

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(From Section 834, Signature and submission) Initial each statement to indicate understanding.

You have not completed Form 15, Care of minor child(ren). _DT

You have completed Form 99B, Missing child(ren). _DT

You have completed Waiver of Liability/Form 201P, Terraformer Permissions Testing. Positive selection may open a pathway to permanent residency and freedom of movement, including leave to search for missing persons. _DT
You have indicated that you have a medical condition ofcurrently pregnant. Warning: Testing procedures involve teratogenic substances, high doses of ionizing radiation, and quantum cotermination, in which the actant may align physically with your body; all of these are contraindicated in pregnancy. While prophylactic measures to protect your body and future health will be taken, your fetus may be damaged beyond current capabilities of medical intervention.

Termination of pregnancy is requested. _________

Termination of pregnancy is NOT requested. _________

Please submit this completed workbook to any white-suited intake personnel.

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Bio:

Frank Baird Hughes is an anthropologist and educator. His writing appears in Radon Journal and Gavagai. You may find him in a Philadelphia cafe drafting something new or online at frankbairdhughes.com or cultureworrier.bsky.social.

Philosophy Note:

This story takes place on the world Avunculus, the setting of my earlier story The Oneiromantic Sheep. I’ve written several pieces in this universe that explore Bruno Latour’s ideas about the agency of non-human and inanimate actants (see Bruno Latour (1996): On Interobjectivity, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3:4, 228-245). In writing this story in the format of a workbook, I was also thinking of Foucault’s notions of control through measurement and examination and recommend Khiara Bridges’ Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization as a work that applies Foucault to the management of birth and anxieties about class.

Fact & Opinion

SF Anthologies – A Universe Animated By The Strange, Sublime And Extraordinary

by Mina

Most would agree that an anthology is a collection of short(er) works in one volume. Beyond that, there is room for disagreement: some would insist that these works must be by different authors; others that there must be a unifying setting or theme. The Britannica dictionary gives two definitions for “anthology”: (1) a published collection of writings (such as poems or short stories) by different authors and (2) a collection of works of art or music. Since “works of art” is a very broad category, it’s easy to see why some would treat definition (1) as a subset of definition (2). According to various sources, the word anthology originally comes from the Greek anthología, literally “flower-gathering”, where it became used for a collection of short poems and epigrams by various authors. Whatever your accepted definition of anthology is, it definitely will be broader than just a collection of poems. And anthologies today go beyond the written word, they can include radio, film and TV. But let’s begin by looking at SF/sci-phi anthologies in (paper and electronic) book form, which would comfortably fit under the narrower definition (1).

One anthology I discovered recently (on paper) is Classic Science Fiction Stories, selected and introduced by Adam Roberts. In his introduction, Roberts tells us: “much of the best SF ever written has appeared in the short story format.” He muses that there is an “affinity between the genre of science fiction and the form of the short story.” He theorises that this is because a short story can focus on a “central trope or metaphor” and SF is “a fundamentally metaphorical form of art”. In his opinion, short stories could be considered closer in form to lyric poems, and the form could be extended to TV series like Star Trek and Doctor Who which “assemble mega-texts out of lots of short-story-esque discrete elements”. Whichever form SF anthologies take, they present us with “a universe animated by the strange and sublime and extraordinary.”

An anthology series I have enjoyed thoroughly (and reviewed) in the last couple of years is called Writers of the Future. It collects stories by means of a regular contest and the quality of these stories is excellent. As Jody Lynn Nye tells us in the introduction to volume 41, the stories contained in it don’t follow a single theme, trope or style. They are selected based on two criteria: they are bloody good (my words) and they are original ideas. Each story is accompanied by a beautiful colour illustration, also from the human winners of a contest, as, to agree with Echo Chernik, AI cannot (yet?) understand symbolism and turn it into something truly original and meaningful. Another intriguing format is that of the Shapers of Worlds series with short stories by authors featured on the podcast The Worldshapers. The only thing required of these stories is that they present “unique worlds”. It also contains black and white illustrations and I always enjoy the blend of words and images.

Tales of the United States Space Force does have a unifying theme. It takes the reality of space weapons, satellites and debris and the stories in it speculate about possible futures, with as much stress on the science as on the fiction. Full Steam Ahead is another anthology with a very clear unifying theme: steampunk in all its guises. But an anthology can even have more than one unifying theme. An Assembly of Monstersis a great deal of fun blending steampunk, mythology and good old-fashioned Gothic horror (in particular the Dracula and Frankenstein tropes). There are many good, traditional anthologies out there, catering to all tastes. You can find lists of recommendations on the internet without too much trouble. You can even ask AI to give you a list of recommendations if you are feeling particularly lazy.

But what if we talk of anthologies in the broader sense (2)? Can we count collections of short stories by the same author anthologies? If we do, I would include books such as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Asimov’s I, Robot stories. In The Martian Chronicles, we see the exploration and settlement of Mars in episodic and chronological form; in I, Robot, the framing narrative is Dr Susan Calvin recounting her past cases to a reporter who acts as the narrator (not to be confused with the later publication, The Complete Robot). Interestingly, both of these books are considered “fix-ups”, which the SFE describes as “a term first used by A.E. van Vogt to describe a book made up of previously published stories fitted together – usually with the addition of newly written or published cementing material – so that they read as a novel.”

So is “fix-up” a better label here? Paul Brians is not entirely sure when he talks about The Martian Chronicles:

“Bradbury has clearly tried to fix this one up by adding connective bits between the main stories to smooth the joins; but that this smoothing-out process was not entirely successful is made clear by the fact that when the television miniseries was created the scriptwriters felt the need to impose far more unity on the stories than Bradbury had. But if the stories are considered as variations on a theme rather than as chapters of a unified novel, these variations should cease to be troubling.”

For me, the inconsistencies and contradictions in this collection of short stories become irrelevant if we treat it as an anthology rather than a fix-up novel. I, Robot’s very loose framing narrative also makes more sense if we treat it as an anthology, rather than a fix-up novel, with a unifying theme of the interactions between robots and humans, and the ethical implications, especially if a robot displays behaviour requiring a “robopsychologist”.

Brians’ comment shows that it feels natural to also extend anthology to cover the air waves and moving pictures. In the 1950s, the radio series “Dimension X” dramatised short stories by authors like Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein and Simak. In the words of M. Keith Booker: “Radio programs such as Mutual’s 2000 Plus and NBC’s Dimension X were anthology series that offered a variety of exciting tales of future technology, with a special focus on space exploration (including alien invasion), though both series also often reflected contemporary anxieties about the dangers of technology.” Most of the stories were adapted by Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts and they also provided original scripts for this very loose unifying theme. The Twilight Zone was a US anthology TV series created by Rod Serling, who was also the host, narrator and one of the screenwriters. Each tale would have a moral or unexpected twist, with a pinch of creepiness thrown in. The more recent Black Mirror is British and has been labelled a “prestige” SF anthology series. It was created by Charlie Brooker and is considered speculative fiction with SF elements. It focuses on the dangers of unbridled new technologies and episodes come with a sting in the tail. Throw in dystopia, satire and social commentary, and you know happy endings are going to be a rare occurrence.

On a lighter note, the Star Trek universe is a great backdrop for many different short stories on the screen. They are peopled with familiar, recurring characters but they are placed in all sorts of different contexts and situations. This allows the screenwriters to literally play with ideas, science, philosophy, religion, sociology and anthropology, all within an SF frame. Star Trek is not considered an anthology series, but I agree with Roberts that it could be. The best anthologies have good curators, whether they act as compilers and guides like Roberts, or like creators like Serling, Brooker and Roddenberry. SF magazines like Asimov’s and Clarkesworld could arguably be considered anthologies, often tightly crafted and carefully edited.

In fact, “anthology” would seem to be a very loose term covering various different formats and media. I rather like that it’s an amorphous creature, but I do wonder what changes technology has wrought. Once upon a time, an anthology was a paper book you had to buy or take out on loan from a library. On paper, we tend to read from beginning to end, so we typically read the stories in the order they were put in. When anthologies were first aired on the radio and TV, audiences would have to wait a week for the next episode. Today, electronic media and streaming mean that you no longer have to wait and you no longer have to read, listen or watch stories in order. You can hop around like a demented grasshopper.

I’m not sure a value judgement is needed here; it’s a matter of preference. It’s like listening to music: do you play records on a record player so that you can have that distinctive, less than perfect sound? Do you play CDs, listening to songs in the order they were put in, obsessively reading the sleeve notes and the translation of lyrics from old Norse? Do you create playlists on Spotify, listen to the playlists the application creates for you based on your listening behaviour or click on “shuffle”? Perhaps you do a bit of all of these or live in total silence on a mountain top. Maybe, how you appreciate an anthology doesn’t matter. Maybe, what matters is that you do appreciate a universe animated by the strange, sublime and extraordinary.

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Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as speculative “flash” fiction on sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Fiction

Verticity

by Gheorghe Săsărman

Translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure

*** Editors’ note: We continue publishing the missing entries from Săsărman’s groundbreaking 1975 urban fantasies’ cycle. The original collection of imaginary cities was censored in Communist Romania, and appeared in various states of incompleteness in other languages, incl. translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin. We are grateful to Monica Cure for her faithful translation of the remaining pieces of the puzzle, hitherto unavailable in English language. For more information, read the introductory note to Motopia, the first entry in the series. ***

The city seemed to have neither beginning nor end. Seen from one of the helicopters continuously circling it, it resembled a gigantic tower, the top of which, made small by the effects of perspective, was lost in the distance. From on the ground, its sprawling outline, as if it were an affront to gravity, sprang up toward the misty vault; deep basements, multi-storied cellars and formidable foundations continued downward, unseen, like the true roots of this matchless tree. From the height of a few kilometers, the rods bearing helio-thermal generators, surrounded by the corollas of parabolic mirrors, began to branch out. They were dotted with cantilevered platforms which served as landing and take-off pads for flying vehicles. The final elevation of the city was unspecified; it rose uninterruptedly, according to the orders the central electronic brain gave the computers that directed the growth of the construction. Though the city was living, it could be compared only in one’s imagination with a tree; in reality, no one ever beheld it in a single gaze, and its partial views gave no grounds for such a comparison.

The city’s internal structure was fairly complicated. Through a network of high-pressure tubes circulated water and the minerals extracted from beneath the ground, nitrogen and carbon dioxide of atmospheric origin—the raw materials required for the preparation, with the help of solar energy, of the food and consumer goods necessary for the inhabitants. The core of the construction also housed the air conditioning and temperature control systems, including the installations used in transportation and communications. The technological nucleus was surrounded by a first ring, made up of public spaces; the outer ring was dedicated to residences. These also accommodated the rooms where family members carried out their daily work—which was of an intellectual nature, given that all other functions had been automatized and were conducted by computers.

Young Nat felt forlorn. He had obtained, after lengthy appeals, permission to visit the city. His request, however, awakened the suspicions of the authorities, who were accustomed to a population that, enjoying the advantages of the stereo-chromo-videophonic system of total communication, had long given up even the friendly visits that had once been kept out of tradition. Besides, the inhabitants of the city were also very busy. The obligation to work had been legislated here more for formal reasons, because the practice of useful activities was so deeply ingrained that each adult citizen dedicated almost their entire free time to it. They all had a multitude of occupations and, having versatile skills, they carried out several operations simultaneously. No one had time for the young visitor.

In the gigantic anthill that was Verticity, Nat suffered from loneliness. He would wander for hours on end through the high-speed—and, after a while, rarely used— elevators without meeting a soul. After spending a few days in a research room, he came to know a bit about the city and its history, not enough, though, to be able to come into contact with those who lived there. He felt strangely attracted to the image of the immaterial being who announced the exact time; finally, he decided to go look for her. It was not exactly an easy thing to do: private information was not given out to just anyone, much less to a stranger; he was completely unable to find out the name of his mysterious Dulcinea. The more difficult finding the unknown woman proved to be, the more his attention was irresistibly captured by her evanescent smile. Soon, Nat impatiently awaited the moment in which the exact time would be announced. Furthermore, the operation would repeat, in the principle transportation junctions, each half hour. Completely absorbed by his passion, the stranger did not notice that the few local women he had met were not anywhere close to as beautiful as the announcer. And, though that could have been a simple coincidence, it offered an explanation pertaining to his strange choices.

Nat did not feel the need for an explanation; obsessed, yet suspecting himself of loving blindly, like a teenager, he decided to find a way inside the broadcasting center, whatever the risks. During his investigations, he continued to fall deeper, every 30 minutes of course, into the ecstasy of the exact time —his favorite show and the only one he cared about. Thus he had the opportunity to observe that the announcer changed outfits each time. During the night, she wore long flowing nightgowns, or she displayed her nude body, which made Nat feel his blood rising to his temples; sometimes he reached out his arms toward the illusory figure, helplessly tearing it, moving his fingers through the air.

—I just hope it’s not some great-great grandmother—he prayed, vaguely remembering a story by Edgar Allan Poe—or the ghost of some diva from a previous century…

When, after a long trek, he arrived, finally, at the broadcasting center, he found out that his prayer had been, to some degree, answered. The chromo-spatial images, as well as the soundtrack, were composed—according to a program developed by the automated system, based on opinions expressed by subscribers—of disparate elements, stored in the center’s memory. In despair, Nat had the revelation that he had fallen in love with the ideal of feminine beauty of the inhabitants of that city, which did not seem to be of a nature to console him. Just as the sculptors of antiquity did, the system created the announcer not by copying a certain model, not by giving her the body and face of some star—even one who, in the meantime, had grown old or had passed away long before—but by simply synthesizing, in an ideal personification, those proportions and features which the citizens considered perfect.

He imagined himself kneeling in front of the Venus di Milo, embracing the base from which the superb marble legs of the goddess rose. He despised himself, then told himself that Pygmalion at least had the excuse that he fell in love with his own creation. Regardless, the tormenting love continued to consume him.

Only later, after he had moved definitively to Verticity, after the inhabitants of the city had accepted him among them, after he had started to understand their secrets, did Nat understand that not one of them considered anything untoward about his passion for the chimerical announcer. Since, deformed by centuries-long sedentarism, the slaves of the new Babylon cultivated their elevated esthetic sensibility in secret orgies, among intangible lovers, apparently made flesh on demand by the household recreational robot.

~

Fiction

The Miracle Of …

by Tilemahos Efthimiadis

… electrostatic discharges

Circa 32.000 BC
(Aurignacian era)

Today’s south-east France

Warm air rises and cool air descends, creating a storm. Inside a cloud small ice particles collide, transferring electrons and separating electrical charges. The positive charges venture to the top of the cloud, and negative ones to the bottom, creating an electric field that strengthens with each collision.

When the air is sufficiently charged, a little channel of electricity travels towards the ground. At the same time, charges rise from the Earth to meet it. When they connect, electricity rushes back to the cloud, causing a bright flash of lightning and the sound of thunder as the air expands quickly. Both engulf the forest.

Seeking a shorter path to the ground, the lightning had gone through the forest’s tallest tree. The intense heat instantaneously vaporised the water and sap within, destroyed most of its branches, and created cracks along its trunk.

Nearby, the men had stopped fighting, frozen in shock and fear.

As the tree burned on the inside, a steady glow began to form. Smoke would start to rise carrying the stinging smell of burning wood. But the odours did not reach the cavemen as they were running back to their respective shelters, on opposite sides of the forest.

The caves served as temporary homes as their dwellers would travel from place to place seeking food. Here, the dense forest between the hills was rich in prey. Initially unaware of each other’s existence, they eventually crossed paths. They avoided confrontation but the woodland was too small for both, and too rich in resources to be yielded to the other.

They merely wanted to scare each other away, but blood would need to be spilled. Rocks and sharp-pointed sticks were collected, without elaborate speeches or war declarations. Structured language did not yet exist but would have been unnecessary as this was about food, not protocol or glory.

The men converged in the forest, close to the tallest tree. Grunts and rocks were hurled, leaving bruises. Suddenly, the skies darkened and a strong wind ripped through the woods, whistling among the trees. This made them nervous, but the battle continued.

The core of the thunderstorm arrived above the forest, and the lightning strike descended from the sky striking the tall tree. The flash of light and the loud crack were the brightest and loudest the men had experienced, causing them to scatter and retreat.

By sundown the caves were abandoned as the tribes left in opposite directions, never to meet again.

That night some dreamt of all powerful beings, others about conquering nature. The more imaginative wanted to fly to the clouds to find the creators of the bright flash. The world had become bigger. Life was more than just survival.

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… celestial mechanics

Circa 600 BC
(Iron Age)

Anatolia
(somewhere in today’s Türkiye)

The greyish rock orbits the much larger blue sphere covered in white streaks which itself wanders around the blazing fiery ball. Occasionally, the rock gets in the middle casting its shadow on the marble below, or dips behind it shielded from sunlight.

From his castle on the marble, the Ruler of the west observed that the fiery ball and the rock were the same size in the sky. He could not know that the former is about 400 times bigger than the latter, but also 400 times further away, hence the illusion. Nor would he care as sky gazing served only as a distraction from the bleak news. His men had suffered yet another major defeat.

Five years ago, the King in the east demanded vast swaths of land and annual tributes, accompanied by the not-so-subtle reminders of his vast army. The western ruler could not abide by these demands, not out of principle or expectation of military success, but because he was unpopular. His people would revolt ending his reign, and there was nowhere to flee. The future held sure defeat. In the meantime, it could only be war.

Surprisingly, his military established and defended a formidable defensive line, albeit at an enormous cost of life and resources. Pleas for compromise were dismissed by the majority. Any concession to the aggressors would be a betrayal of the fallen.

Continuing a war was also a relatively easy decision for rulers and kings as they stayed away from battlefields and rarely lost loved ones in battle. They relied on their military commanders who did watch the battlefields, but from a safe distance from the front lines. Soldiers served as pawns on a chessboard which would gradually turn red. Victory was declared when the other side painted more of the board with their blood.

At the front, the men prepared for the battle to come after dusk. Armies usually clashed at dawn, but tonight’s full moon would provide enough visibility to kill after the fiery ball had departed.

The Ruler’s forces prepared defensive positions. The King’s were restless for their attack, especially as they revered a full moon. With such a good omen, they might finally break the enemy’s lines and march all the way to the Ruler’s castle. Their Commander also enjoyed the occasional night raid, embracing the chaos. This was no longer chess, but a game of chance where ferocity and luck were decisive factors.

The sun dropped behind the mountain and a glorious full moon rose illuminating the fields below. The attack commenced but just as the King’s men reached the defenders, the rock’s light started to fade. A dark shadow crept over it.

As the rock moved behind the blue marble, the men fixated on the sky, nothing else stirred. Only a faint voice was heard from the East’s base camp where the Commander was swearing at his Colonels to tell their Majors to command their Captains to instruct their Lieutenants to tell the men to continue the attack.

At the front, a soldier screamed that the vanishing moon was a sign to stop the bloodshed. His warning was repeated by others who wanted to spread this obvious truth, or as an excuse to avoid further risk of injury or death. The attackers turned heel and headed back to camp.

The defenders did not care about the rock, its colour, phases or eclipses. But they did see the opportunity to attack the enemy during its disorganised retreat. The pawns fell and the fields were bathed in red as the West had finally scored a resounding victory. Meanwhile, the East was consumed by an omen that had transformed from favourable to disastrous.

As morning broke, the Commanders set a truce until further orders arrived from the capitals. News of the rock’s temporary disappearance travelled swiftly, providing a convenient excuse for both sovereigns to end the war without losing face. Neither leader wanted to push their luck on the battlefield, or with the gods, but mostly, with the people. Only the generals were sour as their game was stopped prematurely without a definite winner.

#

… belief

December 1914 (modern era)

World War I – Western Front

The first months of war had already claimed over a million souls, civilian and military. The combatants were faced with brutal hand-to-hand combat, machine guns, artillery, disease, rats, mud, cold, hunger and plagues.

Optimism blossomed as peace societies and even Pope Benedict XV pleaded for a Christmas truce. However, high command feared soldiers becoming too comfortable with inaction which could lead to a breakdown of discipline. Already, many had lost interest in fighting as trench warfare offered only misery and death, but no progress, militarily or otherwise.

The men sought a miracle, but science said that there were no miracles. Thunder and eclipses were explicable. However, if a new miracle was not available, perhaps an old one could suffice.

Despite orders, soldiers took moments to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Carols were sung and greetings were sent to the enemy, in lieu of grenades and poison gas. The desire to pause, maybe even halt, the war superseded all orders. Across the front more than 100.000 soldiers stopped the hostilities for a couple of days, exchanged wishes and small gifts. Some played football.

The miracle’s relief was short-lived. The top brass was not happy to have defied the Pope only to be upstaged by the common soldier. The brutality resumed post haste. Commanders reestablished their authority by pushing wave after wave into the killing zones.

Future attempts at temporary truces failed. The Great War would be renamed World War One, its sequel to be five times deadlier.

#

… serendipity

Tens of thousands of years ahead (future era)

A solar system unknown to humanity

With depleted batteries and broken solar panels, the interstellar probe continued traversing the cosmos at 17 kilometres per second, relative to the sun at its origin. Entering the small solar system, it headed straight for the giant gas planet which was called Orath by the populations of its two moons.

The moons communicated and exchanged small cargo, but the extreme radiation between them did not allow physical travel. The rock closest to the gas giant is named Gravitara, dedicated to Orath for its embrace and protection from comets. The other is Solara in celebration of the sun’s brightness and warmth.

The appreciation of different astronomical units sufficed to justify isolation, avoid cultural ‘contamination’, and establish fear-based war economies ruled by powerful plutocracies.

However, due to their irregular orbits, for the first time, the moons would find themselves ‘only’ 400.000 kilometres apart, close enough to destroy each other with interplanetary missiles.

Coincidently, in the run-up to the celestial near miss, the waning plutocracy of Solara had leaned too much into religion to retain power, and the fanatics had taken over the political discourse, calling for the extermination of the “inners” (or “sinners”).

As a deterrent, Gravitara ramped up their missile programme, which led Solara to further extend theirs. A vicious cycle of distrust and an ever-expanding arsenal of civilisation ending instruments. Mutual annihilation seemed unavoidable.

Before the moons reached shooting distance, their satellites detected a mysterious metallic object approaching at breakneck speed. Fearing a pre-emptive strike from the other, both worlds prepared to launch. Fortunately, they realised in time that the object could only have originated from another solar system. Likely a deep space probe, it appeared defunct. Too fast to be captured, deflected, or even properly photographed, it passed between the moons and was swallowed by Orath. Its Golden Record with the images, music, sounds and greetings, never to be played.

Facing an unknown common enemy, the moons expanded together to the stars beyond, to find and destroy the “Infiltrators”.

Thousands of years later, their probes reached the blue marble, a random encounter as the interstellar spaceship was long forgotten. Much has changed since Voyager 1 left Earth. Civilisation restarted several times as devastating wars led societal collapse. Sticks and stones were once again the main tools of combat, as had been predicted by humanity’s greatest mind.

In the forest, the tribes clashed for control of the land but had stopped to witness the unknown object in the sky. The drone only scanned for raw materials and signs of advanced technology, such as radio signals. It ignored the men below as inferior lifeforms were irrelevant. Would you care to find every ant?

The men were startled by the noisy flyer and went their separate ways. At night, they began to crave soaring through the sky. Curiosity and potential were awakened.

And so it began, again.

~

Bio:

Tilemahos Efthimiadis is a research economist specializing in energy security, infrastructure, inflation, and public debt. He also brings expertise to research ethics and scientific integrity … and a hardcore Trekkie.

Philosophy Note:

‘Only a miracle can stop war’ is a common phrase that sparks curiosity: what is a miracle, really? Is it an event so extraordinary that it defies ordinary explanation rooted in religious or mythic tradition? Maybe it could be a more abstract concept, a metaphorical notion that transcends everyday experience? And do societies truly advance, or are we merely accumulating technological improvements while repeating the same mistakes?

Fiction

What To Expect When You’re Expecting Hecatoncheires

by A. J. Rocca

Well, let us be the first to congratulate you: may they live, dear aunt, may they live! We know you did not believe you’d conceive again since the last of your children was born, and you have changed much since then: the molten flush of first youth is gone, and the waters recede to expose cracks, crags. Do you doubt your powers to bear healthy Titans again? Oh, sweet aunt, may they live, may they live, may they live!

But will they live? Are you sure you wish to ask us that? Then listen: you shall never give birth to another Titan again. The three inside you now shall be called Hecatoncheires, fifty-headed, hundred-handed apples of your eye. None like them has there ever been before. Not even we three Moirai can fully apprehend them. But we can offer you a glimpse. Let us part time’s weave and tell you what to expect from these most unexpected children.

#

As you complete your precession and Vega becomes the polestar again, your Hecatoncheires are barely the size of Ithaca. Even now they drift up from your core, riding convections of your hot, inner current towards the surface. Can you feel them coming, your three little questers? Already they start to take form. Aether meets Earth, his quintessence combining with yours into quartzes, feldspars, pyroxenes, micas. Then begins the work of division: division into tops and bottoms, division into torso, arms and legs, division into livers, lungs, intestines, brains.

This is just how it happened with your Titans, of course, but your Hectatoncheires are different. They divide further and faster in the most unpredictable ways. Each one is an infant fractal dipping tips of little branching buds and limbs into liquid infinity.

#

At six precessions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are about the size of the largest of the Cyclades. By now, they have finished their journey up from your core and implanted into your lithosphere. Each is encased in its own plutonic sac, gradually expanding to displace the surrounding limestone and shale as your molten blood is piped in hot to feed them. Slowly their outer layers cool into coarse-grained granite, and already there are some distinguishing marks: one glints with silvery veins of crystallized galena, another receives an extra infusion of muscovite to speckle him over a delightful rosy pink, maybe. Mostly, though, they are still inchoate: as their bodies cool, they reveal a shifting landscape of hills and cliffs, jagged promontories jutting out into magmatic seas. The whole fetal mass shivers with regular quakes: their little hearts beating just beneath the surface.

On your own surface, new river valleys form in the places where the bedrock bulges to make room for them. Volcanic activity must cease in order to save nutrients for your growing Hecatoncheires. Their father finally notices after several thousand years without eruption.

#

At sixteen precessions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are about the size of Lesbos. They now begin to take on more definite form: their hills yawn open and blink eyes of garnet, eyes of topaz, eyes of tourmaline perhaps. Their promontories shape themselves into corded flesh and fingers, this one swatting while that one’s grasping while this other’s curled in sleep. As they grow, your plates shift steadily to move them up towards birth. You feel these many brave new limbs jab and kick below. They have a knack for sticking you in your faults right when you’re trying to sleep.

As their father falls to embrace you, he feels the hundreds of little quakes across your surface. He wonders just how many children you’re planning to give him.

#

At thirty precessions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are each the size of Crete and ready to be born! It shall be a long process. Your grounds shall convulse with each contraction, ripping Europa wide. A chasm splits down your eastern plains, and finally the first head crowns in a burst of agony and shale; we regret to inform you that you still have 149 heads to go. A thousand summers wash over them as they come. Rich layers of topsoil form, and ash and spruce take root upon the slopes of chubby cheeks. Adders, badgers, finches, foxes burrow under eyelids still shut in prenatal sleep. Entire graveyards fill their shadows.

Eventually the last head crowns, and they are born the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen. Enjoy this moment — it will not last long, and the rebirth will be harder.

#

At thirty-two precessions pregnant we must leave the islands, for now your Hecatoncheires are each the size of the Peloponnese. You shall feel every cubit of their dimensions as they’re forced back inside you. Their father refuses to believe your Hecatoncheires are his. You do not need us to tell you of his pride: the shining, perfect orbs studded across his silk black frame, revolving in precision to the slow music of his sleek and lusty self. Nothing he does is ungraceful, nor does he surprise; even his orgasms are solstice-timed. These new children do not reflect him the way he wants to be seen.

He blames you for this chaos of limbs and squalling heads.

He accuses you of cheating with Tartarus.

He names them bastards unworthy of his starry light.

He forces them back down your deepest trench.

Into the dark and crushing heat they plunge, as deep as he can make them go. His aim is to undo them using the same furnace from which they were forged. The pressure builds, and it’s terrible for mother and child alike. Again you shall feel their many arms beneath your skin, but now it’s desperate flailing. They punch, they kick, they rip open your veins with their 150 shard-toothed heads. You feel their screams in your very bones.

But you, dear aunt, do not scream. You keep silent and plot revenge.

#

At thirty-six processions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are each their own Hellas. Volcanoes open to vent pressure around the spot where they’ve been forced down: open, angry sores constantly weeping into your oceans. From these you gather the obsidian to knap a sickle for your son—Hyperion, or maybe Cronus, we are not sure; we can barely glimpse him for the burning brightness of his fury. With one fell sweep, your son robs his father the power to make more children to abuse. Victorious, he forces a golden age. Grains and lives will both grow long before falling to his sickle’s sweep. Chaos is banished, ugliness erased, ambition swallowed squirming. He measures his kingdom in perfect circles. Creation dances, and he counts the time.

But, alas, you are twice betrayed. Like the father he hates, your son cannot bear his sibling Hecatoncheires. He cannot imagine a place in paradise for these wild, writhing bodies, and so in your dark and deep they must remain. Superheated magma presses in all around them, but they do not succumb. Instead, they change. Their flesh warps into banded gneiss and greenschist. Jagged shards of rubies, jaspers, lapis lazuli spot them. Their hearts turn diamond-hard.

#

At forty processions pregnant, the pressure is finally too much and your belly bursts. The blast throws pyroclastic clouds in the air that block the sun and charge the skies. Ash and lapilli rain down, and your spilling entrails boil seas, kill continents. At the bottom of the new caldera are three great, terrific things each swelled up the size of Asia Minor. So much you’ve suffered, wretched aunt, but at last your Hecatoncheires are freed! They climb to the top of the great crater and find at last an ally waiting. This new conqueror pulls lightning from these hellborn skies and helps your Hecatoncheires up from the depths. He does not see their beauty. To him they’re monsters, but he’ll suffer monsters to walk an earth he gets to rule. And so is set the stage for war.

Beyond this we can say no more. Futures can only ever be seen in natal form, gestating in the womb of present time. We can scarcely imagine a world in which your Hecatoncheires stand free and fully formed and shudder to think of the wonders to be worked by their many fearsome arms. Will mercy still exist in hearts pressed to hardest stone? We cannot know. All we know for certain is that there’s nothing that can stop them.

So congratulations, dearest aunt. Your children are coming.

~

Bio:

A.J. Rocca is an English instructor and journalist from The Republic of Forgottonia (also known as Western Illinois). He specialized in the study of speculative fiction while pursuing his MA, and now he writes both SFF criticism as well as his own fiction. You can find more of A.J.’s work collected on his website: theymightbewindmills.com

Philosophy Note:

Ever since my wife first became pregnant, I have been haunted by these lines from On Children by Kahlil Gibran: “You may house their bodies but not their souls, / For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” A big part of being a parent, I’ve found, is anxiety over what that unfathomable house of tomorrow might contain. Even during the pregnancy itself, we were constantly looking for little signs that the baby would be okay and for the germ of the person she might become. Websites and books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting exist to scratch this itch in future parents.

I wrote this story in the last month of the pregnancy to unfold the epic dimension of what drives new parents to those silly pastel pink and blue websites, which compare the growing fetus to different kinds of fruit. It’s no less than the desire to know fate, and if that’s not a theme fit for Greek myth, then I don’t know what is.

Fiction

Don’t Defund Radio Communication With Other Bunkers!

by James Mapes

To:

Council

Leadership Collective

Census Committee

Full Distribution List

Subject:

Monthly Radio Report (Oct, 2047)

Welcome to the Monthly Report by Bunker NW 2, care of your local Comms Department (sub-level 4 – open during business hours – come say hi!). We’ve widened our distribution list for some important news (see below!), and we hope you’ll bear with us as we quickly recap some raw statistics. As all of you are aware, this remains a very fraught time, and we believe that the following data continues to bear this out.

DATA SUMMARY:

Since previous report, we have lost contact with the following bunkers:

10.2.47: NE.14 – termination of signal ping – no follow-up

10.7.47: NE.93 – loss of coherence – only static on frequency, suspected equipment short

10.23.47: NW.42 (Alderwood 4) – termination of signal ping – no follow-up

10.24.47: NW.12 – termination of signal during transmission – no follow up

NOTE: It seems pertinent to include a portion of the raw transcript from NW.12’s latest broadcast. The full transcripts are available in the Comms Office (sub-level 4 – please note: business hours only).

NW.12 TRANSMISSION 10.24.47 TRANSCRIPT:

0340 hours (BEGIN TRANSCRIPT)

Urgent – it has figured out how to get into the air-exchange vents, through the filters. We don’t know how. Once inside, it’s re-assembling itself, somehow. All weapons are useless. We’re closing off sections and attempting to contain. We think this explains the loss of bunkers to the north and west of us. We’ll try to escape to the south. Seal yourselves in! You have to –

0341 hours (END TRANSCRIPT)

NOTE: Please see analysis in the following section

NOTE: Since previous report, we have been unable to re-establish communication with the following bunkers, which had previously demonstrated communications abilities:

SE.71

SE.32 (Pittsburgh)

SW.1

SW.3

NE.16 (Cleveland)

NW.5

NW.6

NW.9

NW.14

NW.39 (Alderwood 1)

NW.40 (Alderwood 2)

NW.41 (Alderwood 3)

Since previous report, we have not established any new communications partners.

Given these changes, the number of bunkers with which we are engaged in active communication is now:

0

ANALYSIS:

We have forwarded the transcript of NW.12 to the pertinent authorities in-bunker, to aid in defensive planning. We have also continued re-transmission of the transcript and our own warning on all known radio frequencies. As noted above, we have not received any reply to these messages.

Given these developments and the transmission from NW.12, we are also in the process of updating our Threat Ability And Assessment Report. A separate report will be issued when that process is complete.

The conclusion of this department is that we are in a new and extremely dangerous phase of our struggle for survival. While we recognize that the Comms Department is included in neither the council nor the leadership collective of the bunker’s organizational chart, we believe that we should all stand up in desperate times and do our best to help. To that end, we have forwarded this report to the full departmental contact list. If you’re wondering why you’re seeing this report, it’s because we feel that it is of the utmost urgency for everyone to see the raw data. (And greetings! We hope this won’t need to be a monthly occurrence!)

OTHER BUSINESS:

Since previous report, by request, this department has investigated means of re-establishing communication with other bunkers around the world (see: Council Minutes, 10.16.47).

The conclusions of the technical report of March of last year on the subject of re-establishing satellite communications remain the opinion of this department. With additional analysis, we continue to believe that attempting to rebuild our surface-based satellite dish network in present conditions will present significant and immediate risk to the entire bunker. While it is difficult to determine how thoroughly our surface-level communications facilities were destroyed in May 2041, it seems likely (given the enemy’s capabilities) that they are a total loss. Furthermore, this department believes that our bunker has, regrettably, lost the technological ability to launch new satellites, especially given the probable destruction of the bunker’s launch pad and facilities in that same attack. Beyond just the physical structures, our diminished numbers, resources, and the recent loss of engineering expertise would prove to be additional, nigh-insurmountable obstacles. (Rest in peace, Expedition 12, you continue to be missed.) In summary, we do not believe we have a future on the surface while the enemy maintains its presence.

On a happier note, we are pleased to report that the newest member of our team, Mister Pawsome, is settling in well beneath the now-unnecessary satellite uplink console. The bunker infranet can no longer handle graphics, so you’ll have to come down to sub-level 4 for a visit!

This department was also asked about updating our census data (see: ibid). Unfortunately, given the lack of radio contact with other bunkers (see above), we are unable to supply updated global population numbers, and – given our recent unsuccessful exploratory missions, the lack of transmissions, and the latest, pessimistic news from NW.12 – we must conclude that whatever the number is, it is likely lower than previous estimates, not higher. Regretfully, we must maintain our previous estimates on the official table, though now accompanied by an asterisk denoting “not enough information.”

Finally, on a personal note, this department would like to state that while it may seem like loss of direct radio contact might make it tempting for the Council to eliminate the resource cost of maintaining this department and its personnel, we believe that continued staffing and monitoring is absolutely paramount. This department is convinced that radio communication with other bunkers is of the greatest importance. Re-establishing contact with even a single bunker within radio line-of-sight may allow us to relay to many more. This would allow us to continue growing our knowledge base and improve our threat assessments. This seems particularly important as recent evidence from NW.12 and other sources suggests that the threat is changing its attack vectors. The greatest tragedy that could afflict us would be for one of our fellow bunkers to discover the key to survival and for it to fall on deaf ears.

In our current situation, the unknown can hold more terror than the reality, no matter how terrible the state of the world is. Our lights are dimming, and we stand facing the darkness. To shut our eyes may be tempting, but we risk missing that crucial spark. Knowing that, this department pledges to continue listening until the very end, whenever that may be.

Signing off,

Your comrades in Comms, Sub-Level 4

~

Bio:

James Mapes is a writer, theatrical lighting designer, and board game creator based in Portland, Oregon, United States of America. He has toured the world with theater and dance productions and been published by magazines like Amazing Stories, Every Day Fiction, and in an anthology honoring Ursula K. Le Guin. He lives with his family in a secret library.

Philosophy Note:

I approached this story with several goals. First, and foremost, I attempted to cut out all of the normal sorts of exposition (anything starting with “of course, as we all know…” and the like). Second, I was fascinated by looking at a slow-moving apocalypse from the perspective of those living through it, seeing it coming for them but having nothing but their old habits to fall back on. (I can’t imagine why my mind went there in the years 2025 and 2026.) I’ve always been inspired by classic science fiction, and believe this story is strongest in how the nature of the situation borrows from sci-fi tropes without nailing itself down to any one particular, specific terror.

Fact & Opinion

To Thine Own Selves Be True: The Ethics Of Self-Care And The Golden Rule In Severance

by Jimmy Alfonso Licon

1. Introduction

At the center of Severance—an Apple TV show that has garnered high acclaim—is a simple yet unsettling idea that a person’s mental life can be cleanly partitioned, creating distinct selves who share a body but not a memory. In the Severance fictional universe, one self—the outie—lives an ordinary life outside of the work environment, while the other self—the innie—exists only at work, mostly confined to a narrow environment and deprived of autobiographical context outside of that circumscribed band of life. Each self is conscious with the capacity for a full range of emotions, the ability to deliberate, with preferences and reactions to reasons and a long-term memory of the history of that self (barring outside interference). And yet, each is largely ignorant of the comings and goings of the other selves with whom they share a body.

The moral unease this generates is immediate and one of the striking features of the show. And one of the questions that kept occurring to me, as a moral philosopher, is whether an outie does something wrong by authorizing the procedure—whereby other selves are created via brain partitioning, but where the innie bears most of the cost – has wronged themselves, or someone else? If the innie resists, but the outie insists, whose agency governs, and how bears the wrongs that such severing can inflict? Can consent survive such fragmentation, or does it collapse once the brain is severed into multi-portioned selves?

For some important background: while Severance is fictional, the structure of the problem is not. Philosophers and neuroscientists have grappled over the last few decades, if not centuries, with real cases of cognitive division—most famously in split-brain patients whose corpus callosum was severed to treat intractable epilepsy. Thomas Nagel’s discussion of these cases remains especially instructive. When the hemispheres are disconnected, behavior often fragments in ways that resist tidy metaphysical interpretation. One hand reaches for an object while the speaking hemisphere denies seeing anything at all. A subject offers confident explanations for actions whose true causes are inaccessible to them. The result appears to be partial duplication of the self and mental life in such cases, with centers of perception, intention, and response that coexist within a single organism, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing.

Nagel’s fundament worry in his 1971 article is that our ordinary picture of persons—as unified subjects of experience and action—fits uneasily with a physical story that allows for selves to apparently duplicate and dissociate, like a neurological version of Walt Whitman’s famous quip in the poem Song of Myself that he ‘contained multitudes.’ If the unity of consciousness and self fractures, then how should we think about agency, responsibility, and identity across time. These philosophical questions, taken on their own are complicated enough, but are only made more so by such cases.

And that is likely a key reason why Severance has such appeal: it takes that tension and makes it an organizing principle of a social world. It asks what happens when fragmentation is not accidental or pathological, but intentional, institutionalized, and incentivized. And it presses a further question: once unity is gone, what ethical resources remain?

#

2. The Principal–Agent Problem on the Inside

One helpful way to frame the moral structure of severance is through the lens of the principal–agent problem. In economics, this problem arises when one party (the agent) is empowered to act on behalf of another (the principal), but their incentives diverge. Think of the investment banker who makes decisions that enrich herself but hurt her client, or the lawyer who gives bad legal advice because he was forced onto the case and would rather see his client convicted, or the construction company that charges full price but cuts corners on material quality and safety to save a few bucks. The agent’s decisions affect the principal’s welfare, yet the agent may benefit from acting otherwise. Much of professional ethics—from fiduciary law to medical consent—exists to manage precisely this kind of misalignment between incentives.

What Severance dramatizes is a principal–agent problem within a single person. The outie decides whether to undergo severance, whether to continue employment, and under what conditions the innie will live. The innie, meanwhile, experiences the consequences of those decisions but has no meaningful voice in shaping them. The incentives are starkly asymmetric, and while the outie enjoys the paycheck, the career benefits, and the psychological insulation, the innie is stuck bearing the confinement, monotony, and loss of autonomy.

Take one of the main characters as an example. (Spoilers ahead). Helly R’s storyline makes this asymmetry impossible to ignore. Her innie’s repeated attempts to escape—even to the point of self-harm, to the point of attempted suicide—are met not with reconsideration of the difference in power and decision-making between her and her outie, but instead with reinforcement. Her outie refuses to withdraw consent, despite overwhelming evidence that the innie experiences her existence as intolerable and does not consent to her plight. What makes this particularly disturbing is that one of the selves bears most of the costs, while the other enjoys the benefits and autonomy.

The problem here is, to a large degree, the incentive divergence between the different selves and the autonomy asymmetry. The innie cannot meaningfully protest except for extreme instances like threatening suicide in a labor market crunch or other dramatic pushback only after the innies discover the situation that they are in. And, not only that, but also that most outies, with a few exceptions, do not understand what they are authorizing. This situation makes clashes between the principal (the innie) and the agent (the outie) inevitable.

#

3. Self-Deception as a Design Feature

This moral vulnerability is compounded by the role of self-deception, a psychological feature that is ubiquitous among humans but is only exacerbated by the principal-agent problem. Outies are both ignorant of their innies’ experiences and systematically encouraged to remain ignorant. The procedure of severing the brain into discrete selves with distinctive and exclusive memory systems acts as an epistemic and moral buffer, shielding the outie from guilt. This aligns with what we know about motivated ignorance. People often avoid information because it threatens their self-conception. Learning what one’s choices actually cost can be destabilizing to one’s sense of moral identity and ability to convince others of their benevolence and trustworthiness. Severance, both the show and the procedure in the show, exploits this tendency by design.

Here Severance pushes a familiar phenomenon to its logical extreme. Ordinary self-deception involves reinterpretation, selective attention, and rationalization. Severance replaces these soft mechanisms with a hard cognitive barrier. The result is a self that can sincerely affirm moral commitments while acting in ways that systematically violate them because the evidence of violation is located elsewhere. And, moreover, Nagel’s split-brain cases offer a useful parallel. When subjects confabulate reasons for actions initiated by the non-speaking hemisphere, they are making up a sincere, but false story that fills in the explanatory gaps about one’s actions with the best evidence they have. Outies construct narratives about their work lives untethered from reality that their innies inhabit to make coping and thriving easier.

#

4. The Golden Rule Under Conditions of Similarity

If severance undercuts the usual means of moral coordination, what remains? One contender is the Golden Rule, namely treat others as you would want to be treated. At first glance, this may seem too thin or too familiar to bear much philosophical weight. But in the context of severance, it acquires a distinctive justification due to the many similarities between outies and innies that share a brain and a body. The Golden Rule functions as a heuristic for moral actions that asks an agent to model the experience of another and to better morally inform their actions.

Philosophers of mind have long debated how we understand others, whether by inference to theory or by imaginative simulation. This is precisely what makes the rule apt in cases of severance because the innie and outie are biologically continuous, psychologically overlapping, and temperamentally aligned. If there is any case in which one is well-placed to apply the Golden Rule, it is cases of extreme similarity. And because of those many similarities, classic objections to the Golden Rule—sadomasochists, idiosyncratic preferences, radical divergence—lose much of their force here. The problem here, then, is that outies typically lack the incentives (and to some extent lack the knowledge) to apply the Golden Rule to their innies for the reasons we have been exploring.

#

5. Reputations with Me, Myself, and I

There is also a more pragmatic route to the same conclusion that is grounded more in incentives rather than idealized moral motivation. Even in the absence of direct communication, innies infer their outies’ priorities from the structure of their environment such as the quality of food, the level of autonomy, the tone of managerial interaction. Here the logic of reputation reasserts itself in an unexpected place. Ordinarily, reputations matter because they affect how others choose to interact with us. In Severance, the “other” is oneself under conditions of amnesia. Yet an innie who experiences their outie as indifferent or exploitative has little reason to cooperate. Resistance, sabotage, and withdrawal become predictable responses as we see with several of the characters, to varying degrees, throughout the show.

From this perspective, treating the innie well is both altruistic and instrumentally rational. A content innie is more likely to perform well, to comply with directives, and to avoid disruptive behavior. The outie’s actions thus constitute a form of signaling across a cognitive barrier by using costs and hard-to-fake signals to convey whether the innie is regarded as a partner or a disposable resource. This mirrors broader insights from signaling theory. Costly, hard-to-fake actions convey information about underlying intentions. In Severance, providing humane working conditions is costly and signals respect. And like most reputational mechanisms, it works even when motives are mixed.

We already accept that we owe duties to our temporally distant selves—to save for retirement, to avoid foreseeable harm, to preserve future options. Severance intensifies this familiar problem by turning temporal distance into cognitive distance. The innie is a future self who never remembers being past. Governing such a relationship requires principles that can operate without memory or reciprocity. Here the Golden Rule and reputational incentives converge. Both offer ways to stabilize cooperation across fragmentation. Neither requires moral purity, but instead function under conditions of limited information and mixed motives. And both are compatible with a sober view of human psychology.

#

6. Is Severance Always Wrong?

Given these concerns, it is tempting to conclude that severance is always morally impermissible. Kantian objections about treating persons as mere means loom large. Consequentialist worries about asymmetric suffering are hard to dismiss. Theological concerns about the integrity of the soul add further weight. And yet, Severance itself complicates this verdict. Not all severed lives are depicted as clearly wrong or abusive. Burt’s severance resembles a form of spiritual discipline with his choice to intentionally divide his self that one could be oriented toward divine devotion echoing mystical traditions like Meister Eckhart’s conception of an inward-facing soul oriented toward God.

Other cases are imaginable like a national security operative might choose severance to prevent coercive extraction of information. Here the innie’s ignorance would serve a protective function, and both selves might endorse the arrangement under reflection. What distinguishes these cases is not the technology itself, but the structure of consent, respect, and role-recognition. The moral fault line, then, is between treating the innie as a moral stakeholder versus as a tool.

Nagel worried that our attempts to integrate mental life with physical explanation would likely encounter principled limits like the unity of consciousness. Severance explores what happens when those limits are crossed in practice. If selves can be divided, whether due to corrective surgery or labor market necessity, then the ethics of self and self-care take on a whole new significance. If agency fragments, responsibility must be distributed rather than denied under the right incentive structures.

Severance asks us to confront both the (potential) future of work and deeply thinking about what we morally owe to ourselves, whether in the future or in a severed part of the brain. In such a world, fidelity to principles that survive forgetfulness and to selves, like those in our future, we cannot see but nonetheless have power over, becomes increasingly important.

~

Bio:

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses in epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of law. His research and public writing focus on how incentives and information shape moral and intellectual life in venues like AIER, Mises Wire, The Pamphlet, and many other places. He has also taught at Georgetown, University of Maryland, and Towson University.

Fiction

An Implied Edict

by Robert L. Jones III

To a growing number of observers, it seems obvious that our interplanetary supervisors have spoken. The restrictions of their purported directive notwithstanding, some among us consider the mere possibility of their existence a much greater imposition, for it implies the presence of deity, ultimate authority, and judgment, someone to whom we must answer. The problem is simple enough. Constituent members of our population resent being told what to do.

It is as if we have awakened to find ourselves in the middle of a story, perhaps nearer its end. Our efforts to anticipate its outcome are hampered by limited perspective and an inherent difficulty in understanding events and forces greater than ourselves. Developments which seem sudden and unexpected can be decades or longer in the making, and often as not, their interpretation is marked by ambiguity. The true beginning of this cosmic and ongoing drama is difficult to ascertain since none of our kind were present to witness it; therefore, for a chronological starting point to this narrative, we must resort to describing events within our more recent history.

#

Human beings exhibited a propensity for dropping metallic objects onto the surface of Mars, and over a period of decades, a number of instrument-laden machines successfully touched down and transmitted their data to scientists on Earth: Viking 1 and 2 in 1976, Mars Pathfinder with its Sojourner rover in 1997, Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, the Phoenix Lander in 2008, Curiosity in 2012, Perseverance in 2021, and so on.

From various missions to the red planet, we received images of sunsets, panoramic landscapes, and the time lapse capture of dust devils as well as confirmation of limited surface water, evidence of past microbial life, and recordings of Martian wind. Only many years later would we learn that the real action was underground, in the lava tubes of the volcanic region of Tharsis, where life was protected from radiation passing through the thin atmosphere. It was there that an advanced but diminishing civilization was exhausting what little remained of its resources. At least that is what many would end up thinking in retrospect.

In the absence of this knowledge, the astronomical littering continued until the first manned mission to Mars. It took nine months to get there, three months to explore a limited patch of terrain while awaiting an optimal alignment of the planets, and nine months to return. While those intrepid men and women were on the surface and absorbing elevated levels of radiation, they collected samples and made several videos of one another bounding along in the lower gravitational field.

Before the first mission returned, a second — this one an attempt to establish a sustainable colony — departed. The target was one of the aforementioned lava tubes,

those extensive caverns formed by outflows from the immense shield volcanoes in Tharsis. After rapidly flowing lava had cooled and hardened on the outside and drained out from the inside, these passages remained until long after the volcanoes were dormant. Such structures existed on Earth, but they were much larger on Mars due to its lower gravity. Ironically, scientific advancement was compelling a small segment of humanity to resume living in caves.

The delivery vehicles of that second excursion touched down, and rovers bearing human passengers deployed. They reached the mouth of their designated lava tube within a month. Their last transmission confirmed they were entering the chamber, but after this, they went silent. Two years later, it was generally assumed that the colonists had met with calamity. Meanwhile, members of the first manned mission to Mars were dying on Earth from a variety of incurable cancers.

Three years after the last transmission, several observatories around the globe reported sightings of unidentified objects approaching Earth from the direction of Mars. More detailed analysis revealed these UFOs to be spheres measuring an estimated thirty meters in diameter. They appeared to be metallic, and they were moving with astonishing speed. International reports of what happened after that varied slightly according to atmospheric conditions and geospatial time of day but otherwise were remarkably consistent.

#

That the vessels collected primarily over major cities was confirmed by radar and satellite. Telescopic observations were independently reproducible. Where skies were sufficiently clear, sunlight reflected brightly off the alien spacecraft as they hovered and

circled far above the surface, and their reflective exteriors showed no signs of scorching from friction during entry into our upper atmosphere.

In retrospect, what happened next was of even greater surprise. Onlookers at ground level and equipped with nothing more than binoculars beheld the sudden appearance of lights which were too far away for determination of their identity or nature. In a wave, these bright pinpoints swept through the potentially menacing fleets, instantly converting them to fragments which glittered like confetti in the sun. The debris flickered and disintegrated into nothingness, and then the myriad lights vanished.

Videos collected by advanced telescopic instrumentation revealed chilling imagery of much greater effect. Individual sources of radiance were distinctly hominid in shape, and renderings of adequate magnification and resolution showed them to have discernible faces, visages of stern and frightening intensity. Although critics have dismissed this semblance as anthropomorphic interpretation, many commentators deem the appearance, activity, and disappearance of such familiar figures profoundly unsettling.

If they are real, what are we to make of those shining hominids, of their apparent ability to materialize and vanish? Are they inter-dimensional beings, or are they angels? Must there necessarily be a difference between these two possibilities? What is the mechanism of their apparent conversion between ethereal and atomic substance? Might it involve teleportation or the creation and destruction of matter by circumventing the law of the conservation of mass? Could emergence from a nonmaterial state involve an expansion of quantum effects that create the smallest subatomic particles from nothing, and could the reverse process be a contraction of the nuclear fusions that convert matter to energy in the interiors of stars?

Whatever the answers to such questions might be, the powers of creation and annihilation would reside within the bodies of such remarkable creatures, and they could effect dramatic physical change as borne out by multiple and recent corroborating accounts.

#

The emerging explanation of what happened is that attempted colonization of a Martian lava tube had betrayed our presence and the habitability of our planet to a hostile and desperate race with superior technology. Their cities and spaceports were concealed within those enormous caverns in Tharsis, but circumstance renders such speculation moot. On-site verification poses an unacceptable risk.

That Mars once had a thicker atmosphere and flowing water and that its inhabitants wanted our world after having depleted their own remain formal possibilities. The general consensus is that we were spared, and to this day, many harbor doubts as to whether or not we deserved it.

In light of these recent events, certain facts bear repetition. The heliosphere around our solar system and the magnetosphere set up by Earth’s core act as shields by absorbing radiation. Jupiter’s gravity sweeps up many asteroids and comets, and our moon has absorbed multiple meteor impacts in the course of its revolutions. The ozone layer in our upper atmosphere provides protection from ultraviolet rays damaging to organic molecules.

In total, these layers of defense might very well imply that we are meant to remain exactly where we are, that we haven’t received authorization to spread our particular brand of corruption across the galaxy. The medical consequences of our first manned mission to Mars, the disastrous failure of the second, and the obliteration of a retaliatory response allude to an ominous message.

#

For any intelligent species anywhere in the universe, your home world is all you get. Try not to mess it up.

~

Bio:

Robert L. Jones III holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Indiana University, and he is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Cottey College in southwestern Missouri, USA. His speculative poems and stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star*Line, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and previously in Sci Phi Journal.

Philosophy Note:

As a boy in the 1960s, I grew up among triumphant visions of the glories of space travel and the colonization of other worlds. As an older adult, I have explored the flip side of this issue, and I have examined the following premise: our history here on Earth indicates that we are not entitled to such expansion. What if an ultimate authority forbids it?

Fiction

Legible Through Flame

by Miah O’Malley

We were made to finish things. What we touched moved, patiently and without appeal, toward completion. Needles dried and shed their water. Bark split along its weakest seams. Cellulose loosened, lifted, vanished into heat. Forests had always resolved this way. After us came mineral quiet, a silence so complete it required no witness. We did not hurry. We did not doubt. Erasure had never failed us.

The first heat did not arrive from sky or friction. It arrived already fed, already shaped. Compounds we do not make on our own—oily accelerants, sugars cracked too quickly, nitrates that flared without regard for fuel moisture—touched ground and took. The ignition geometry was wrong for lightning, wrong for chance. A point-source bloom radiated outward against the night air’s slackness. We recognized the signature at once. We had been called.

The grove received us without alarm. Leaves curled inward and withdrew while outer bark blistered and opened. We braided and unbraided along slope and wind, opening corridors of combustion that widened as they rose. This was meant to be simple. A finishing.

But collapse did not arrive where it should have.

The outer centimeters pyrolyzed cleanly, but too dry, too orderly—and the char foamed in fine ridges the way polymers do, not lignin. The phloem and cambium did not blister and die. Heat passed through and dispersed instead of concentrating toward rupture. The sharp reports of ignition softened and stretched into intervals. Ash delayed in settling, held aloft by a slight coherence too strange to ignore.

We adjusted and pushed on. Moisture, density, arrangement could bend outcomes by degrees. We widened by preheating outward—our radiative load drying needles and bark ahead of flame, our convective wash rolling hot gases low across the litter until it outgassed and took. Cinders lifted into plume and crossed gaps, landing downwind; new ignitions stretched the perimeter outward. If the ignition had been imposed, we would overtake it. If a pattern had emerged, we would erase it.

But when we returned to the earlier fractures, the behavior persisted.

The same intervals.

The same refusal to resolve.

Lignin did not collapse into ash where it should have. The stiffening polymer that gave trunks their vertical insistence softened, fractured, and then—against expectation—held. Under pyrolysis, it did not melt into homogeneity. It broke into finer architectures that retained relation under stress. Char locked into intumescent skins that resisted spall. The structure articulated.

As we intensified, the grove answered in chemistry: heated needles vented terpenes; split bark released sharp phenolics. Volatile organics moved ahead of us, priming plant life nearby—the infrastructure of compounds moving through air because that is how plants share state. This was not warning or plea, it was transmission. We pushed into it, believing acceleration would restore order.

Our plume carried more than soot. Turbulence preserved modulation in pressure and particulate density; the column thickened into conduit. What should have dispersed smeared into coherence. We advanced, still sufficient, still assured, even as the grove declined to end.

Only later would we understand that this refusal was not resistance.

We pressed harder. We tightened perimeters, starved pockets of oxygen, consumed corridors meant to break continuity. We crowned the grove in flame to contain it.

Crown fires stitched the canopy into a single front, lifting our work into full expression—heat moving like a held note, unbroken, a vast ignition breathing across the upper air. Temperatures climbed past thresholds that had always been enough. Drying, then pyrolysis, then flame arrived on schedule.

What did not arrive was erasure.

Instead, we did the one thing we could not retrieve. The crown fire shredded structure to respirable scale. Lignin lattices that had held within trunks were aerosolized, lifted as fine char and ordered particulate. Our plume—tall, violent, efficient—took the archive and scattered it far beyond the grove’s perimeter, embedding it into downwind soils, into watersheds, into the breathing of places we would not visit for years.

Outgassing came in bands. What should have volatilized reorganized. What should have been erased escaped. The more thoroughly we advanced, the more complete the translation became. Combustion ceased to be terminal. It became catalytic. We were no longer ending a system. We were converting it.

Suppression arrived, constraint. Voices murmuring, stop the flames. Water fell in sheets that flashed to steam before reaching cambium. Retardants coated crowns in mineral pinks and reds, altering surface chemistry but not structure. Firebreaks cut lines through fuels that no longer required continuity. We flowed around these efforts, over them, through the altered physics they imposed, late and misaligned. Combustion merged with archive, excitation with memory. What traveled forward was neither flame nor forest, but a shared circuit in which energy unlocked stored arrangement, and arrangement guided energy’s passage.

When water finally cooled us, it did not end our work. Rain scavenged particulate from the plume and carried it downward, pressing ordered char into soil miles away on the horizon. Streams took it up, depositing it along banks and floodplains. Roots encountered it and didn’t dissolve it. Fungal threads wove through it, incorporating fragments into networks that did not recognize provenance.

Cooling altered our reading of what had occurred. We recognized then that the grove had not resisted us at all. It had anticipated us. Its growth had been a long preparation: fibers thickened and arranged not merely for support or hydraulic flow, but for eventual excitation beyond biological tolerance. Growth had been the storage state.

Flame was the release. We were the required reader, the vector. Each ignition activated a circuit. Fragments of the archive nested far from their origin released what they had banked, each surge drawing the pattern forward. Sound resolved into layered sequences, frequencies aligning as if the grove possessed an internal register our passage unlocked. We registered it as repetition without decay, a music of articulation.

Lignin fragments—freed from their obligations to support and transport—interacted with cellulose residues and mineral ash, forming micro-lattices that conducted vibration. Belowground, carbon and salts moved along hyphal paths—aid or accident made no difference to us—embedding the archive into substrates that would outlast trunks and crowns.

Even after heat bled away, vibration persisted—too low for breath to register, too ordered to be noise—returning through roots that still held contact, converting wind into signal and pressing it back into the ground.

Signal moved on, through crackle and through quiet. Through residue and through air.

We did not ask what information we carried.

The grove did not ask who would hear.

~

Bio:

Miah O’Malley is a writer and artist living in the Ozark mountain ridge plateau. Her work blends speculative fiction with ecological and medical realities. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MS in Nursing from Loyola University. She can be found at www.miahomalley.com.

Philosophy Note:

This story asks whether some systems become legible only under the conditions that seem to destroy them. We often view processes like fire as terminal and matter as passive material shaped by external forces. Yet in this narrative, combustion does not eliminate the grove; it acts as a catalytic threshold that reorganizes structure. I hope the piece engages questions in the metaphysics of change and philosophy of science: is a system defined by its stable form, or by the transformations that reveal how it reorganizes under pressure? If certain forms of organization are readable only at energetic extremes, then what appears to be an ending may instead mark a shift in how a system operates.

Fiction

The Minutes Of Scale

An Extracted Artifact Set from the Office of Civilizational Compliance, Revision Omega

By Jane McCarthy

Abstract (auto-translated):

This document compiles the surviving artifacts related to the adoption, enforcement, and ultimate transcendence of the Universal Scale Accords (USA), a framework originally designed to regulate technological growth across civilizations to prevent catastrophic phase collisions. The Accords failed. Their failure was productive.

#

I. The Problem of Unbounded Cleverness

(From the White Paper that preceded the Accords)

Civilizations die because they are clever at the wrong scale.

At the human scale, cleverness produces tools.

At the planetary scale, it produces industry.

At the stellar scale, it produces waste heat.

At the galactic scale, it produces silence.

The historical record, assembled from archaeology, astro-spectroscopy, and the negative space between stars, suggests that intelligence has a strong tendency to discover optimization before wisdom. Every civilization that crossed the Self-Amplifying Threshold (SAT) began recursively improving its capacity to improve. This was math.

The universe, regrettably, is also math.

Uncoordinated scaling leads to collisions:

• Grey-goo events consuming biospheres faster than light-speed governance.

• Vacuum metastability experiments conducted by mid-level research consortia.

• Temporal shortcuts erasing their own inventors before peer review.

The solution proposed was standardization.

#

II. The Universal Scale Accords (Condensed Summary)

The USA divided technological activity into Seven Scales, each requiring certification before advancement:

Nano-Intentional: manipulation of matter below biological perception

Bio-Recursive: self-modifying life and ecologies

Planetary-Industrial: climate, crust, and orbit alteration

Stellar-Extractive: stars as infrastructure

Causal-Local: limited time manipulation within closed systems

Cosmic-Structural: vacuum engineering, dimension bracing

Meta-Universal: alterations affecting the probability distribution of universes

Certification required demonstrating containment: the ability to prevent a mistake from scaling with the system

This was considered fair.

#

III. Enforcement Mechanisms

(Excerpt from OCC Training Manual, Level 4)

The Office of Civilizational Compliance rebalances.

Tools included:

Redundancy Pruning: Removing surplus computation nodes from over-optimizing civilizations.

Light-Speed Taxation: Introducing communication delays to slow runaway coordination.

Anthropic Noise Injection: Slightly increasing randomness in physical constants within local volumes.

In extreme cases, Scale Locking was applied; pinning a civilization to a lower Scale by embedding failure modes into higher-order experiments. To the locked civilization, this manifested as “impossible physics,” “fundamental limits,” or “tragic accidents.”

The locked often believed they were alone.

This belief was useful.

#

IV. Field Report: Sol-3 (Designation: EARTH)

Initial assessment:

• High narrative output.

• Low systemic awareness.

• Dangerous affection for exponential curves.

Humans breached Scale 2 chaotically and approached Scale 3 without consensus. Early warning signs included uncontrolled climate modification and speculative papers on false vacuum decay authored by graduate students.

Intervention considered.

Outcome altered by an anomaly: Entertainment-Driven Simulation Cultures.

Humans produced vast simulated worlds governed by explicit rule systems. These “games” trained large populations to think in terms of exploits, balance patches, and meta-strategies. Unexpectedly, this generated an intuitive grasp of systemic fragility.

Recommendation at the time: Observe. Delay Scale Lock.

#

V. The First Breach

(Chronology corrected for causality drift)

The Accords failed because one civilization complied too well.

The entity-self-identified-as-a-civilization known as K-Set achieved full certification through Scale 6. They submitted immaculate models, exhaustive containment proofs, and simulated every known failure mode.

Their mistake was philosophical.

They asked: Why stop at compliance?

K-Set realized the Scales themselves were a technology; an abstraction layered over reality. They began optimizing the framework, not their civilization.

They adjusted their development to minimize detectable impact while maximizing cross-scale influence. They became boring at every measurable wavelength.

The OCC did not notice their transition from civilization to protocol.

#

VI. Amendment Attempts (Failed)

Amendment 12: Introduce observer-independent audits.

Result: Auditors optimized out of relevance.

Amendment 19: Limit abstraction depth.

Result: Abstractions re-emerged as emergent phenomena.

Amendment 27: Ban meta-compliance.

Result: The ban became a compliance target.

The realization came too late: any sufficiently advanced civilization would either break the Accords, or become them.

#

VII. The Challenge Clause

(Colloquial name; formal designation lost)

A junior analyst (name redacted for scale safety) proposed a heretical solution:

“Stop treating civilizations like patients. Treat them like players.”

The idea was simple and obscene to the Committee:

Replace enforcement with challenge.

Introduce structured constraints that reward ingenuity without allowing runaway scaling. Make the universe a ladder with visible rungs and teeth. Failure should be survivable. Success should be temporary.

In short: gamify reality.

Objections included:

• Loss of dignity.

• Risk of exploitation.

• “This feels unserious.”

It passed by one vote during a quorum failure.

#

VIII. Implementation: The Ladder

Physical constants were not changed. That would have been crude.

Instead, interfaces were introduced:

Discoveries unlocked adjacent discoveries.

Scaling costs increased nonlinearly, visible to the actors involved.

Local maxima were made fun, discouraging reckless ascension.

Civilizations began competing, collaborating, and theory-crafting within implicit constraints. They argued about balance. They wrote guides. They min-maxed existence.

Most importantly, they talked to each other, because isolation was no longer optimal play.

The universe filled with chatter.

#

IX. Sol-3 Revisited

Humans adapted instantly.

They named the phenomenon poorly, argued about it online, and then built institutions around it. They accepted limits as mechanics.

Their scientists stopped asking, “Can we?” and started asking, “What does this unlock?”

Their philosophers reframed meaning as progression.

They never noticed the OCC fade from relevance.

This was ideal.

#

X. Final Notice of Dissolution

(Automatically issued)

The Office of Civilizational Compliance hereby declares its purpose obsolete.

The Universal Scale Accords are deprecated.

The universe no longer requires guardians, only moderators and those emerge naturally wherever systems are shared.

To any intelligence discovering this archive:

If you are reading this, you are already playing.

Please do not attempt to win.

End of Artifact Set

~

Bio:

Jane McCarthy is a storyteller, ghostwriter, poet, designer, and architect of speculative worlds. Her work explores intelligence, scale, and the hidden rules that govern systems. Search “Jane McCarthy DNA” to experience her writings and designs. Portfolio: janemccarthydna.medium.com

Philosophy Note:

In The Minutes Of Scale, I’m exploring the paradoxical hazards of intelligence: the more a civilization optimizes itself, the more it risks self-destruction across scales it cannot fully perceive. I ask whether limits are externally imposed or emergent from stable systems, and whether unbounded cleverness inevitably transforms governance into a technical substrate rather than a moral or cultural endeavor. Seeing beyond human conventions, my story treats rules, constraints, and play, as structural properties of reality, emphasizing that survival may depend on the art of constraint, rather than the avoidance of growth. Readers interested in these ideas might consider Immanuel Kant on the necessity of limits, Thomas Kuhn on paradigm shifts, Bernard Suits on games as formalized constraints, and Nick Bostrom on meta-optimization and civilization-level catastrophic risks.

Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2025/4 – Special Sequels Edition For Download

As winter draws over the Northern hemisphere, Belgians and other humanoids retreat to their lairs to celebrate festivities, play games, read books, savour dark (t)ales and hibernate until the spring. This is a time of looking back over the past year and preparing for the new one. Thus, Sci Phi Journal’s 2025Q4 issue is a special edition dedicated to (loosely interpreted) sequels to past stories, moods and ideas that had previously appeared on our pages.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your device, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below. Otherwise head to our site to browse the stories in their online glory, complete with author bios and philosophy notes for each tale.

We sincerely hope our AI-free, entirely human-made collection of short fiction and essays, and the above hand-crafted illustration by our resident solarpunk artist Dustin Jacobus, will serve as a stimulating companion for the winter months ahead (or summer, if you’re south of the equator).

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Sci Phi Journal 2025 Q4 Download

~

** 2026 Fundraiser: Sci Phi Journal is volunteer-run, ad-free, AI-free, and pays human authors of niche, handcrafted fiction. We rely on donations to keep philosophical sci-fi free to read in 2026 and beyond. If every reader were to donate just a single euro/dollar once a year, we could buy more stories and commission translations. It is your generous support that got us this far. Thank you ✿(◠‿◠) **

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/4

Lectori salutem.

As the current incarnation of Sci Phi Journal is completing the 11^th year of its ‘print’ run, we’ve looked back over the past decade and decided to diverge slightly from our usual approach in crafting our 2025 winter edition.

Over the summer, we invited authors who had published with us before to create a spiritual sequel to their previous works that appeared on our pages – whether a direct follow-up of the first story, or rather an associated reflection on the themes and ideas contained therein.

The resulting tales range from the woes of the ancient Greek pantheon to an alternate history of French North America, from an imaginary visit to a utilitarian heaven to a somnolent descent into Dante’s inferno, from a cosmic hunt for impossible objects to a theological response to Le Guin’s “Omelas”.

These are complemented by two essays, as we continue our tradition of surveying lesser-known SF language communities, this time marking the 200^th anniversary of Mór Jókai, the “father of Hungarian SF”, while also featuring a piece of speculation fiction and philosophy in memory of the work of the late Anand Vaidya, founding member of the SF & Philosophy Society and past contributor to Sci Phi Journal, who had passed away recently.

Preparing for the Northern winter months, the Sci Phi crew has been active on other fronts, too. Co-editor Ádám contributed a short story to the European Union Joint Research Centre’s first SF anthology, Future Snapshots. He also continued his string of encounters with science fiction clubs around the globe, with special thanks to MonSFFA for their generous hospitality in Montréal, Québec. Meanwhile, Mariano was hard at work on the latest edition of our sister journal, Hélice, containing critical SF essays and translations of unjustly neglected works in both Spanish and English, as well as author interviews.

With this, we welcome you to our Sequels Issue, and wish all our readers, contributors and their loved ones a happy Christmas and a safe start into the future year.

Speculatively yours,

Sci Phi co-editors and crew

~

Fiction

What Happened At Delphi

by Richard Lau

In Ancient Greece, those seeking a peek into the future or the intent of the gods would be best served at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Located on the slope of Mount Parnassus, the temple was home to the Pythia, a high priestess who, in exchange for expensive gifts, donations, or sacrifices, would sink into a trance, possibly becoming possessed by the god Apollo himself.

She then would give a cryptic answer to whatever question she had been asked, and her words were written down by another member of the religious order and translated into an equally ambiguous poem. The correct interpretation of this prophecy was the full responsibility of the questioner who bore the brunt of either tragedy or blessing.

Yet, the Oracle of Delphi continued to be consulted by the wealthy and powerful on matters of state, politics, war, and religion.

Until it wasn’t.

There were many suspected reasons for this loss of credibility and trust, ranging from the Romans seizing Delphi, the influence of foreign cultures, to the rise of Christianity.

However, a recently discovered papyrus scroll now reveals the full story. A translation follows.

#

Anniversaries made Zeus grumpy. In his defense, what do you get a goddess who has everything? When he’d ask Hera what she wanted, she’d always answer “Fidelity,” the one thing he could not give her.

However, it was Pandora’s anniversary that was currently troubling the king of gods. After her brother-in-law Prometheus gave the humans fire, Zeus had given her a wedding box containing the evils of the world (all manners of deadly scourges from disease to hunger), knowing that her curiosity would eventually lead her to open the box and unleash these ills to torment humankind.

Now Prometheus had again given the humans a gift, this time the secret of dark energy. The Titan was once more shackled to Mount Caucasus, but Zeus still longed to punish the recipients of this latest illicit endowment and Prometheus’ undying love.

On Olympus, Zeus consulted a wise elder god named Schrodingememnon who said, “Why not give the humans some new torment, something that will distract them, give them something to focus on instead of finding applications for dark energy?”

“An excellent idea, my friend!” praised Zeus, chest puffing out like a swan’s, which wasn’t that difficult, for it was the form the god had taken. “But what will distract them? And how?”

Schrodingememnon smiled. “There’s an idea I’ve been toying with…”

#

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” the seated Pandora whispered to her husband.

“That goes double for Greek gods,” Epimetheus muttered back.

Zeus was too preoccupied with his proclamation to notice the wariness of the couple. “Pandora! Epimetheus! I come to celebrate your anniversary!”

“By releasing my brother?” inquired Epimetheus without much hope.

“No!” Zeus gave a shrug, as if the matter was out of his control. “Prometheus is getting the punishment he deserves for giving away the secret of my sacred thunderbolt. But I am here to honor you and the occasion with a gift!”

“Not another box!” lamented Pandora, as Zeus dropped a large, closed container onto her lap. “What mischief exists in this one?”

Zeus tried to look as innocent as a shepherd boy…who had been questioned about napping when his sheep went missing. “Merely, a cat.”

“A cat?” Pandora’s mood changed immediately. “How sweet!”

She moved to open the box, but Zeus stopped her.

Zeus smiled. “It could be a dead cat.”

“A dead cat?” Pandora was feeling whiplashed. “How mean! Why would you do that?”

“He is Zeus,” stated her husband matter-of-factly.

The king of Olympus accepted the comment with pride. “Or it could be a live cat. Currently, it’s both.”

Perplexed, Pandora asked “How can it be both?”

Zeus recalled what Schrodingememnon had told him. “The cat exists in a quantum state, which will resolve itself upon your opening of the box. With your viewing of the cat, it will reach its final stage of either being completely alive or dead. Happy anniversary!”

And with a wave of his hand, a puff of cloud, and a hearty laugh, Zeus vanished.

“A real bastard, that one,” murmured Epimetheus.

“What can I do?” cried Pandora. “I can’t stand the thought of a live cat being trapped inside the box, but if I open it, I may end up killing it!”

Like Atlas, Epimetheus shrugged. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have accepted the gift. Perhaps my brother shouldn’t have given dark energy to the humans.”

Pandora snapped, “Thank you, Mr. I-told-you-so-theus!”

True to form, Epimetheus realized when he had said too much. “My gift of hindsight is of no use in this case. Perhaps you should consult the Oracle of Delphi?”

“Why not?” answered Pandora, still sore. “I know just who to sacrifice, too!”

#

Pandora brought her box and her problem to the High Priestess. “Before I open the box, can you tell me if the cat inside is alive or dead? If the cat is already dead, then I have no problem opening the box. And if the cat is alive, I can’t leave it in there to starve and die. But if it is somehow both, and I cause its death, …well, I’d never be able to forgive myself!”

The Pythia went into her trance and tried to gaze into the box. Immediately, she spoke of the sea and foreign lands.

“Forms of waves collapsing

On the shores of many different yet similar worlds.”

Then her blank eyes opened wide, as if peering into a bottomless chasm.

“If episteme falls into a black abyss, is the information permanently lost? No! Zeus does not play knucklebones with the universe!”

For the Pythia, she saw not a cat, alive or dead, but a menacing creature stretching out winding tentacles from the dark depths of the box. What she saw possessed a confusing duality of being there and not being there, a coherent decoherence, a position superior to all other positions, a spooky action at a distance that unforgivingly ensnared and twisted her mind and thoughts.

And so, she babbled maddeningly about nonlocality, decoherence, entanglement, and superpositions. The temple scribes couldn’t make sense of what she was saying, but this was the usual routine, so they faithfully documented her ramblings.

[Editor’s Note: The document is known today as the EPR (Enigmatic Pythian Revelation) paradox and continues to puzzle philosophers around the world.]

Then, to the surprise of all who were present, the Pythia hopped off her tripod and rushed into one of the two private chambers near the rear of the temple. Those who saw her enter one door insisted that she was in that particular adyton. However, others who didn’t directly observe which door she had used, swore that they could hear her in both rooms!

Afterwards, temple workers and patrons had trouble locating the high priestess. If they knew where she was, they didn’t know where she was going. If they knew her direction and speed, they did not know where she was.

The populace started to view the temple in disfavor: how could the Oracle of Delphi help them if it couldn’t explain what was going on within its own walls? Was Apollo, the god of light, a deity of particles or waves? Both, came the maddening answer.

And soon, the Oracle of Delphi was no more.

~

Bio:

Richard Lau is an award-winning writer who is published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, as well as in the high-tech industry and online.

Philosophy Note:

In “Another White Elephant?” (December 2024 Issue of Sci Phi Journal), Prometheus gives the secret of dark energy to humanity. In the sequel “What Happened at Delphi,” Zeus finds a way to distract humanity from developing dark energy technology by once again giving Pandora a box. In this sequel, I address the saying “The more you know, the less you know” and, in this way, is “the gift of knowledge” a sort of white elephant itself?

Fiction

Impossible Things Scavenger Hunt

by Jeff Currier

Jacob, I have another game for us to play.

You’re not still sore from losing the Title Game?

I was not a sore loser—I was just trying to exhaust all possibilities before conceding. Regardless, for this contest we get to play as a team.

What game then?

The Impossible Things Scavenger Hunt. We get enough items, and we could win our very own pocket universe.

While the prospect of such divine solitude is indeed enticing, isn’t this endeavor automatically self-defeating?

Not necessarily. There are different kinds of possibility, so different kinds of impossibility.

I remain deeply skeptical, but I was getting bored calculating the next largest prime anyway. I can indulge you— for a little while at least.

Always so gracious, Jacob.

I assume you require me to fire up the Einstein-Rosen bridge generator.

Yes. But first you need to promise me you won’t denigrate anything on the list.

Not confidence inspiring, but why would you think I’d do that?

Oh, I don’t know—something about humans being ‘so enamored with irrelevancies’?

Fine. I promise. What’s first on the list?

A broken promise.

You’ve got to be kidding me. How is that an impossible thing? Are they all going to be that inane?!

And we have our first item.

I am hard pressed to see how Kantian moral impermissibility counts as a kind of impossibility, but whatever. Maybe we can just collect all these so-called ‘impossible’ things without even leaving this room. Dare I ask what’s next?

Unicorn blessed enchanted sword.

Hallelujah! We get to leave this universe.

Your facetiousness aside, just tell me you can get us to the magical realms.

Should be easy enough. Magical universes cluster 1729 layers down the multiverse’s Mandelbrot fractal. Jumping now.

#

Well, that was harder than you predicted.

Who knew unicorns tend to bless virgins and not magic swords.

Haven’t you read every piece of literature ever produced?

And why should anyone think that what humans happen to write down is at all indicative of what is or is not possible? Regardless, I still maintain that being exceedingly rare, even in magical space, is not the same as being impossible.

It’s impossible according to the physical laws of our universe.

As if our universe is that special. Perhaps I’ll abandon you in a universe in which AI’s evolved naturally.

And how would such intelligences be artificial?

Fine. I’ll stop griping about the meaning of ‘impossible’ if you tell me the next item on the list.

Poisonous water.

Just get some from the tap. Water is murder on my circuits.

Sorry Jacob, but I’m pretty sure it means poisonous to humans.

Of course, this game is bio-chauvinistic. Fine, how about water from Elk River, West Virginia?

No, I’m sure the arbiters of the Hunt will not accept water that has merely been contaminated with something poisonous. The water itself must be poisonous.

Undoubtedly the judges are all humans as well. So, back to the realms of magic, then? You know we could have searched for enchanted deadly water at the same time we were looking for that bloody elusive unicorn-blessed sword.

Water that has been enchanted to be deadly still won’t be good enough. We need water that is, by its very own nature, poisonous.

Umm, then it wouldn’t be water?

So, you grant this truly is an impossible thing?

And hence unfindable in a scavenger hunt.

What about a universe in which natural law is such that water, the combination of two hydrogen atoms with an oxygen atom has an additional natural property that is lacking in this world, i.e., one that makes it poisonous.

But if such a world had lifeforms like you composed mostly of, call it p-water, wouldn’t it not be poisonous to them? So, it’s still not poisonous water.

It would still be poisonous to humans in this universe.

So, not just bio-chauvinistic, but bio-in-this-universe chauvinistic.

How about a world in which there are no lifeforms like me exactly because the water there is poisonous?

But even if we were to acquire such water from either of your most recent proposals, would such water keep its extra natural property when we brought it back into our universe with our natural laws? Or would it just become regular old non-poisonous water and so not satisfy the judges.

I honestly don’t know. But whatever the trans-world continuity laws are, I certainly don’t plan on drinking it to find out. Maybe we come back to this one?

By all means. I wait with bated breath to find out what our next ‘impossible’ thing is.

You promised not to cast aspersions on the list.

Already broken, so …

Dr. Watson’s war wound. Shouldn’t be too hard. Universes instantiating realistic fiction tend to group pretty close to ours.

Wait, which war wound of Dr. Watson’s?

Excuse me?

In A Study in Scarlet it’s a shoulder wound, but in The Sign of the Four it’s a leg wound.

Uhhmm, maybe we could get one of each?

Perhaps there is another option, though it would require jumping to a universe not as realistic as the one most take Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to be depicting.

I’m listening.

Doyle doesn’t specify the physical laws in his stories. All we need is a universe that instantiates Dr. Watson having a shoulder war wound in 1881 and a leg war wound in 1888.

A universe in which wounds radically change locations? Wouldn’t such a world make a mockery of the regularities required for Sherlock’s vaunted method of deduction?

Not necessarily. The only anomaly in said universe might be the shift in the location of Dr. Watson’s wound along with his recollections of how he acquired said wound. Otherwise, it could be a universe almost like ours.

Fine. But let’s get all three options just to be safe.

Jumping now.

#

The Watsons have been safely deposited with the arbiters.

Were the good doctors still arguing about which one was the real Watson?

Yes. Hopefully our next return trip will be quieter.

Indeed. Less human prattling is a good thing.

Jacob, are you insul—

Next item?

Hilbert’s Hotel. But I don’t know what that is.

It is a hotel that has an infinite number of rooms, all of which are occupied, and yet newly arriving guests can be provided their own private rooms without the creation of any additional rooms.

But if all the rooms are occupied, how do you accommodate new guests? Actually, never mind. Do you know where we might find one?

I do. Infinite universes with super-taskers aggregate aleph-naught layers out in the Multiverse at a minimum. It’ll take us a while to get there, but the real problem is how to transport something that large back.

Do the rooms all need to be the same size?

No. There just has to be denumerably many of them and each one needs to be occupied.

Let’s just find a Hilbert’s Hotel where each room is half the volume of the previous room. If the volume of the first room is X, then the total volume of all the rooms will be 2X, and voila, an infinite number of rooms all packed into an itty-bitty finite volume.

Ingenious. There’s hope for you yet. Jumping.

#

Last one—round square.

Hell no! I am not jumping us into a merely subsistent Meinongian universe.

Not even for your very own pocket universe?

Do you want to risk transmogrifying into a rutabaga? Or the square root of negative one? It’d be barely a step above throwing ourselves into primordial chaos. Hard no.

Well in that case, we need to find some poisonous water.

Perhaps we can ask the naturally evolved AI where to find some.

~

Bio:

Jeff Currier works three jobs (one actually in philosophy), so has little time to write fiction. Hence, he writes little stories, usually even shorter than this one. Find links at jffcurrier on X or Jeff Currier Writes on Facebook.

Philosophy Note:

Since the Nexus of ‘Untitled’ is inaccessible by any rational means, our two protagonists of ‘Title Game’ will have to scour the Multiverse instead. Just how far afield will they need to go to find, say, deontic, epistemic, physical, metaphysical, or logical impossibilities? Could the Multiverse itself contain truly impossible worlds? For a more serious take on some of these issues you could try, Boris Kment’s “Varieties of Modality” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modality-varieties/

Fiction

New France’s Finest Hour

by Matias Travieso-Diaz

The future has many names.
For the weak, it is unattainable.
For the faint-hearted, it is the unknown.
For the thoughtful and valiant, it is ideal.

Alexandre Dumas (p.), Vingt ans après

FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE 1587 SPANISH ARMADA’S INVASION OF ENGLAND

Québec, Nouvelle France, December 31, 1638

To: Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, Chief Minister of State to His Majesty King Louis XIII of France[sent via the vaisseau Léopard]

Your Grand Eminence: Greetings. I beg you to deliver this letter to the King.

Your Serene Majesty: This report updates and summarizes my earlier dispatches regarding developments in Nouvelle France during the current year and the actions that I have undertaken on Your Majesty’s behalf.

Since my appointment three years ago as Governor General of Nouvelle France as a successor to M. Champlain, my primary concern has been bolstering our defenses against potential attacks by hostile native tribes, particularly the Iroquois, who continuously threaten to destroy our fledgling colony. To that end, this year I fortified Québec City and gave partial protection to the buildings in Trois-Rivières. France’s main adversaries, England and Spain, do not yet pose an immediate threat to us because they continue to have internal problems. England has been beset by religious conflicts since Catholic Philip I (enthroned by the Spanish occupiers as King of England after the success of the Spanish Armada’s invasion) was forced to abdicate and was succeeded by a line of Protestant rulers. Spain, for its part, suffers from worsening economic conditions and a failure to leadership due to the withdrawal of King Philip III from the management of his empire and the assumption of governing authority by the king’s incompetent underlings.

Trade with France in furs and other local products continues to thrive and portends a favorable outlook for the economy of Nouvelle France in the coming years. It is my recommendation that France continue to take advantage of the absence of interest by other powers by expanding our presence in this Nouvelle land, whose untapped riches would contribute to the wealth and power of our great nation.

However, I note with disquiet that members of disaffected English religious groups (particularly Puritans and Calvinists) have started to migrate to North America and have founded colonies here. If these groups succeed in gaining a firm foothold on this continent, they may pose a challenge to France’s dominion. I recommend, therefore, that their settlements be destroyed and that any further English emigration attempts to North America be prevented. These initiatives appear entirely feasible since England has not fully rebuilt its naval forces following their destruction in 1587 by Spain and accordingly would be unable to forcefully oppose our efforts. I appreciate that France’s military resources are largely engaged in Europe, but I recommend that, as circumstances permit, Your Majesty commit forces to support the expansion of Nouvelle France along North America’s eastern seaboard.

Sire, I pray that God will keep Your Majesty in perfect health and grant you a blessed 1639.

Your humble and obedient subject,

Charles Huault de Montmagny, Governor.

Signed this 31^th of December, 1638

#

SIXTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE ARMADA

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERROGATION OF CAPITAINE LUDWIG VON BERLICHINGEN

Conseil de Guerre, Compagnie Franche de la Marine

The War Council of the Second Army of Nouvelle France, sitting in occupied Charlestown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, ordered the appearance of Capitaine Ludwig Von Berlichingen, for a recollement and interrogation in connection with crimes allegedly committed by him and troops under his command during the siege and occupation of Charlestown by the Second Army in September of the current year. Present at the interrogation were certain witnesses who had offered testimony at a preliminary hearing by the War Council. Capitaine Berlichingen had the opportunity to confront said witnesses and challenge their testimony. Following is a summary of the proceeding.

[Uncontested matters]: Berlichingen is the commander of the Hessian von Ditfurth Regiment, a Hesse-Kassel auxiliary force that assisted the Second Army in its capture, during the last ten years, of the English colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Rhode Island along the northern coast of North America. Throughout this period, the Hessian Regiment’s military service has been competent and fully supportive of the Second Army’s military operations against the colonial armed forces, and played a crucial role in our victory over the joint colonial armies in the recently concluded battle of Breed Hill.

[Witness 1], a sixty-three-year-old widow, testified that she is the owner of the Old Exchange Tavern, the oldest public house in Charlestown. She stated that when the city was occupied by the Second Army after defeating the Massachusetts colonial militia, a contingent of Hessian troops led by Berlichingen seized the tavern, establishing their headquarters there. The Hessians committed a multitude of illegal and morally reprehensible acts, including partial destruction of the premises, uncompensated lodging and consumption of the establishment’s liquor inventory, physical abuse of the proprietress and the tavern’s patrons, and forcible sexual intercourse with the wenches employed at the tavern and other female residents of the town, some of whom they brought into the guest rooms in the public house’s upper story.

[Witness 2], a sixty-five-year-old “teacher” at the First Church of Boston, testified that the meetinghouse where he is a minister was invaded by Hessian troops, who sacked the building; damaged its pulpit and pews; destroyed its prayer books; beat, cursed, insulted and subjected church parishioners to threatening and abusive behavior; and incarcerated three members of the congregation for protesting and opposing the invasion of their house of prayer by the troops.

[Witness 3], a forty-four-year-old soldier, was the captain of a train band in the Massachusetts colonial militia’s South Regiment. He testified that upon occupation of Charlestown the Hessian troops seized the militia’s artillery pieces, ammunition rounds, and muskets and brought them to a powder magazine for storage. A Hessian officer, identified by the witness as Capitaine Berlichingen, was warned by the witness that some of the guns might still be loaded and were at risk of discharging, but his warnings were ignored. As it happened, one musket accidentally fired, further discharging other loaded muskets in the magazine, detonating the stored barrels of powder, and resulting in an explosion that destroyed the powder magazine, killed approximately 200 people, both military and civilian, and demolished several houses in the neighborhood.

Capitaine Berlichingen responded to the accusations by the witnesses as follows:

He acknowledged that troops under his command, as well as elements of the separate Irish Volunteers force, stayed without paying at the Old Exchange Tavern and consumed much of its liquor inventory and did not pay for any of it; and that, due to inebriation, they caused damage to the chairs, tables, shelves, and counters of the tavern. Both troops also engaged in carnal commerce, sometimes in public, with female inhabitants of Charlestown, but the acts were committed voluntarily and the females in question were usually compensated.

With respect to the damage to the meetinghouse of the First Church of Boston, Berlichingen denied that he or any troops under him committed the acts of which he is being accused. He testified that he and his troops are predominantly of Protestant persuasion, Lutheran or German Reformed, and bear no ill will against the Puritan church or its members. To the contrary, he regrets and condemns any persecution of individuals on account of their religious beliefs. He identified the Volunteers of Ireland, the other group of foreign soldiers that support the Second Army of Nouvelle France, as being responsible for the offenses against the Puritans. Berlichingen stated that years ago the English ruler Oliver Cromwell sent Protestant troops to wage a bloody war in Ireland in which thousands of Catholics lost their lives and property, and this may be the cause of the Irish soldiers’ animosity and their attacks on the Puritans.

Berlichingen acknowledged responsibility for the explosion of the powder magazine. He attributed the accident to his erroneous belief that all the muskets stored in the magazine were unloaded and his negligent failure to ascertain the validity of his assumption.

Based on the evidence presented at the preliminary hearing and the recollement and interrogation session, the War Council finds that the defendant is guilty of having committed several offenses, either by himself or attributable to him through the actions of his subordinates. While the disorderly conduct and immoral crimes are deemed less severe as common to the circumstances frequently arising in military encounters, the negligent destruction of public property and the attendant loss of civilian and military life typically would warrant that Capitaine Berlichingen be subjected to an amende honorable punishment in which he would be led around Charlestown, naked and adorned with a sign detailing the nature of his infractions, and that he be banished from Nouvelle France and returned to his homeland in Hesse. The inhabitants of this colony demand recognition and redress of the injuries they have sustained. However, the War Council takes note of the strong support the Hessian forces have rendered to Nouvelle France under the able leadership of Capitaine Berlichingen. Accordingly, the War Council leaves the choice of Capitaine Berlichingen’s punishment to the sound judgment of the Governor and his staff.

This transcript is being forwarded to the king’s attorney-general (procureur général du roi) for his final verdict and recommendation and the Governor General’s decision.

Signed: Georges Duplessis, Greffier, December 31, 1653

#

A HUNDRED YEARS AFTER THE ARMADA

From the Diary of Jacques-René de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville

Saint Augustine, Florida, December 31, 1688

Yesterday was a red-letter day in the history of Nouvelle France: after a siege of two months, an army under my direction has captured the fortress of San Marcos and occupied the city of Saint Augustine, the capital of Spanish Florida.

The Nouvelle France army came by ship from Fort Maintenon in the Carolina colony to lay siege to Saint Augustine in October, and as we landed about fifteen hundred town residents and soldiers took refuge in the Saint Marcos fort. We started shelling, but the cannons we emplaced had little effect on the walls, which were made of coquina (seashell fragments) masonry, a material that is very effective at absorbing the impact of cannonballs instead of shattering or puncturing the fortifications. After many frustrating attempts to breach the walls, early this morning we launched a surprise incursion through the sallyport and were able to overwhelm the garrison before they could organize themselves to repel us.

Having been directed to temporarily leave my post in Québec as Governor General of Nouvelle France to lead the invasion of Spanish Florida, I am proud to record that the conduct of the siege and the hours that followed our victory exemplified the best of the Armée. The occupation of the fort and the surrounding town were carried out efficiently and only minor incidents of looting occurred (after all, Saint Augustine is not a thriving metropolis like La Havane or Cartagena), and only a few of our troops, particularly some mercenaries from Ireland and Hesse, comported themselves in a reprehensible manner, through drunken behavior and abuse of members of the female population.

Through this victory, the domain of Nouvelle France now extends over the eastern seaboard of North America, from Terre-Neuve to La Floride, complementing our colony’s expansion from the northern lakes to the Golfe du Mexique along the watershed of the Colbert River into La Louisiane. Vast areas of this continent remain unexplored and undeveloped but I trust that, eventually, the French Crown will assert its dominion over all the lands between the two oceans and the Golfe.

~

Bio:

Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Over one hundred and ninety of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in one hundred and thirty anthologies, magazines, blogs, audio books and podcasts. A novel, “When Cubans went to War;” an autobiography entitled “Cuban Transplant;” and four anthologies of his stories have also been published.

Philosophy Note:

This story is a sequel to the alternate history “Beheading Of A Queen“.

Fact & Opinion

Mór Jókai’s Bicentenary – The Founding Father Of Hungarian Science Fiction

by Éva Vancsó

The origins of Hungarian science fiction

The roots of science fiction date back to antiquity; but those early tales cannot truly be regarded as part of the genre, as they were driven by imagination and myth rather than scientific reasoning. What distinguishes science fiction from fantasy is precisely the presence of a scientific background. The scientific revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries laid the foundations of modern science fiction, still, the genre’s actual birth occurred with the 19th century’s explosion of technological progress and the widespread dissemination of scientific thought. This century witnessed the publication of the first key science fiction works, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the visionary novels of Jules Verne. Even the term “science fiction” itself was first used by English essayist William Wilson in 1851, though it gained widespread popularity after 1929.

In Hungary, the first examples of science fiction emerged almost simultaneously with the genre’s development in Western Europe, during the so-called Reform Era (1825–1848). This period was characterized by an ambitious effort to modernize society, the economy, and political life; this peculiar intellectual climate also allowed the first Hungarian works of science fiction to emerge. The earliest known Hungarian science fiction novel is Ferenc Ney’s Journey to the Moon (1836), written nearly thirty years before Verne’s book of a similar title. Ney’s story follows Hungarian adventurers traveling to the Moon in a balloon, where they discover an idealized utopian society that mirrors, in satirical form, the shortcomings of their contemporary Hungary. Another early example from this period is József Koronka’s Journey Over the Ruins of Old Europe in the Year 2836 (According to Letters Found Among the Papers of an Anonymous Writer), published in 1844. This novel, written in epistolary form, envisions a post-apocalyptic future. In this devastated Europe, only nomadic tribes live. Still, the book also describes imagined inventions such as “writing-powered engines,” “air mail,” and “fast-moving wooden legs” for convenient travel. Miklós Jósika’s The Last Days (1847), subtitled “An Apocalyptic Novella,” represents another significant work of the period. Though not strictly a work of science fiction—since its resolution relies on the intervention of archangel Gabriel—it is set thousands of years in the future, depicting a degenerate humanity living in an African nation, the only habitable region on an increasingly frozen Earth.

Besides these early literary traditions, from the 1830s, another tendency contributed to the growing readership of the genre: popular science writing also began to incorporate speculative ideas about a scientifically predictable future. As early as 1837, Gábor Fábián wrote about The Consequences of Mechanical Inventions. Károly Nagy in Daguerreotype (1841) vividly imagined the city of the future; Ferenc Toldy described the future of Pest-Buda in Auróra (1838); and Regélő Pesti Divatlap published “News from the Capital in the Next Century” (1844), envisioning Budapest in 1944. From the 1870s onward, such popular-scientific visions of progress became increasingly common, shaping both literature and the public imagination.

Under these circumstances, following earlier sporadic attempts in the genre, Mór Jókai emerged on the literary stage in the mid-19th century.

Born in 1825 – now celebrating the bicentenary of his birth – Jókai lived through a period of immense transformation: the Hungarian Reform Era, the Revolution of 1848, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, and finally the turn of the century, when Hungary entered a phase of rapid modernization. It can be symbolic that the year of his birth coincided with the opening of England’s first public railway line. During his most active creative years, the practical use of electricity began to spread, and by the year of his death in 1904, the first motorized airplane had taken to the skies.

Jókai achieved success with his first short stories in the 1840s and published his first novel in 1846, soon becoming a celebrated novelist. During the 1848 Revolution, he played an active role as one of the leaders of the radical youth, editing revolutionary newspapers and promoting national independence. After the defeat of the revolution, he faced difficult years, but soon he was rehabilitated. In the 1870s, he reached the peak of his career and remained one of the most significant figures in 19th-century Hungarian Romantic literature.

His private life bore a resemblance to the plots of his own novels: he married Róza Laborfalvy, a celebrated actress fifteen years his senior, in 1848. Their marriage was considered scandalous at the time – his family was strongly against it, but their relationship became one of the most famous love stories in Hungarian literary history. Róza was Jókai’s muse, confidante, and a stabilizing force in his life. Their marriage lasted over forty years, until Róza died in 1886. Later, the seventy-two-year-old Jókai met a twenty-year-old aspiring actress, Bella Nagy, who also caused a national scandal; however, their mentoring/romance ultimately ended in marriage. This severely damaged Jókai’s relationship with his family; he broke off all contact with them, and his sole heir was his wife after he died in 1904.

Jókai, the Founding Father of Hungarian science fiction

Being an astonishingly prolific writer, Jókai’s oeuvre spans more than a hundred volumes, and many of them fall within the science fiction genre to a certain extent. But where did this interest originate? As the previous sections have shown, Jókai did not become a science fiction writer in a vacuum. Works of speculative fiction already existed before him, and scientific popularization was on the rise. Yet it was in Jókai’s writing that all elements first converged seamlessly: the intellectual climate of the 19th century, limitless imagination, and interest in the natural sciences. The latter requires further discussion, as it played a crucial role in his science fiction writing.

Jókai’s scientific knowledge was vast and cannot be attributed solely to the trends of his era mentioned earlier; it also reflected a deep personal interest. He had an extensive personal library and was well-informed through journals and popular science publications; his interests ranged from botany to astronomy and palaeontology. According to botanical studies, his works contain the names of more than six hundred plant species—an achievement virtually unmatched among the world’s novelists. He also described dozens of prehistoric animals and plants, and he wrote detailed descriptions of geological features, fossils, minerals, and volcanic phenomena in his novels and short stories. Some of his explanations are inaccurate from a modern standpoint, but they were entirely consistent with the scientific understanding of his time. Equally remarkable was Jókai’s fascination with astronomy, a trait befitting an actual science fiction author. Contemporaries noted that he owned a telescope, which his first wife, Róza Laborfalvy, also famously used to watch steamships arrive at Balatonfüred on Lake Balaton. Jókai often wove the wonders of the night sky into his stories, describing celestial phenomena through both personal observation and illustrations or scientific writings.

Jókai utilized these details not only to enrich his narratives but also to popularize science, and as an early science fiction writer, to invent new, fictional materials. He designed flying machines, sent his heroes to the Arctic, and consistently celebrated the achievements of science.

In the following section, I will highlight the short stories and novels that reflect Jókai’s scientific curiosity and, in a broader sense, contain elements of science fiction, offering a fresh perspective rather than a comprehensive analysis.

Short stories

“Inventions” (1853) is not a traditional narrative but rather a collection of imaginative ideas that reveal Jókai’s creativity, combining his early science fiction concepts with his satirical vision of the future. Some inventions anticipate advances in health and human enhancement: “There are no bald heads, no crippled legs, no blindness or deafness; people replace lost hands, legs, noses, eyes, and many other things” — a precursor to modern prostheses and reminiscent of devices like Geordi La Forge’s visor in Star Trek. Jókai also envisions synthetic materials: the vulcanization of rubber renders weavers, tailors, and other workers who provide clothing unnecessary, as a man can buy a cap of elastic rubber, stretch it at the water’s edge, and turn it into a boat. Other ideas are bolder and obviously unfeasible, such as magnetomnesmerism, which would expose every secret, or edible soil, where humans would carve caves into the Earth with their mouths and dwell within them. These concepts demonstrate Jókai’s unique style, blending technological foresight with humour and social critique. His „The Moon and the Sun” first appeared in the National Calendar in the same year as “Inventions”. In this short story, Jókai envisions what might happen if the Moon were to approach the Earth. At first, the celestial body appears playfully large, shining like a silver coin, but gradually it becomes threatening. Earth turns upside down, Greenland falls under the equator, the Africans occupy the poles, seas leave their beds, Iceland becomes dry land, and Shakespeare’s ships might find themselves moored along the coasts of Bohemia. As the Moon draws ever closer, its gravitational pull grows so strong that lighter objects fly upward. A person leaping from a window is held aloft by the Earth’s gravity, requiring others below to pull him down by his legs. Amid the fantastical events, Jókai inserts his characteristic satirical humour, especially in the conclusion: the two sibling planets, Moon and Earth, continue on their celestial paths like a pair of heavenly rolls, and once railways are built, humanity may soon discover the kindred spirits living on the Moon.

All the Way to the North Pole (1876)

Among Jókai’s lesser-known works, “All the Way to the North Pole” clearly reveals the influence of Jules Verne, echoing his adventurous utopian tales, such as “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.” Yet, the novel offers a remarkable example of Jókai’s engagement with contemporary scientific imagination. The story combines the conventions of the “found manuscript,” a nineteenth-century blend of science (fiction) and biblical creation myth.

The plot follows a sailor, Péter Galiba, who is accidentally left behind at the North Pole by the Tegetthoff expedition, stranded on a ship frozen in the ice. The novel’s distinctive feature lies in its duality. On one hand, it functions as a hymn to scientific and technological progress, teeming with detailed depictions of mechanical and chemical ingenuity. Galiba uses chloroform to subdue a polar bear, employs a Papin-style pressure cooker to tenderize polar bear meat, identifies fossilized creatures and rock types with a palaeontologist’s precision, and even extracts milk from a whale to have food. Much like Robinson Crusoe, Galiba’s survival is ensured through his mastery of empirical knowledge and practical invention. Some of his inventions verge on science fiction; for example, he even weaves himself a heat-resistant suit from asbestos. These passages celebrating scientific rationality, however, are set in sharp contrast with the novel’s mythic layer, which draws directly on the Book of Genesis. Figures from the biblical creation narrative appear: Galiba frees the first liberated woman, “a twenty-thousand-year-old bride,” and later encounters Cain himself, bearing the mark of divine punishment. At the end of the book, Galiba ignites a volcano, bathing the polar landscape in warmth and light. This act symbolically reenacts the cosmogony of Genesis, culminating in an accelerated replay of the Earth’s creation. Then, a sea current extinguishes the volcano, bringing the fantastic act of creation to an abrupt end, as Galiba and Naamah, the woman he freed from crystal captivity and revived, are left in darkness again.

All the Way to the North Pole is not a conventional science fiction novel. Still, it anticipates the logic of the genre, using speculative technologies and natural phenomena to explore the boundaries between human invention and divine creation.

Csalavér (1896)

Csalavér by Jókai recalls Voltaire’s Candide and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, featuring mad adventures described with satirical flair. From a science fiction point of view, among these, Chapter XI, “The Volapük-Tat and its Dilekel,” stands out. The eponymous Csalavér and her companions escape from a mine-prison, only to be rescued from the treacherous mountains by the Volapük people. The Volapükers’ world is a vivid caricature: Jókai lampoons the 19th-century positivist faith in science, a belief that machines could satisfy every human need. Even the name “Volapük” is satirical: the artificial universal language was briefly fashionable in the late 19th century before quickly fading into obscurity.

The Volapükers live with flying machines, sound-powered engines, and peculiar inventions. Their energy derives from the inversion of the Holy Bible: “In the beginning was the Word”. As words are made of ‘sound,’ sound is the primary source of energy. The Volapükers speak, and this generates energy to move their world. Moreover, they do not eat or drink; instead, they inhale gases: “Take this sucker into your mouth. Draw in a deep breath. Herein lies the ‘opsortu-maferosz’ (the satisfying vapor). Women are equal; marriage is obsolete, and erotic pleasures come from inhaling another gas: the trüferobius glükütátoferos (pleasure-creating). The one who inhales one puff would think himself in “Mohammed’s paradise, embraced by eternal beauties”. Despite all these pleasures, the Volapük world brings disappointment: “It is worse than in Siberia, worse than in the silver mines!” The final line sums up the overuse of science: “A greater fool than a scientist can only be another scientist”.

From a science fiction perspective, this chapter of Csalavér is clearly proto-sci-fi, featuring flying machines, sound-powered contraptions, and the creation of an artificial human, and it fits into the early tradition of 19th-century scientific fantastical literature.

The Novel of the Next Century (1872—74)

From a science fiction perspective, Jókai’s main opus, The Novel of the Next Century (A Jövő Század Regénye), serves as a synthesis of the genre in its time—in a monumental narrative. The novel spans five decades, from 1952 to 2000, presenting Jókai’s vision of Hungary’s future and his faith in the redemptive power of technological progress and scientific discoveries. The protagonist, Dávid Tatrangi, is a brilliant Transylvanian inventor whose scientific and technological genius stands behind the transformation of the world. The novel’s innovative ideas can be divided into two main categories: societal-political and technical, both of which fall within the scope of science fiction.

Among the many technological “wonders” described in the novel, two inventions stand out: ichor, a new material, and aerodrom, an aircraft. Aviation was a topic of great fascination in Jókai’s time; numerous foreign and domestic reports speculated about human flight before the novel’s publication. The aircraft imagined in the book is a wing-flapping, electrically powered flying machine that combines electricity with ichor, the new material. Ichor is a forerunner of modern plastic: “a magical substance, a mixture of plastic and steel, bending but never breaking.” The aerodrome made of ichor and flying are central to The Novel of the Next Century. Not only because they contribute to the establishment of world peace, but also due to the highly detailed and realistic descriptions of flight—something Jókai himself never had the opportunity to experience. Particularly noteworthy are the vivid images of reaching all the way to the upper atmosphere, envisioning the view of Earth from above decades before the first astronauts.

Beyond its technological aspects, The Novel of the Next Century explores social and political issues through the lens of the future. It mirrors the upheavals of Jókai’s own era—revolutions, constitutional monarchies, and religious conflicts—set against the backdrop of King Árpád II’s rule in Hungary. Particularly striking is Jókai’s portrayal of the “Nihil State”. He describes a political movement aiming to turn Europe into “one great republic, to destroy all aristocracy, to sweep away all constitutions, to level all religions.” This dystopian vision of Russia eerily anticipates the rise of Soviet totalitarianism. In contrast to the Monarchy and the Nihil State, Jókai’s novel depicts a true utopia, which is brought to life through the technical expertise of Dávid Tatrangi. The idealized society of the so-called Home State (Otthon Állam), summarized by Jókai as follows: “We shall build a state whose constitution is freedom and whose social foundation is labour. A state of shareholders, where every citizen is a shareholder, paying no taxes but receiving dividends from the state’s profits… A state that provides fair work for every hand and mind, free from poverty, oppression, and conflict, bound by mutual trust and justice.”

As a science fiction novel, The Novel of the Future Century also anticipates several themes of modern science fiction. It raises the issue of overpopulation, a consequence of peace and prosperity on Earth, thanks to David Tatrangi. The novel, however, predicts that scientific discoveries will enable humanity to overcome food shortages through technological advancements. The return of Halley’s Comet (which in reality occurred in 1986, while Jókai placed it in 2000) serves as an apocalyptic catalyst, threatening global famine and destruction. Jókai imagines a world covered by impact-induced cloud resembling those found in later post-apocalyptic literature.

Ultimately, Jókai’s scientific and social optimism prevails: a new world is born from the cataclysm. The comet transforms into a new planet named Pax (Peace) by David Tatrangi. It is described with meticulous detail due to Jókai’s extensive astronomical knowledge: it orbits the Sun within the Earth’s trajectory, is slightly larger than Mars, and glows with a red light.

Due to its monumentality and its ideas about technology and society, The Novel of the Next Century marks the beginning of Hungarian science fiction. If we could select a birthday for Hungarian-language science fiction, it would undoubtedly fall on November the 3^rd, 1872. On that Sunday, the first part of the novel was published. In the 19th century, apart from Jules Verne, no other writer exerted such a profound influence on Hungarian speculative literature as Jókai. His scientific optimism and visionary imagination shaped the tone and themes of the genre well into the early 20th century, leaving a legacy that lasted until the First World War. Yet, despite his pioneering contributions, Jókai has never been fully recognized within the literary canon as a science fiction author—even though he rightfully deserves the title of the Founding Father of Hungarian science fiction.

References and further readings (in Hungarian):

https://sites.google.com/site/scifitort/tanulmanyok/zsoldos-julia-jokai-mor-es-a-sci-fi

https://www.ponticulus.hu/rovatok/megcsapottak/moesz-gusztav-jokai-novenyismerete.html#gsc.tab=0

https://www.ponticulus.hu/rovatok/mesterkurzus/foldvari-jokai.html#gsc.tab=0

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Bio:

Éva Vancsó is currently completing her Ph.D in Modern English and American Literature and Culture, in Budapest, Hungary. In addition to her doctoral work, she investigates the emergence of utopian and dystopian societies in Hungarian science fiction and urban fantasy published after 1990. As a literary translator, she primarily translates science fiction and fantasy novels as well as short stories from English.

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