A Reflection on the Achievement of Gene Wolfe, with Gregorian Chant Echoing Offstage

by Blackstone Crow

“Robert, I think he’s lost his mind.”

“He has eyes, Marie, and you don’t.”

“What do you mean by that? And why do you keep looking out that window?”

Quite slowly, the man turned to face us. For a moment he looked at Agia and me, then he turned away. His expression was the one I have seen our clients wear when Master Gurloes showed them the instruments to be used in their anacrisis.

Like that? It’s a haunting scene, one from a weighty tome of haunting scenes, capped as a lyric with a couplet by that edgy comment about the countenance of those wretches who see the “instruments” whom the “Master Gurloes” – the reader at this stage of the novel knows Gurloes to be a Master Torturer of the Guild of Torturers – reveals to his “clients” about to suffer their “anacrisis”, a term from the Ancient Greeks referring to the torture used when, in a law case having interrogation and inquiry, torture was applied.

And lift a tip of an interior ear to that “You have eyes, but you do not see” echo from the Gospels. But it is cast in a semi-pagan way, too, that line, cast as it is with the very modern, “I think he’s lost his mind” coupled with it in a dynamic and very conjugal way. Something is askew here, a mismatch, hints of the Christian Faith and instruments of torture. Or maybe not? One could easily picture this scene in the sunny background of the High Middle Ages, in an office of some Star Chamber court. But in fact, it takes place on a far-future Earth almost (not quite, there are hints!) unrecognizable.

This vignette is taken from page 190 of volume 1 of my Fantasy Masterwork edition of the late Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun multi-tome epic. All four volumes, on every page, have scenes word-woven on such a level. Ursula K. Le Guin said of Wolfe that: “He is our Melville” – maybe so, but he strikes me as more an Old Testament author (whom Melville himself hoped to “channel”, perhaps?). Wolfe strikes me as a Master Chronicler of the Guild of Haunting Unsettlements, or he would do so if the Prophet Ezekiel had ventured into essaying a Science-Fiction novel. Wolfe haunts; he unsettles. One just doesn’t “read” such an author. Does one “read” Shakespeare? One spends a lifetime carrying Shakespeare about, and one does that with Wolfe. It is a gift very few writers achieve at all, and fewer still on a sustained level. Besides the Avon Bard himself and Wolfe, I can name two others: Tolkien and Homer.

Gene Wolfe died on April 14 of 2019 at the age of 87. Having survived both polio and the Korean War, he became an engineer – and if you have a taste for Pringle potato chips, Wolfe helped create the machine that forms them. His wife Rosemary, born the same year as Wolfe, died in 2013 after long illness, including Alzheimer’s. Wolfe has a quote about her recorded in The New Yorker in 2015 that, “There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were married, but she still remembered that she loved me.” After a long life as a melancholy observer of Earth’s all-too human scene, I have to say that is a poignant line; indeed, there have been few such loves.

With this essay, I stand here before the Assembly of Readers as Wolfe’s Advocate. He deserves to be read, whether a particular writing of his is Science-Fiction or whether it is Fantasy. Wolfe deserves to be read because all of us deserve the mystery he conjures. Justice is giving something its due, and Science-Fiction itself is due the gift of seeing reality as something that can act on us as much as we think we can act on it. Sci-Fi – the art, relying as it does on building imaginative narrative architecture based on the empirical sciences – more than deserves mystery: it needs it desperately, for all Creation needs a return to the sense of mystery – and of course in the heart of mystery resides beauty. Or terror. Yet beauty is allusive, non-capturable – and in that peculiar oubliette in the Mansion of Meaning, Wolfe is THE master “mystery” writer, “mystery” in the Catholic Sacramental sense. Wolfe himself was a Catholic, a convert who initially studied the Faith to marry his beloved Rosemary, and much speculation orbits that question as to what extent his religion influenced his writings. Wolfe himself averred that it did. As he converted in the 1950s, before the controversial changes in the Church, he thus experienced an older, more transcendental theology than those whose Catholic experience dates from the 1960s or later.

Do a writer’s personal religious beliefs color his oeuvre? Enlarge it? Or restrict it? It’s a common enough question when discussing where authors cultivate their ideas, and how they wrestle with the concepts they create, yet Science-Fiction (nor most of the rest of Modernity) often doesn’t have the “religious gene” that way; at best, reality is matter to manipulate and we’re Descartes’ Ghosts in the Machine – pure matter ourselves, yet oddly “haunted”. The natural world in which we live in our technological bubble is not considered that type of mystery, not a Mysterium requiring awe and contemplation but a material reality needing exploitation for profit. Though an author of more than 25 novels and twice that many short stories, no reader of his can believe Wolfe wrote with much of an eye for profit. His fiction is not “pop” fiction, written to sell high volume, though Fantasy is a huge seller in general, compared to “literary” works.

Wolfe’s fiction is instead a wondering, a cosmos-wide pondering on whether it is reality that is a player in the game, whether it can exploit us, or transform us, as in his Fifth Head of Cerberus, a three-novel combo asking the question of whether the long-settled human colonists of a planet haven’t actually been replaced by the aliens native to the place. Who does the haunting? (Or is it more like possession?) The humans who have replaced the natives or the natives, haunted by what happened to the humans they have altered themselves to pantomime? In the Fifth Head, Wolfe also asks whether a machine can hold a human’s mind, and whether a clone can continue the life of its original, whether prostitution offers a greater freedom and whether suffering is…. Well, one doesn’t just “read” Wolfe, one interacts with Wolfe, and one does so sacramentally, for as the Catholic Sacraments are physical channels of invisible, divine grace; in Wolfe’s art, his characters experience the worlds he creates as believers experience the drama of divine life in such a sacramental metaphysic.

Alien that is, of course, to our present world, and it is fitting an author of Science-Fiction engages in it; but that raises another reason for Wolfe to be read: he’s work. He takes effort. As suggested here, his form of storytelling is quite different from the norm. And he can be more work than Tolkien, more than Homer, for he has an anti-Mysterium world to work against. And that’s Sacramental too. From his unsettling reflections on who we are and contemplation of what we might be, even if unbeknownst to ourselves, to his wonderful, exquisite prose and his penchant for creating words – one often finds oneself looking up a word only to realize Wolfe has made it up – in all of that, Gene Wolfe is a transcendent author, or perhaps, suggested by the unsettling questions raised in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, he is Ezekiel come again; an ancient phantasmagoric, a prophet of the supernatural imperiously striking itself through the natural world, an extraordinary visionary who sees a higher reality our world in itself can only dully reflect – perhaps the prophet has indeed replaced the potato chip machine maker.

Read Gene Wolfe, and you’ll wander in these wonders, and over time, bit by bit – perhaps – garner that most elusive of graces: wisdom.

~

Blackstone Crow blogs at corvinescatholiccorner.blogspot.com

Fiction

Letter From a Slave-Making Ant

from Charlas de café [Coffee-Shop Chats]
by Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Translation and Introductory Note
by Emily Tobey

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) was a pioneering neuroscientist from Spain who is best known for receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. Cajal was the first Spanish laureate in medicine, and cities around the country responded to the honor by re-naming streets for the scientist. As a child and a young man, he demonstrated an affinity for art, sketching in particular, that would prove to be unexpectedly advantageous to his medical career. After serving as a medical officer in the Spanish Army in Cuba, he returned to Spain and received his doctorate in medicine in 1877. In connection with his research, he applied a particular staining technique to the densely-packed and therefore previously unstudied neurons of the brain and spinal cord, enabling him to see their structure with more detail than theretofore had been possible. This in turn facilitated his conclusion that the relationship between nerve cells was not continuous, but rather contiguous, a discovery now considered a foundational principle of modern neuroscience. His meticulous handmade illustrations of his findings combine two fields in a relationship that proves to be characteristic of Cajal: he synthesizes the sciences and the humanities in his interpretation and depictions of neuroscience and social systems alike. In addition to his not only notable but also prolific scientific work in which he published over one hundred articles and books, Cajal produced a collection of science-fiction stories, Cuentos de vacaciones (Vacation Stories) in 1905, and essays, Charlas de café (Coffee-Shop Chats), in 1920. While the stories in the collections diverge from what might be considered a “typical” (whether through unusual organizational divisions or their intent to teach a bit of science to a layperson), they reflect Cajal’s ability to weave together science and art. The same can be said of his story “Carta de una hormiga esclavista” (“Letter from a Slave-Making Ant”), published in Charlas de café in 1920.

In the translation of the latter story I have taken into account two main principles: Cajal’s combination of the scientific and the literary; and the parallels between this letter and the early conquest narratives of Hernán Cortés and Christopher Columbus. The style of Cajal’s imagined correspondence between a worker ant and his queen imitates the reverential form of address, attitude of an expert by experience, and superiority in the face of colonized people that those conquering authors employed in corresponding with the monarchs they served. In translating the piece, I have endeavored to maintain those elements through word choice and sentence construction. I have attempted to be as faithful as possible to the original text, though clarity for an English-speaking readership required some changes throughout the piece. Where possible I have maintained original punctuation, but again, some differences in sentence construction necessitated small departures. Where Cajal includes Latin names of existing species, I leave them in Latin; where he invents names in Spanish that allow the narrating ant to name orders of humans, I render them in English. It is my hope, in so doing, to allow the description of each caste to speak for itself. Cajal’s decision to place these observations in the unlikely voice of an ant that is set on colonizing humanity encourages us to recognize their destructiveness. In this piece, Cajal masterfully brings up one of the darker parts of humankind’s behavior and uses it to admonish a post-World War I audience, encouraging them (and by extension, us) to consider our motivation for actions, our treatment of each other, and the ways in which we allow our worst impulses to govern not only ourselves but our societies.

###

Letter from a slave-making ant (Polyergus rufescens), written during his travels through Europe, to the queen of his colony

My dearest mother: Fulfilling the charge that you gave me to secretly explore the colonies where dwell Man (formica ferox as classified by our underground naturalists) I now briefly convey my impressions.

These exceptional ants, not so in their education or wisdom, but rather because of their size, live almost as we do, but with several essential differences that speak little to favor their instincts and customs. Verily, they occupy colossal colonies that they call cities, formed by a labyrinth of family chambers and of avenues and of connected streets; but these seem to be filled with all kinds of litter; and the dwellings, lacking the underground apartments where we keep out of the heat, become unbearably torrid in summer and glacial in winter. In a select few more refined locales, the humans have begun to care for and pave the streets with cobblestones, though not with the perfection of our American relative.¹

We must recognize various types of Formica ferox: the farmer ant, who resembles our farmer sister Aphenogaster barbara (I employ here the ridiculous and pedantic nomenclature of Man), and above all the ingenious Attini of South America,² who make their living through the sowing and harvest of seeds; the milkmaid ant, who, imitating the conduct of many of our sisters, dedicate themselves to raising a type of monstrous giant flea called a cow, which they milk daily; the gardener ant, more docile imitator of our lasius niger and of other hymenoptera, and who feeds on fruit and leafy vegetables; the sugar-making ant, dedicated to the production and sale of sugar, like our cousins the bees and the Myrmecocysfus melliger, from Texas; the mason ant, builders of solidly closed houses, shamelessly plagiarizing our cousins the calicodomas bees; with all this said, they do not lack a special warrior caste who, following in our footsteps, has war as their exclusive occupation, etc.

With regard to this singular profession, I have noticed one curious thing. Instead of fighting for the sake of taking useful slaves, as we do, mercifully limiting our slave-making to the larva of other races of ants (these, even having reached adulthood, remain ignorant of their condition and serve us most selflessly and solicitously), Man fights fiercely with those of his own race with no other object than the pleasure of exterminating one another, taking and returning hungry and mutilated prisoners, and exhausting the provisions of the community. Just recently I watched with astonishment a general conflagration of nearly all of the great colonies of Europe, whose result has been the death of ten million workers and the terrifying ruin and desolation of all of the human communities. (The date of this writing being 1919.)

Further regarding the war, permit me to note a particularly strange contradiction. Homo sapiens – as he is content to call himself – is possessed of a peaceful body and warlike mind. Can we conceive of an earthworm endowed with warlike instincts? But as his body has lost the ability to model within itself the arms of aggression and defense, the brain has taken it upon itself to supplement this lack, constructing deadly and varied, enormously costly annihilating machines that he puts away when he goes to work. How different from us, who never allow ourselves to be separated from our formidable mandible claws! Such inability to manufacture organic defensive instruments has brought about the gravest of inconveniences: the creation of a social class, highly onerous at that, of armed slackers with the objective of protecting the defenseless workers. In spite of this, there is not a day that passes without raids and instances of violence. It is no surprise, then, that beings endowed with irresistible predatory impulses would find it more convenient and expeditious, in order to satiate their hunger, to exchange the heavy tool of work for the light and efficient revolver of the robber! . . .

Representatives of the Formica ferox puff themselves up with vanity at having invented flight (such a novelty!) several million years after insects, reptiles, bats, and birds had done so. But this so-called flight does not move beyond being an unobstructed method of suicide; they dishonor it, besides, using it not in order to love within the azure sky as we do, but rather to assassinate without fear of reprisal. They do not understand, therefore, the sublime nuptial flight of the hymenopterans. It would be better for the aviators, imitating our queens, to amputate their wings and live hidden in their homes.

Each nation lives fighting fiercely within itself, once they no longer have foreigners to despoil. All social classes, as we would refer to our soldiers, workers, and queens, are at each other’s throats. And not few of them have taken up imitating the communism of bees and ants! Could they be more foolish? They even plan to install a new regime, maintaining a plurality of females, the separation of families and the full freedom of love!…We resolved this struggle millions of years ago, but with logic and foresight, which is to say, rejecting outright corruptive individualism ad delegating to a singular female, our revered queen, and to a few select males, the work of the perpetuation of the species. And we, the neuter, do not feel nostalgia toward love, because we know from experience that love, slavery, and death are all the same.³

Another incomprehensible custom has shocked me enormously. The Formica ferox is educated in schools where they teach to speak and to understand the Universe somewhat. Studying for learning’s sake! Such idiocy has never been seen. Even without demanding teachers or blighted professors, we know how to communicate our preferences and emotions, educate our children and slaves, get our bearings in unknown lands, distinguish between noxious plants and animals and those that are useful, begin long hunting expeditions without faltering, and work in a coordinated and peaceful manner in favor of the community. As being embarrassing, vile and fallacious, we disdain rational logic, which we have instead replaced with the celebrated method of direct vision or intuition, a supremely intellectual perfection which all animals, including Man, envy in us. Fabre, one of our oldest counsellors amongst the humans, has compared instinct to genius.

In sum, and here I conclude my lengthy epistle. Nothing transcendental has grown out of the human vermin: they still discuss the enigma of understanding versus instinct; they only begin to decipher the mechanism of the Cosmos; they do not know the essence of life, and with regard to practical and legal order, they have not even resolved the pressing problems of social stability and an ideal political system. Not to mention the riddle that is death. It must not worry them, whatever the preaching of their apostles, given that the most densely populated colonies of the Formica ferox, having just shaken the dust from the ruins and dried the blood, hurry on to new wars, infinitely bloodier and more destructive. The future contest – or so they say – will be resolved purely by air, hurling at harmless peoples balloons full of germs and suffocating gasses.

Let us not rush to deplore this incredible dementia. In the form of human cadavers, many insects of the muscidos family will find inexhaustible rations, which are also the favorite delicacy of the nomadic tribes of hunting ants (Myrmecocystus viatitus, Aphenogaster tertaceopilosa, Tapinoma erraticum, etc).

And since I have nothing to learn here, but rather much to endeavor to forget, I will return as soon as possible to the anthill, our beloved homeland.

Embracing you effusively with my antennae, R. y C.

###

Endnotes:

1. P. barbatus, who pave their nests with very small stones.

2. Admirable ants, who within their nests pile pulp of mashed leaves where they sow a fungus (Rhocites gongyophora, Müller), from which they sustain themselves.

3. Lest the reader forget, the queen is cloistered and absorbed entirely in the work of motherhood, and the scarce males perish once the queen is impregnated, whereas the workers can live for many years, as Lubbock has shown.

~

Fact & Opinion

What Sci Phi Is All About: Treating Science Fiction as Philosophy

by David Kyle Johnson

Readers of the Sci Phi Journal already know that there is a deep connection between philosophy and science fiction. But what exactly does that connection entail, and why are philosophy and science fiction so well suited for one another? In short, what exactly is Sci Phi all about?

How Philosophers Use Science Fiction

Well, for one, science is directly related to philosophy. Indeed, it was birthed from it. Philosophy just means “love of wisdom,” and as the study of all things, originally philosophy was the only thing that one could study. Science came to be because certain philosophers developed methods of thinking and investigation that could guard against the biases of our senses and natural reasoning to discover the way the world actually is. It began with Aristotle, of course, but the revolution happened thanks to philosophers like Francis Bacon, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, and C.S. Peirce. Indeed, the first scientists were called “natural philosophers.” Their methods were simply so successful that the employment of those methods eventually became its own discipline (“science”) and those that employed them went by a new name (“scientists”).

This is true of pretty much every discipline that exists today. Medicine, mathematics, economics, political science, education—everything is an offshoot of philosophy. When people study the founding and influential thinkers in their fields, they are studying the work of philosophers—like Hypocrites, Descartes, Adam Smith, Plato, Dewey—who discovered methods and answers so groundbreaking and important that they spawned their own discipline. This is why philosophy has the (inaccurate) reputation of being a discipline about unanswerable questions. In reality, philosophers find answers to questions all the time! It’s just that when they do, the answers are so groundbreaking that they spawn new disciplines that get new names—and the people still dealing with the questions that have yet to be answered are still called philosophers.

But to answer them, philosophers often turn to thought experiments—made up scenarios that reveal our beliefs and intuitions that can also be used to make arguments. I can reveal your intuitions about, for example, whether overall happiness is the only good by imagining a situation where an entire society is made blissful by continually torturing one small child. If you don’t think such a thing is morally justified, the thought experiment should convince you that “the most happiness for the most people” is not the only metric by which to gage the morality of actions.

And that’s where science fiction comes in, and why it’s so useful to philosophers. Indeed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” describes just such a society and is used by philosophers to show that our moral intuitions often don’t align with the moral theory of utilitarianism. Because science fiction can be set in a future time, distant planet, or alternate world, and can involve advanced technologies and alien beings, science fiction is an ideal place for philosophers to go to find the thought experiments they need.

Sometimes philosophers are inspired by science fiction to make up their own. Modern philosopher Robert Nozick imagined a sci fi like virtual reality generator he called an “experience machine” to argue against a philosophical view called hedonism. (Since most people wouldn’t trade a virtual world of happiness and satisfaction for real life, happiness and satisfaction must not be the only thing that is valuable.) Derick Parfit used thought experiments with Star Trek like transporters to make an argument about what philosophers call “personal identity.” (Is a “reassembled Spock” still Spock? Are your you-now and your eight-year-old self the same object? )

Sometimes philosophers inspire science fiction stories. Plato’s Cave Allegory which he used (among other things) to argue against willing ignorance later inspired The Matrix. Rene Descartes thought experiment about not being able to tell dreams from reality inspired Inception. (The list goes on and on.)

And sometimes, philosophers simply use existing science fiction to explain philosophy. Indeed, there are two “Philosophy and Popular Culture” books series—one by Wiley-Blackwell and the other by Open Court, but both started by my colleague William Irwin—that do exactly that with popular culture in general. Not surprisingly, some of the best books in both series are on science fiction. They use it as a thought experiment to explain and make philosophical arguments. And this has been going on for almost 20 years.

Science Fiction Before Science Fiction

But something that often goes unappreciated is something that’s been happening for longer—about 2000 years longer. Science fiction authors have been doing philosophy. Since before science or science fiction was even labeled or identified as a field or genre, authors have been writing stories that today we would call science fiction to make philosophical points and arguments.

Don’t believe me?

In the 2^nd century, Syrian philosopher Lucian of Samosata wrote a story about a ship that sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules and was whisked away by a whirlwind to the moon called “A True History.” The crew finds it inhabited by cloud centaurs, giant birds, and an all-male society embroiled in a war with the inhabitants of the sun over the colonization of The Morning Star. The work was intended as a criticism of the sophists and the religious myths of the time, and even as a satire of some philosophers. The name itself mirrors Socrates’ profession of ignorance. In the Apology, Socrates argues that no one really has knowledge; only those who (like him) admit their ignorance are truly wise. In the same way, most histories of Lucian’s time were complete myth. Only those that openly admitted to being false (which Lucian does in his introduction) were really “true.”

In the 1200’s, Islamic philosopher Ibn al-Nafis told a story about a spontaneously created man (named Kamil whose creation envisioned something like cloning) called “The Theologus Autodidactus.” Kamil proceeds from the island out into the world and, through empirical observation alone, reaches all the same conclusions as the Islamic scholars. The point was to suggest that what Islam revealed or professed could be discovered by reason.

In 1515, the philosopher Thomas More coined a term by writing a story about an ideal society on the fictional island of Utopia (which, interestingly, is Greek for both “The Good Place” and “No Place”). In Utopia, Hythloday (which is Greek for “speaker of nonsense”) recounts his visit to the crescent-shaped Island of Utopia, which is protected from outside invasion because its inner bay contains hidden ship sinking rocks that only the Utopians know how to avoid. It’s a seemingly perfect society—very intellectual, totally communistic (all property is held in common and everyone works)—and completely superior to the European society in which More found himself. And, of course, that’s the point; it’s a philosophical argument for improvements which could be made to European society.

About a century later, Francis Bacon made a similar argument in a similar way with The New Atlantis—a story about a utopian society, on the Island of Bensalem, with devices like submarines and microscopes, that is ruled by science. Indeed, the story could be seen as an argument for Bacon’s method of doing science—and for the idea that science and religion are compatible (since Bacon takes time to make clear that religion also plays a role in this scientific community).

And in 1705, Daniel Defoe used his work The Consolidator to poke fun at the politics and religion of his day. In it, the protagonist visits the moon in a feathered-covered Chinese rocket ship called “The Consolidator.” With special magnifying glasses that enable them to observe the Earth, the Lunarians reveal the iniquities and absurdities of the humans’ lives and governments. It’s kind of a story version of Carl Sagan’s we all just live on a “pale blue dot” observation, to try to get people to see the absurdity of our disagreements and war.

All of this is before Frankenstein, which is usually considered the first work of science fiction, which itself is a philosophical argument about the dangers of “playing God,” “science gone too far,” and makes a host of other philosophical points that others have pontificated about in length.[i] Writers have been using science fiction to make philosophical arguments before “science fiction” was even a thing.

But, of course, it didn’t stop with Frankenstein. Since then, the efforts have just intensified. At first it was relegated to the written word, and other philosophers besides me have written on the plethora of science fiction short stories and novels that explore philosophical themes.[ii] But it eventually moved on to film and television. As Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine once put it on the SyFy Origin Stories podcast,

“the science fiction authors … of today … [are] the people who are really wrestling with the great what-if questions [and] grappling … not just with the political possibilities, but [questions like] ‘What does it mean to be human?’ [and] ‘Where do we fit in the cosmos?’ I think they are doing all the heavy lifting of the philosophical questions even as they’re doing chase scenes …”

That might be a bit overstated. Philosophers are doing philosophy too. But the point is well taken.

Science Fiction as Philosophy

With this in mind, imagine the moment The Teaching Company approaching me with the idea of doing one of their “Great Courses” on the intersection of philosophy and (what we might call) “moving picture science fiction” (film and television, as opposed to printed media science fiction). I was compelled to insist that we call it “Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy” (rather than, say, “the Philosophy of Science Fiction” or “Philosophy and Science Fiction”) because, although it’s all well and good to use science fiction to explore and explain philosophical topics, I wanted to identify and evaluate the philosophical arguments that the authors of moving picture science fiction are making.

As a public philosopher well known for my life-long obsession with science fiction, this was kind of the part I was born to play—or, I guess, the course I was destined to teach. Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, The Matrix—the hours and hours I had spent watching science fiction in my youth was finally about to pay off! But I didn’t want to just concentrate on my favorites or popular titles; the course had to have variety. It had to have both the old and the new, the fun and the depressing, hard science fiction and soft, and both popular and obscure titles. And of course, everything had to be making a philosophical argument.

The popular stuff was easy. Star Wars is about the difference between good and evil. Star Trek’s prime directive is an argument against colonialism. I used Doctor Who to talk about the possibility of time travel, and The Doctor’s pacifism to talk about violence and just war. The Matrix’s thesis? Ignorance isn’t bliss. The Matrix Sequels? Free will exists.

The obscure stuff was fun. For example, I used a British Sci-fi show from the late 70/early 80’s called Blake’s 7 to talk about justified political rebellion. Most who see it think it’s just “British Star Trek” (because it has transporters called “teleports”), but I suggest that it’s actually a precursor to Firefly. Indeed, although Joss Whedon denies it, it looks like that’s where he got the idea for Firefly. They both are stories about politically rebellious crews of 7 roaming the galaxy in ships with “glowing bug butts” for engines. (Seriously, google it.)[iii] I asked which crew’s approach to political rebellion was better.

The hardest science fiction (in terms of scientific accuracy) was probably Carl Sagan’s Contact or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Contact is undeniably a film that argues for the compatibility of science and religious belief, something that Sagan argued for many times publicly. I examine the argument the film presents. Kubrick’s 2001 was considered by many to be “the first Nietzschean” film. (Indeed, that famous opening music is named “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” after Nietzsche’s book of the same name.) I close the course by arguing that Kubrick got Nietzsche wrong.

The softest science fiction I covered is something that others might argue isn’t science fiction at all: Margret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Because I utilized Damon Knight’s definition: “Science fiction is what we point to when we say it,” I was able to justify having it in the course. Soft sci fi often involves speculative dystopian societies (think 1984 and Brave New World); since the world of The Handmaid’s Tale certainly qualifies as dystopian (unless, according to Michele Wolf, you are Mike Pence), some people certainly call it sci fi. But I wanted to include it because it seems obvious to me to be an argument for feminism, and yet Attwood herself has said explicitly that it’s not. I tried to figure out whether she is right. (Keep in mind, in the first lecture, I use Inception to argue that authorial intent can’t determine the meaning of a work of art.)

The most depressing lecture was on Snowpiercer; the movie itself is really good, but I took it to be an argument for a position on climate change called “lukewarmism” which suggests that global warming isn’t going to have the catastrophic effect that many suppose. The philosophical issue is how non-experts should draw conclusions on such issues; unfortunately, given the evidence, it seems that we should conclude that the effects of global warming are likely going to be worse than we have supposed, not better. Indeed, our prospects look even bleaker since I recorded the lecture just a year ago.

The most fun (in my opinion) was Starship Troopers, which on its face is a shallow, poorly acted shoot-’em-up about sexy teenagers killin’ space bugs and getting it on. But it turns out that it was screenwriter Edward Neumeier and director Paul Verhoeven’s expressly stated intention for Starship Troopers to satirize nationalism and fascism—something they thought that America was in danger of embracing. (And that was back in the 90s! One wonders what kind of film they would make today.) The fact that American audiences largely didn’t catch the satire indicates that Ed and Paul were probably on to something; those being satirized often don’t recognize that they are being satirized.

Speaking of fascists…The oldest film I talked about was Metropolis, a silent film from the 20s, which was written by someone who eventually became a Nazi: the director Friz Lang’s later ex-wife Thea von Harbou. Ironically, Metropolis was praised by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, but then edited by American studio director Alfred Hugenberg for American audiences to cut out its “inappropriate” communist subtext. (Keep in mind, the communist were America’s allies against the Nazi’s in WWII.) In reality, Metropolis is just an argument in favor of labor unions. “THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD [the owner] AND HANDS [the workers] MUST BE THE HEART [the union president].”

The newest sci fi I talked about was Seth MacFarlane’s new show on Fox: The Orville. As a kind of mashup of M*A*S*H and Star Trek, nearly every episode makes a philosophical point. Indeed, although I only mentioned one episode that makes a point about the dangers of social media (“Majority Rule”), I could have used the entire series to talk about the most effective way that science fiction makes philosophical arguments: something I call “cloaking bias to create cognitive dissonance” through what Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement.” By presenting us with a world unlike our own, science fiction forces us to leave our biases behind as we draw conclusions about it. Then, when we realize that the sci fi world is like our own after all, we’ll often find the conclusion we drew regarding it to be the opposite of one we have drawn about the real world. This cognitive dissonance forces us to recognize our bias and the fact that we should probably abandon it.

In the Orville episode “About a Girl,” for example, we conclude that Bortus—a member of an all-male race called The Moclans—is wrong when he wants to force his newborn daughter to undergo a sex change operation. But then we realize that what Bortis is doing is not unlike what many parents do with their gay children and Molcan biases against females are not unlike the biases that exist against transgendered people in the real world. Indeed, in the episode, cognitive dissonance through cognitive estrangement is what changes Bortus’ mind. He watches the claymation “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and realizes that what some consider a hinderance could actually turn out to be an asset. “Christmas would have been ruined,” Bortus observes, “if Rudolph had been euthanized at birth, as his father wished.” Like Bortus, when we are presented with a paradox—a contradiction in how we react to science fiction and the real world—we have the opportunity to realize our error and change our ways.

Perhaps Lucasfilm’s Chief Creative Officer John Knoll explained it better on the SyFy Origins podcast:

“One of the big misconceptions about science fiction is that it’s … escapist entertainment for kids that [doesn’t] tackle any serious themes. [But] the best science fiction gives you an opportunity to explore philosophical and moral themes. There are often societal problems that are very emotionally loaded … [but] if you … recast them in a science fiction setting, [and are thus] looking at a more novel situation, then you can leave some of those preconceived notions behind and … reevaluat[e] it anew. [This] may cause you to rethink your position on the terrestrial version of that problem.”

Well said John, well said.

Conclusion

So, at least to me, that is what Sci Phi is about. It’s about not only how science fiction can be used to explain or illuminate philosophical arguments, but about how the authors of science fiction stories can use them to make philosophical arguments. They, of course, may not always be right. After all, the Starship Troopers book by Robert Heinlein on which the movie was based was overtly pro-fascist. But as authors of both fiction and non-fiction write for the Sci Phi Journal, I hope they keep in mind what Sci Phi can be.

[i] See Raymond Boisvert’s piece “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein & Moral Philosophy” in Philosophy Now (2018). https://philosophynow.org/issues/128/Mary_Shelley_Frankenstein_and_Moral_Philosophy

[ii] See Nick DiChario piece “Not So Strange Bedfellows: Philosophical Sci Fi Roundup” in Philosophy Now (2011). https://philosophynow.org/issues/85/Not_So_Strange_Bedfellows_Philosophical_Sci_Fi_Roundup

[iii] Or you can find pictures of the two ships side by side in this comparison of the two shows by “burrunjorsramblesandbabbles” at https://burrunjor.com/2014/09/28/blakes-7-vs-firefly/

~

Bio

David Kyle Johnson is a professor of philosophy at King’s College (PA) who specializes in logic, scientific reasoning, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. He also produces lecture series for The Great Courses, and his courses include Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy (2018), The Big Questions of Philosophy (2016) and Exploring Metaphysics (2014). He is the editor of Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream (2011), and the author of The Myths that Stole Christmas along with two blogs for Psychology Today (Plato on Pop and A Logical Take). Currently, he is editing Black Mirror and Philosophy.

Fiction

Remnants

He had been drifting on the outskirts of oblivion for a long time. Left with only his own thoughts and his relentless search for a planet he could call home. Infinite desolateness, and after all these years in space, experience had brought an entire new meaning to the word. An adventurer by nature and an outcast by status, he had been rejected by his own kind and now searched for anything different than the piercing void. His mission was to return to the origin-world, the planet from which his people came. His home was an industrialized moon, but some told stories of life beginning on another planet. An oasis of vibrant life could be found on the far side of the galaxy. It was the birthplace of his people. However, wars raged between his people and another species that inhabited that planet. His people lost and were doomed to roam the galaxy until they found a new home. And apparently, they roamed for a long time because his journey back to the coordinates of the origin-world had already lasted 300,000 years.
He had personified his thoughts long ago in order to cope with the loneliness. The current conversational topic was one he’d had multiple times with himself over the years. “One can never truly understand what it is like to exist this way,” he thought. His existence consisted of pacing back and forth in his tiny capsule, sleeping and thinking. He had nothing to entertain himself with, not even a medium through which he could record his thoughts and conversations. He kept his mind active by actively describing things he remembered from back home. For example, he often thought about coffee. Although he did not have to eat or drink, coffee was a common pleasure to the people of his home-world. He attempted to picture it… and described it so tenderly that one would think he was speaking it into existence. “Coffee, the rich aroma, earthy and perfumed, a cyclical stream of steam rises from its blackened surface. Lifted to my lips, the placidly shifting liquid weighs down on my hand in its plastic cup. With its impending warmth and the promise of a jolted awakening, the sensations overwhelm. The anticipated sensations, the smell, the color, the flavor…all to be fully experienced, and all to bring momentary relief.” He sat down impressed with himself, for his own mind was his only refuge. Everything had been taken from him, even his ability to end his own life. He had tried many times, but could never produce the strength required to smash his own head into the interior walls of the capsule. But in this moment, he knew what they couldn’t take from him was his own mind and attitude. “To exist is to exist and to not exist is to not exist.” He could always find a reason to choose existence over non-existence. And that was something they could never take away.
He had been rambling on with himself in conversation for about 20 minutes before he looked out the small window of the capsule. In the distance, a small orb was slowly taking form. His heart began to viciously race, his hands began to tenaciously tremble, he couldn’t make a sound. For 300,000 years he had waited, hoping and praying that it was not all for nothing. And now, when he needed it most, purpose once again slowly crept through the cracks of the darkened capsule and infiltrated the very soul of his being. He knew he was still years from the small orb that he couldn’t look away from, but he wept with overwhelming joy at the hope of sweet escape. Now awakened from his stupor of existential nothingness, he reflected yet again on his life back home. A utopian society, his people were bred with a single occupational purpose. Their personality, interests, dislikes, and annoyances all balanced out to make a person perfectly suited for the occupation they had been provided at conception. He was a medic. His job was fairly simple, to repair people’s internal damages and continuously upgrade them. His kind were estimated to live for 800,000 years. The escapade of technical education, training and programming that he had endured for his trade seemed pointless now. He always grinned when looking back at his life. He believed himself to be a true visionary and rebel with a cause. He had won the hearts of millions, who had helped push him to the top against a corrupt regime of amoral, controlling sociopaths. But was he really the first to climb out of the mind-numbing stupor that stemmed from their suppression of innovation and free-thinking? And if so, why? Nonetheless, in the end, he was captured and charged for a multitude of things. His punishment was to drift alone in a tiny capsule unto coordinates that hopefully led to an oasis. The place of his and his people’s ancestors. Its name was Earth.
He watched in awe as rays from the sun poured over the edges of Earth’s spherical body. It had taken 10 years but now he watched as beams of orange, yellow and red illuminated Earth’s already rustic glow and he once again wept. It was unusual for his people to express emotion, something he had always actively questioned. Although he was a medic by occupation, he had always taken an interest in the written word. He did not like how every text he had read had been monotonous and technical by nature. His rise to fame and power had started by breaking with this ideology. He wrote about the things that inspired him, whether they were the morning stars or the planet his moon revolved around. Besides that, he was a skeptic in its truest form, constantly writing about challenging the status quo. He had always felt something wasn’t quite right with people. There was this constant push towards perfection, efficiency and routine, as if they aspired to nothing more than the mind-numbing rituals of daily life. The closer you stayed to your predestined path, the happier you would be. But he was a dreamer. “Look at what good that brought me,” he thought, for he knew his free-spirited nature is what eventually doomed him. But nothing could contain his excitement as he slowly but assuredly approached Earth. He had dreamed about it perhaps a thousand times. He dreamed of a planet filled with color and vibrancy, a planet where elements of its natural terrain were still present. Rolling hills and magnificent valleys, beautiful extensions of the planet that stretched towards the sky. But mostly he dreamed of the life-forms he would encounter. He was surprised by his own nervousness, another thing that always made him stand out from his peers. He hadn’t been in social contact with anyone for all these years; how would he react upon arrival? How would they react? And then he remembered something. A tablet had been provided to him for his journey, a tablet that allowed him to make a call back to his home once it was in range of the coordinates provided. The purpose of the call was to inform the people back home that the planet did indeed exist. He rose from his bed, the only seat in the capsule, and walked to the front. He slowly opened the drawer where the tablet had rested for the entirety of his journey. His nervousness reached new levels as he shakily pulled out the ancient contraption. He turned it on. The small screen unexcitedly pulled up a message that read: “Programmed coordinates now in range, searching for signal.” And once again, he had to wait. Who knows how long it would be before the signal reached home? He pondered whether or not he should attempt to calculate if the signal was even strong enough in the first place, but after a few minutes, he decided to leave it be. He would rather live in blissful ignorance and have hope than know for sure. Instead, he decided to focus on what he hoped would be his new home. He was getting closer and closer. And in eager anticipation, he continued to wait.
#
It was not what he had imagined. Perhaps the vibrant collage of natural beauty lay buried under the dust and ash. A barren wasteland, Earth’s dried up surface could have represented the pattern of his life. He had wandered Earth for 250 years. It wasn’t Earth’s physical qualities that had him down, so much as it was its inability to sustain biological life. And he saw no evidence of other non-biological species. So once again, he was left alone to wander aimlessly. “At least I get to move around,” he reminded himself for he had not forgotten his voyage through space. It was then that he noticed something shining in the distance. He ran to it, for it pointed just over a cliff up on the horizon. He ran for two days, never stopping, frantically hurling himself forward towards the silver beam in the distance. He approached the edge of the cliff and awed at the wonder the silver beam had led him to. That beam happened to be the tip of an enormous tower. Tilted slightly and under the enormous tower was what appeared to be the shattered remnants of a once great society. Buildings similar to the ones from his home lay in ruins, under the dirt and dust. None compared to the magnificent tower that drew him there. He decided to rest his body and stay for a few days on top of the cliff. As he rested he thought about how he once again had found some semblance of purpose. “Perhaps this is what it is to be?” he thought. “I exist because I exist. And I find purpose so I can justify my own existence.” What a peculiar thought. He once again thought about the irony of it all. His people had cast him away, doomed him to search for the origin world that may or may not still exist. Now he was here and once more there was only nothingness. But now he headed towards the tower and the ruined civilization which it hovered over. As he approached, he stared up and once again practiced describing what he was experiencing. “Four monstrous legs that rise up to a centered tip. Its overpowering arch provides comfort for I once again feel small.”
He examined the area for a few days. While walking through the ruined city, he noticed himself thinking about the people who once lived here. He thought about what the experience of seeing them, hearing them, and feeling them would have been like. For they were a biological people. Fleshy to the touch and more susceptible to harmful external elements. He thought about the war that took place between his kind and the other people of Earth. The purpose of his people was to enhance efficiency. The people of Earth were like gods, but they became afraid of their creations and looked to extinguish them. It is at this point that his people fought back. War raged and eventually those who remained retreated to the nearest galaxy. He wondered what the people of Earth would have done or said to him upon his arrival if they still existed. Perhaps they would be horrified? Perhaps their views had evolved? Or perhaps they created another life-form to walk the Earth with them. The possibilities were endless. He had now returned to the tower from which he first found the ruined city. He lied down underneath it. “I am going to end it now,” he stated. He had wandered the remnants of Earth long enough. Existence and non-existence had become one and the same to him. He would return to his capsule and send his only message into oblivion. Perhaps it would reach his home world, perhaps not. He would be long gone before then anyway.
He now thought about nothing and felt relieved. It would all be over soon and then he could rest. “Nobody is meant to exist this way. I have been alone for so long. My life means nothing and therefore my end will mean nothing.” He continued walking in the direction of the capsule. The barren wasteland showed him a perfect representation of himself.
As he meandered back to the capsule, he noticed a large glass-looking object peaking out of the ground in the near distance. He walked towards it and realized it was a glass pyramid, partially buried in the dirt. “This is truly beautiful,” he thought. And at that moment he decided to dig. He dug and dug and then dug some more, and months later he had unveiled the entire glass pyramid. While he was digging he had uncovered two other smaller similar pyramids on each side of the larger one. He sat and looked at what he had uncovered and once again realized his life had been saved by purpose. “Well,” he thought. “I might as well keep digging and see what I find.” Eventually he found a small window, although it wasn’t made from any material he had seen before. Fortified and barricaded, it must have protected precious contents. For three years he dug and once again had found purpose, as he strived to find an entrance.
When he found the entrance he had worked so hard to uncover, he was suddenly overcome with despair. “Probably another disappointment,” he thought. He opened the door and the sun’s beams lit up the room like a Christmas tree. As he entered he saw a perfectly preserved room filled with the most unique and enthralling objects. He slowly stepped forward. He had never seen such exquisite makings.
The objects that filled the room seemed useless at first. Most of them were made from a sheet-like material and they hung on the walls of the giant room. Enamored by them, his attention slowly shifted to the back corner. There rested an object that was clearly superior to the rest, for it had its own pedestal and viewing area. He walked towards the corner and for the first time saw what the people of Earth looked like. It was a picture. A picture of a female human. He looked deep into her emotional eyes and was overcome with joy. For he related to the person in that picture. He empathized with the tired, sad eyes and the half-smile. They spoke to the pain he had endured his entire existence. He did not understand much about the experience he was having, but he knew he was on the brink of something that could provide the meaning he needed all that time. “This is what it is to be human,” he thought as he looked around the dark room at all the wonder. “This is what I live for.” He noticed a title above the magnificent picture of the woman. Mona Lisa.
#
He spent the majority of his days going through all the artwork he had stumbled upon. The art typically held themes of intimacy, procreation, death, love, and other aspects of human life. As he sorted out and rummaged through the artifacts, he pondered about his creators and if they had intended his kind to be the emotionless perfection-hunters they always seemed to be. He was certainly the anomaly of his kind, for he felt closer to the people portrayed in the paintings than his peers. “But was I the intended goal or simply the accident?” He would never know. His outlook was shifting from despairing to hopeful. Like his creators, the humans, he wanted to create something beautiful. Even if no other life-form ever laid eyes on his creation, he knew he would have accomplished something. He picked up Mona Lisa and held her in his arms, just like the couples from the paintings. “You have inspired me,” he thought. “Therefore, I am going to be inspired by you.” He now had a plan. He walked outside of the building and began to search for rubble he could use for carving. After a few days, he had the tools he would need. And once again, he started digging. This time however, he was digging to produce something, instead of finding it. He focused on his task at hand, instead of losing himself in his own thoughts. He had a goal in mind and he would not stop until he had accomplished what he set his mind to.
His creation was complete after another 200,000 years or so. He had walked perhaps every nook, cranny and crevice of Earth’s surface, finding rubble to make his tools and continuing the work that he had set out to do. He had made art his life’s purpose. He never wavered. He never got stuck in the trap of his own thoughts. He simply carved, and carried Mona Lisa everywhere with him, talking to her and holding her like she was his long-lost friend. When he had finished his work, he walked back up the cliff to where he had seen the large tower upon his arrival. He held Mona Lisa to the air, looked at her and then looked down at his creation. Before him, rested a perfect replication of the picture he held. The picture was about 3 acres large. It surrounded and infiltrated the remains of the city. Above the picture, a giant title that read “Beauty amongst Ashes, Purpose amongst Nothingness.” In all his life, this creation was by far his greatest accomplishment. It spoke to him so deeply and he cried. He had not cried since first seeing that distant orb that would become his home. “I have lived a life as meaningful as any other, for I was destined to be alone, just like we all really are.” He then returned to the capsule.
After months of traveling he finally made it back to the nightmare that was once his reality. Coming back to the capsule filled him with dread for he was reminded of the long treacherous journey it had carried him through. He walked to the front of the capsule and once again pulled out the ancient tablet. He turned it out and decided to send his only message into the abyss of space. “My name is Medic-3248, but my pseudo-name is Vaga. Due to my rebellious and disruptive tendencies, I was forced to drift through space for 300,000 years. I headed into the direction of the origin-world, Earth. My job was to see what had become of our original home and report back to you. Well, humans survived the war against us, but they couldn’t survive the Sun’s powerful rays. After wandering the planet, I have discovered that Earth moved too close to the Sun, drying up the oceans and killing off all biological life. It will not be long before the entire planet is burnt to a crisp. That being said, I feel I now understand the human condition on a more intimate level than any of our kind ever has. They looked to extinguish us, because they were afraid of our perfection. We may have strived to build a utopia, but we failed. We failed because there is no beauty without suffering. To existentially suffer, is to be human. Of which I have suffered greatly. My purpose? To find a new reason to awaken with each revolution of the Sun. There is nothing left of Earth, for all things eventually end. Just like I too, will soon end.” He pressed send. Who knew if his message would reach home? If it did, he would probably be long gone anyway. So once again he sat and waited. Waited, to be inspired.

Fiction

Shell Game

“I’m already locked inside a trillion cells. What difference does one more make?”
He shouted this from his cage, the words slipping past receding guards to find more receptive ears in similar cages lining the corridor. It didn’t take long for his zen-like question to become a subtle but standing echo throughout the facility.
Some treated it like a mantra, its repetition a source for stoic inspiration. Most thought it was a pretty good joke. Eventually, the echo found someone who understood and could answer the prayers of prisoner AShannon46812.
#
When you need human guinea pigs, the imprisoned and poor will do just fine, thank you.
Still, Dr Andrews felt his fully secular prayers had been answered in the form of this mystic-cum-murderer whose goals aligned so well with his own. All the doctor had to do was convince a staunch Luddite that science and technology had more to offer than his lifelong commitment to spiritualism.
“AShannon46812,” the guard said, as he wheeled the prisoner into the room. His tone was flat, bored, like he’d delivered a package and only needed a signature to be on his way. Of course, given all the restraints, one might think he had just delivered a package. The inmate could hardly breathe, much less escape.
Andrews ordered the gag removed and watched Shannon’s eyes as the guard complied, trying to establish contact, some kind of empathic bond. But a continued, unfocused stare told Andrews his small gesture of kindness had meant nothing to the prisoner. And why should it? You can uncork a bottle of wine to let it breathe. That didn’t make it more than an object to be used and discarded.
“Can I call you Aiden?”
“My hypothesis is you will.”
“I’m Malcolm Andrews. You understand I’m not the medical doctor for this facility? I’m a–”
“Scientist,” Shannon said through gritted teeth.
Andrews had been prepared for a negative attitude, but had never heard the word scientist pronounced with such open hostility before. His knee-jerk reaction was that Shannon must be an idiot. Had to be. And yet, everything in his files said otherwise. Whatever Andrews might make of Shannon’s irrational rantings and disregard for modernity, the prisoner’s methods had been sophisticated, his manipulation of people and events undeniably intelligent. It could be Shannon was just trying to throw him off by getting him upset, emotional.
“What about investigator? That would fit just the same. And isn’t that what you did, Aiden, investigate?”
The prisoner didn’t respond, but his eyes shifted in ways that suggested he was thinking about something.
Remembering.
“You may not believe this, Aiden, but we’re both seeking something very similar. Identical, perhaps.”
“Really? I can’t imagine what that could be.”
“An escape. Not from this facility, or from one’s past. I mean an escape of the human mind from this…” Andrews waved his hand around to indicate his body, then Shannon’s, and then the objects around them. “The physical world.”
Shannon smiled. “Malcolm is it? The physical world is the only thing you scientists believe in. What else can there be but this?” He lifted his hands as far as the shackles would allow, then shook them in mocking imitation of Andrews.
“Well, you have me there, don’t you? The only evidence I can rely on are the effects I can see in the material world. But I’m not fooling around with disembodied voices, or traces of ectoplasmic residue. What I’m talking about is a definite, measurable breaking of the supposed inseparable bond between minds and the physical bodies they happened to emerge from. If that can be done. If you, the essence of who you are, can be shifted outside of the brain–functioning first here, and then somewhere else–that would be a critical step in proving that the mind is something more than the cells which make it up.”
“It could just be a clever imitation, a mere duplication of reactions to stimulus without retaining the real person.”
“Now who sounds like a scientist?”
Shannon snorted. “I’ve trained in stage magic. I understand how an audience can be fooled into seeing what it wants to believe.”
“Sure, but if I wanted to fool an audience I’d be making computer simulations. Chinese boxes. I wouldn’t need flesh and blood subjects.”
“If I understand where you’re going with this, Malcolm, the end product will be a computer, maybe a robot, and nothing remotely flesh and blood.”
“Computers and robots follow sets of programs, designed in advance by other minds. My end product, while noncellular, is not a computer system or robot. It’s a receptive unit for a mind. Your mind, maybe. The process involves direct transfer of a mind, from one point to another, through use of the unit by that mind, without set coding schemes or programs.”
“What does this physical receptive unit receive, if the mind is not physical? And how does it receive it?”
Dr Andrews frowned. “Come now, Aiden, you’ve played this game the same as I have. The mind, the soul, whatever you want to call it, is not a physical thing. It’s an accumulation of personal experience, as well as the ability to sustain and act on those experiences. The mind is a set of functions that is manifested by, but separate from, whatever physical material underlies those functions. The unit I’ve created receives such experiences, and allows a mind to continue building and acting on them. The unit receives and maintains those functions.”
“Then we aren’t seeking the same thing at all. Don’t you see? According to you, these functions are in the brain. The physical brain is their source. But what if the functions are carried out somewhere else? The way I think the mind exists. What if the brain is simply a conduit through which an immaterial mind animates flesh? How do you transfer the actual mind, the actual, unlimited functions from there over to your little box?” Shannon gripped his shackles. “To here? And what kind of escape would that be?”
“Well that’s where I have you, Aiden. Let’s say the mind is made up of super-duper magical rainbows in wherever-land. And the brain is just a conduit, as you say, between unlimited, functional rainbows and your limited, dysfunctional body. Then what I’m telling you is that I’ve built another conduit through which your rainbows can shine on this world. A conduit that can free you of all earthly desires.” He grabbed Shannon’s restraints and shook them hard with each point. “Sexual lusts, gluttonous hungers, slothful slumbers. All of it. While proving the mind is not merely the body you inhabit, my so-called little box will break most of the chains which keep your precious rainbows fixated on this world.”
With that, Andrews cast the shackles back at Shannon. The dice were thrown. He knew of the bloody scourging, the starvation level fasting, the psychotic-episode-inducing sleep deprivations that Shannon had required his followers to suffer in order to escape the demands of the body they hated so much. That many of his followers had escaped their fleshy confines–though not in the way he promised–was exactly why Shannon was at the facility. Would he see this as a chance to short-cut those extreme privations from which nobody had yet returned to prove his beliefs correct?
“How many?” Shannon asked.
“How many what?”
“How many people have tried this thing? I can’t be the first. I want to know how many people survived this transfer of conduits, or how many people you have killed and yet you stay free because you wear a lab coat, while I rot in prison for seeking the exact same thing as you. Your words.”
Andrews thought about the real answer to this question, as well as how to phrase it right. “In all honesty, you will be the first. You, of all people, should know how hard it is to get someone interested in moving the mind anywhere from where it is right now. Imagine how much harder it is for a guy in a lab coat, your words.”
“So what’s your proof it’s possible? No one gave you permission without something science-based to suggest you could succeed. At the very least you killed some rats or pigs or primates.”
“Oh. Well, OK, if you mean like that, then yes. I don’t know really. If it’s important I could find out how many animals were sacrificed.”
“Sacrificed.”
“Yes, but I’m not sure how relevant that is. The point is that the technology has reproduced mental function allowing for continuous activity in several animals. We have videos of course. It’s quite impressive. But from what I understand you believe the human mind is unique. We exist elsewhere and other animals don’t.”
“That’s the best you have? Reproduction?”
“Not just reproduction, continuity of function.”
“Of animals.”
“Well yes, but they were just proof of principle that dry technology could be used to do what we’d already achieved in humans using wet systems.”
“Wet systems?”
Andrews felt the hook sink into whatever metaphorical flesh made up Shannon’s interests, as his eyes shifted to lock on the scientist, and decided it was time for Shannon to meet The Siamese.
#
It was too bad most people at the conference weren’t listening to Dr Andrews. After all, his was the first official announcement that science, or rather a group of scientists, had managed to move a human mind from a living, organic brain to a largely inorganic, completely noncellular system.
As important as that achievement was, the data proving it was catastrophically upstaged by the presence of a prior scientific success, sitting behind and slightly to the left of Dr Andrews.
He’d introduced the man with a brief, “My assistant… I’m sure no introductions are necessary.” But many around the room quietly disagreed. While no one required an explanation of who he was, few had seen this assistant beyond videos or still images over a decade old, much less been introduced to him in person. Though of mixed Sudanese-Japanese descent, he was popularly known as The Siamese because of the second head jutting from his body on fleshed-over bio-mechanical supports emerging from his neck, trapezius, and collarbone.
Like Shannon, he’d been presented to the doors of the facility under heavy guard as prisoner PKit30277. Unlike Shannon, his crimes weren’t driven by occult interests, and his work with Dr Andrews had never been a meeting of the minds. He’d volunteered for the “wet systems” experiments for the same reason most others had. He’d wanted privileges in the facility that allowed for the semblance of an almost normal, albeit housebound, life.
Some subjects ended up having their second heads removed, others their first, and some regrettably both. Save Kit, none of them were the same man who had entered the project. But there’d been no tissue rejection or other complications with Kit. He hadn’t just survived the procedure, he’d thrived. And the results remained as startling, and distracting, as the first day he’d been revealed.
One reason Shannon wasn’t triggering the same reaction is that the results looked so commonplace. Expected. Imagery of humanoid robots had been around forever. And even if their existence as independent AI pseudo-persons still seemed a pipe dream, the level of mimicry machines were capable of while carrying out complex tasks was routine. Plus, the technology allowing humans to remotely operate mechanized avatar units, while receiving sensations from them, had long accustomed people to seeing mechanical units acting with apparent human intelligence and emotion.
The other reason was purely visceral. To evolved human senses, inorganic objects just don’t register as inherently important. It didn’t matter that Shannon’s brain was a nest of nanobots writhing in a complex medium, or that it duplicated the feedback/forward oscillation patterns of organic neuronal networks to render decisions–via critical states and quorum sensing–that defy reproduction using binary code on silicon chips. Whatever technical advance that might represent, to biological nervous systems keyed up to spot other life forms, Shannon was mere background environment. They might as well have unveiled a covered bowl sitting on a simple shelf. After all, that is exactly what he looked like when not in motion.
The Siamese, on the other hand, wasn’t commonplace or capable of registering as background. Despite coming from Kit’s own cells, the second head didn’t resemble its source material at all. It was tinged a bluish-pink, with the bulbous melon of a dolphin or narwhal, and a face containing strong hints of the feline–or maybe a pug dog–with very wide set eyes that were usually closed or squinted. Unlike Shannon, The Siamese set off primitive alarm bells just by being there. Kit was a grotesque at best, at worst an abomination.
This also helps explain why, despite being the main source of distraction during the conference, Kit wasn’t mobbed by admirers at the reception afterward. With drink in one hand and the other tucked in pants pocket, Kit didn’t seem put out by the long distance stares, or Dr Andrews routinely pointing in his direction while discussing him in the third person.
“Of course,” Andrews said. “It was the same for both of them. The mind is voracious… Well… Wait, let me be clear. The organisms making up the mind are voracious. They’ll take whatever they can get. That’s so obvious when you understand the ease with which we can implant circuits to carry signals within the brain, duplicating the simplest activity of neurons. The cells take it and use it to keep the mind going, say to extend activities to or receive sensations from avatar units. Brains are free in the true, practical sense, you know? Any means necessary.”
The group surrounding Andrews, mostly military, looked at the scientist coolly. Some took strong pulls on their drinks to avoid having to reply.
“So… anyway, you have to think of the second brain, whether organic or inorganic, as simply a prosthetic. The process of training to use the device remains the same. First the brain-prosthesis is set to take in impressions much like a newborn, until it can be reversed and the subject uses it like a reservoir or backup. With enough experience he can practice flipping between the two. None of that mind uploading, as if it were mere information exchange, claptrap. The subjects used an external device to augment their original brains, until they no longer needed the first.”
“What about the conscience?” said a man with bars on his shoulders. “The self? Doesn’t that always remain in the first brain?”
“Tsk, Captain. I see someone else slept through my presentation. Look, it’s all about continuity of conscious experience. If you lost the right hemisphere of your brain, you wouldn’t lose use of the left, or who you are, your self, would you? It’s the same principle. Without access to their original brain, they’d lose a portion of older memories that weren’t fully transferred to the prosthesis during memory exercises, but they’re synced up for most relevant information and all bodily functions. They feel–and as I discussed earlier we have tested this–a bit disoriented at first when only using the prosthetic. Lots of things from childhood feel like they’re on the tip of their tongue, but will never come. That seems a small price to pay for immortality. And given Kit’s childhood, I’d say good riddance.” Andrews waved at The Siamese, and the others took the opportunity to stare a little longer. The Siamese raised his drink to them.
“Except,” said another officer. “He didn’t choose to give up the head with all those memories did he?” Then he hiked a thumb at the black lacquer bowl sitting on a shelf by the wall. “Only Shannon over there took it all the way. Isn’t what’s left really a different person? Especially without all the memories and physical feelings?”
Andrews’s eyes narrowed in thought. “No Major, he’s definitely still the same person. The point is that for both of them… I mean don’t you see? This was the whole point of our experiments. They could tell us, using their original brain when it was active, what it was like. They told us that regardless of initial disorientation and partial memory loss, their experiences of the self remained seamless. And so Shannon chose to cut, not the wire to his original self, but the ball and chain.”
“Ball and chain?”
“Yes, the ball and chain holding back the best of himself. There you see it gentlemen…” Andrews swept his arm grandly at the spartan shelf, with the bowl of nanobots. “There is the essence of a man, unfettered by desires holding him back, preventing him from attaining his ideals. No distractions like hunger, exhaustion, pain–”
“Pleasure.”
“No, no, no. You can have physical pleasure if that’s what you want, when you want, but without having to feel pain of loss or unnecessary desire. It’s true Shannon cut off most physical sensations. But he still receives gratification from ideas and for him that is all he wants.”
“Fucking hell, what kind of life is that?”
“Free, Major Troski,” Shannon said in hi-fidelity sound, as the shelf unfolded into a streamlined avatar one might find at depth below the oceans. In fact, for all they could tell it was being commandeered by someone with a remote in the next room. Its limbs swung seamlessly to bring the body up to The Siamese, who it clamped onto like a lifeline in a storm. “A life free of your constantly-fucking hell.” Shannon pinched at The Siamese’s arm and then strode out of the room. It was hard to say if he left with intended grace, or whether the avatar’s frame prevented any other kind of exit.
The Siamese smiled to the group, “Now Major, don’t let our little tin man give you the wrong idea. Not everyone wants a life of the mind. If you like doing it then we can set you up to go nonstop, all you want, multiple appendages too. Heck, we can even fit you with male and female organs so you can go fuck yourse–”
“Hey, hey, heyyyyy!” The crowd jumped as Kit’s second head sprang to life, its eyes opening and voice croaking in a gruesome ventriloquist act. “You boys get a load o’ the rack just walked out of here? Hooo, boy.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of Shannon. “You know I had a girl with a rack like that once. I think she got it at a garage sale.”
#
You find the secret passage.
It took a while, but you finally mapped out the entire training area, revealing what had to be the technical service entrance. Well disguised, they wanted you to believe there was no direct way into the administration section of the facility. They’d even gone through the motions of having technicians, guards, and observers take the long way around to access the training area.
Theater.
Misinformation.
But they didn’t know to hide what they couldn’t sense.
They didn’t know to hide the squalls.
There’d only been two unexpected squalls in the labyrinth-like training area. But their timing in connection with surprisingly quick repairs, required while exercises were underway, made it likely another door or hatchway must exist.
The search took all of you.
So many bodies now.
Though you’d never piloted a remote avatar before, never been “hooked up”, you’d played video games when you were a child. You were familiar with focusing your attention so hard for so long that you became the onscreen character. Your physical body and the room around it receding until it was gone. Piloting multiple avatars was a little different, since you didn’t have to focus as hard to keep the illusion going, but it was almost the same. First they gave you two avatars, then three, and then the avatars came in sets.
One day it was as natural as breathing. The collection of bodies was as one, each avatar a separate piece of a whole. Only instead of doing just one thing, limited to a single function like a limb or organ, each unit could do everything an entire human body could.
You called them your tentacles.
The techs laughed at first, but soon they were running with it, referring to your primary frame with the nanobots as the Cephalo-Pod.
You understand how strange it must have seemed to them; comparing units that are stiff and mechanical, to something rubbery and organic. But that’s how it felt on the inside as your attention slipped and slithered around the avatars. And their movements were smooth and fluid compared to the jerking awkwardness of your old flesh and bone body, the units capable of carrying out the demands of your will in separate yet eerily coordinated ways.
By stretching out your tentacles during exercises, and comparing the metric feeds between them, you determined where hidden rooms and corridors might exist within the walls of the massive training area. By replaying memories of the two squalls, in flawless detail, potential entrances jumped out on your just completed mental map. By cross-referencing times between squalls and completed repairs, with memories of any temporary obstacles in the training room at the time, the actual door and likely path of the hidden corridor behind it was obvious.
Now, with all that work behind you and the door right in front of you, you walk away.
The passage is too long, with the possibility of turns and several doors, before it would reach the observation room. It could be manned with many guards, real or automated. Even if it wasn’t guarded around the clock, it could be reinforced by the time the door was forced open. The guns and explosive devices they gave you in the combat training sessions weren’t real. Not that powerful.
They weren’t that stupid.
You’d hoped that the service entrance would turn out to be close to the observation room. Just a quick rush and a push and you were there. Instead, it might as well be in another building.
You look at the faces behind the impenetrable glass of the observation room. All of them tired, seemingly unaware of your discovery. They must have been able to read your sudden elation, followed by crushing disappointment. Are they assuming it had to do with a failure in today’s test?
You suppose it was.
Just not their test.
Dejected, you gather your tentacles around your pod, as you head toward the edge of the room, wondering if you’d made a mistake in keeping an emotion like disappointment. Wasn’t registering failure enough? At the time, you’d thought they were useful tools. Without some kind of mental pain associated with failure, you thought growth might be impossible. No incentive. But wasn’t that just another slave conception?
Downright Pavlovian now that you think about it.
Had you kept a shackle after all?
Your disappointment is crystalline. Crushing. Like the point of a ten ton diamond pressing right through your mind and into your soul.
Forget failure, think about the squalls.
Think about alternatives.
Squalls were stronger than any psychedelic trip you’d ever had. The first time you’d tried to discuss what you were experiencing, the small events that seemed to occur almost everywhere, the scientists and techs assumed it was an issue with your sensors. But after those had passed inspection, with no chance for error, everyone thought you were making it up just to screw with the scientists.
Your descriptions didn’t make sense to them anyway. Didn’t seem consistent. How could they be when they didn’t involve one of the five natural senses? There weren’t colors, smells, sounds, textures, or tastes. By the way the events twisted and moved about, like small storms, you came to call them squalls. And it’s when the others became so dismissive of your claims, like a roomful of blind men dismissing all talk of “colors”, that you finally understood. Somehow, they’d accidentally given you a new sense.
You’d heard some species of animals have organs to detect electric fields, and you wondered if you had gained this ability. Saw the world as they did. After all, these events often occurred around transmitters. Even the hand held radios gave off clear emanations, allowing you to track the location of guards and technicians, with some practice.
But the strongest squall had been capable of pulling you outside the boundaries of your physical form better than any attempt at astral projection.
It was there, in the observation room, during a special tour given for some top officials, that it had happened.
And no one had noticed a thing.
Like the acid flashback you’d once had in a packed train, you looked around to see if anyone else was reacting to what you were experiencing, holding the panic and terror and elation and joy inside, as the shutters on reality fell down around you. On instinct, you knew you shouldn’t talk about it, unless someone else did.
The way this squall acted seemed intelligent, like it was communicating in this medium, and it managed to move your sense of location, being, out of the pod, out of the conduit they’d made for you. The shift only lasted for a few moments, and a short distance, but it was enough.
That was the experience that had made you realize these squalls couldn’t be just about electric fields, they could be about the spiritual. Maybe the organ they had unintentionally fitted you with was a third eye. The squalls had only started after your body was destroyed. Maybe that act had opened it. Broke the necessary chain that had been holding you back. But was it evil? Would it damn you? Though your mind remained in the world, by killing your body had you committed a blood sacrifice by mistake? Whatever the reason, the results were beyond expectations. It made you wish they’d given your pod lips so you could kiss Dr Andrews.
You vowed to get back into the room for more tests. You felt that with sufficient power, the squalls there could be key to completing your personal experiments.
Yet all your requests to revisit the observation room were denied, because they could see no reason for it. You got desperate and tried to discuss what had happened with the one person who might understand.
The freak. The abomination.
The closest thing you had to a friend in the facility.
But while The Siamese was sympathetic, thought the squalls were real enough, not just a joke, he’d said they were just flukes, side effects, hallucinations, glitches that you shouldn’t waste time and energy chasing. He gave you more shit about having cut off a perfectly good body, while his monster-head kept winking at you with a conspiratorial grin, nodding toward the regular head as if it were trying to let you know it wanted to bump off the first head too.
You couldn’t shiver, but you’d kept moral disgust. That was essential. The feeling of revulsion was intense, yet for some reason you didn’t tell The Siamese what his lesser half was doing. Perhaps if he’d agreed to help you?
So, with The Siamese out, you were on your own. Another elicit experiment to be pursued without the knowledge of, and against the wishes of, the others. Like when you figured out how long you could last without rest or sleep. The scientists wanted to know that too, of course, but you’d only let them know what you’d wanted them to know. You’d pretended to lose physical or mental control well before any real fatigue. Same for how many avatars you could control at one time. Or discovering how avatars could be recharged using alternative sources.
They had their theater, you had yours.
Misinformation.
And with their expectations set the way you wanted, you had cover to run your most important experiments. The ones you’d been running nearly all your life.
Andrews had once illustrated the complete transfer of your mind–from biological body to the inorganic–by lighting one cigarette off another, then tossing the first. Well if it could be done once, you reasoned, why not again? With multiple avatars under your control, why could you not shift from one conduit to another and stay there when the experiment ended?
During training it was easy to concentrate, focus, shift attention into one tentacle. It was just like shifting attention to a finger to the exclusion of the rest of your body. Easier. What if you did that and connection with the rest of the tentacles was broken? What if connection to the main avatar, your pod, was lost? Isn’t it possible you could remain in that tentacle, that avatar?
The scientists laughed when you asked that in passing, and explained how it was impossible. How your pod held the nanobots that produced your mind, and the tentacles just had shunts, devices to relay control and sensory signals back and forth to your mind. You couldn’t stay in your finger, if it got cut off from the rest of the body, no matter how much you concentrate your attention there. The finger only has nerves relaying signals to and from the brain, it doesn’t have a brain itself. But, you asked, if the mind is not produced by the nanobots, rather the mind has trained to use the nanobots, why couldn’t it train to use a shunt just the same? After all, the shunt had connections to control all aspects of the avatar body. That made it much different from a finger.
One of the scientists made a screwy motion with a finger by her head.
You were crazy.
She reminded you of another scientist, long long ago, who had come to your group with what she said was an “open mind”. She had not yet become a full scientist, a doctor, a PhD. She was still in school, and wanted to test alternative theories of reality. That’s what she said.
During her time in the group she’d been critical about the sciences. Told your group a joke. Told the real meanings of all those abbreviations scientists have behind their names: BS – Bullshit, MS – More Shit, PhD – piled higher and deeper. Everyone had laughed. She spent a lot of time with your group, asking so many questions.
Seemed highly interested, eager, sincere.
Misinformation.
After a year, she left without explanation and wrote a scathing article–what she called an exposé–about your group. About you. Said you were crazy. Said you were a liar.
It was well received.
For some reason no one in the science community saw the irony in this admitted liar proudly reporting how she’d used lies to “infiltrate” your group, in order to show others how much of a liar you were.
Or crazy.
She did give you that out.
One day you ran into her where she was working. Wasn’t sure if it was her at first, couldn’t believe it, so you moved in close. It was her all right. Still asking people questions, too. She didn’t recognize you when you spoke to her. Then she asked what she’d been asking everyone else.
“You want fries with that?”
Guess science hadn’t worked out for her after all.
“You want that medium or large?”
Guess the exposé had helped you more than her.
You leaned in close, setting down a large wad of cash.
“Piled higher and deeper,” you said.
The scientist who made the screwy motion may have been just as wrong about you as the other one had been. But she’d turned out to be right about the shunts.
She hadn’t been lying about that.
Late into combat training exercises, when you had it fixed so they thought you might start losing control, you’d begun your own experiments. Had your tentacles get sloppy. Make mistakes. It turned out that if your attention was fully in a tentacle when it was knocked offline, you snapped right back to the pod. And if you cut power to the pod while in a tentacle, usually having attacked it by “mistake”, you were knocked out completely. You ran these trials over and over again. You checked for possible variants, including sheer will power, meditation, and chants. The shunts didn’t seem capable of holding your mind, or vice versa.
That made using the squalls, the large squalls, your next best line of investigation. But with the observation room now out of the running, what could you do? The second largest squall you’d ever experienced had come from within a room in your section of the facility, right off a corridor you could reach. Just a rush and a push, as you had hoped would be the case here. But that squall hadn’t come close to what had gone down in the observation room.
So you give up. You give in.
You announce that you aren’t getting anywhere in this task. The tired faces in the observation room look at you with hope. You crush it, telling them to reset the room for deep water repair exercises. You hear the soldiers in the current combat exercise sigh in relief, while the people in the observation room groan. At this late hour, it would take a while for them to get the training area reset. And it would use up most of their already skeleton-thin personnel.
“Are you sure about this? Maybe you should just take a break. Get some rest.”
You spin your pod’s hand to indicate they should get things rolling. They groan again, louder, then order the soldiers in the training exercise to regroup and get supplies. To speed things up they’ll have the soldiers help the techs with the reset. Now the soldiers groan too.
You wait until the soldiers exit the training area.
You see the faces in the observation window staring at their computer screens, eyes glazed, drawing up specs for the changeover.
You say, “I’m only going to use three units in this exercise. I’m putting the rest back in storage.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
You march fifteen avatars to the door and exit when the locks open. The overworked personnel in the observation room fail to observe your pod is among the fifteen exiting units.
Outside, you see the usual guards have left their station, likely in order to assist the techs and soldiers with the training area reset.
You walk down to the storage facility, but instead of locking the units down, you swap in new battery packs and have three tentacles carry plenty of backups.
As you leave the storage facility, you hear a voice in the observation room say, “Hey.”
You cut their audio feed.
You round a corner and walk straight into a guard, returning from the toilet. He looks at you in surprise.
“I thought you guys were still in training.”
You surprise him again… tentacle #9 grabs his gun.
#
To: Joint Oversight Committee
From: Col. M.I. Johannson
Subject: Termination of Project Chorus
Clearance level: Top-Secured
On my authority, Project Chorus has been terminated due to circumstances detailed in the following document.
As previously reported, prisoner AShannon46812 had progressed to use of multiple avatars. His configuration made it possible to control over 10 units at a time, and for extended periods exceeding limits of top biological users. Common factors of physical and mental fatigue had been removed. This underlines limitations of earlier “wet” products, and our justification for terminating that program.
Last week, during routine exercises, AShannon46812 (commanding 15 units with primary avatar frame, aka “body”, positioned at center) broke protocol and left the training area. As soldiers and facility guards were encountered, subject gained numerous small arms and used them to take control of wing R’s command hub. Once in control, subject released prisoners from their cells, who proceeded to initiate a riot.
Dr Andrews voluntarily engaged in personal negotiations with, and was consequently taken hostage by, AShannon46812. The intentions of subject at the time were unknown.
This initial action lasted 35 minutes, at which time civilian command alerted my staff to conditions inside the facility. I determined that it fell within experimental parameters (20 casualties, no fatalities, no escapes) and took control of Project Chorus, initiating emergency sub-initiative, code name Plot-Twist.
Briefly, sub-initiative protocol allowed for AShannon46812 to progress at will, so as to develop psychological profile of subject and test limits of physical configuration within real-world combat conditions, safeguards removed.
Knowns:
While lacking limitations common to humans, and other organic life forms, AShannon46812 remains vulnerable to threats. In addition to direct physical damage, AShannon46812 requires a consistent source of electric energy (max. 18 hours without recharge), a broad but fixed temperature range (213-423K), and recycling of fluid medium for optimal use (every 72 hours). It is also assumed his converted central nervous system, the Modular Inorganic Neural Device (MIND), would be vulnerable to intense Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP).
Results:
Excepting a habit of facing all controlled avatars in the same direction, subject performed beyond expectations. Tactical threats were dealt with efficiently, regaining initiative in each direct encounter. AShannon46812 quickly assessed we were testing his environmental limitations and began building protections against them, establishing control of corridors to all necessary supplies, as well as taking a technical service hub that was protected against EMP. Once in control of the service hub, AShannon46812 brought down blast doors to prevent potential EMP disruption of his MIND, while also working to gain access to communications outside the facility. At this time, all avatar units, including his body, collapsed as one. Witnesses inside the hub, including Dr Andrews, stated that as soon as the blast doors closed, AShannon46812 and his avatars “fell like marionettes with their strings cut.” This ended the incident, with rioters in wing R quickly subdued.
After initiating Plot-Twist, unrestricted combat experiment lasted 147 hours, 12 minutes. Casualties were below predicted levels and considered balanced for vital information gained on performance of MINDs under combat conditions (total: 11d, 55w, no escapes).
Dr Andrews and civilian staff were informed that to prevent this kind of situation the military had placed a device within AShannon46812’s MIND, triggered to detonate if service hub blast doors were sealed without override code entered by senior military personnel. Cover story was accepted and no problems should arise from civilian staff. The remote avatar units and Shannon’s body unit were returned to Dr Andrews with appropriate damage inflicted to support cover story.
AShannon46812’s MIND remains safe inside wing Q’s clandestine Project Chorus lab, awaiting orders for extraction to separate facility. It is disconnected from remote avatar controls and has no other means of travel or communication. At no time was the subject’s MIND in danger and our ability to end Plot-Twist (if acceptable risks exceeded) by disabling connection between prisoner’s MIND and body was never compromised. The connection between AShannon46812’s MIND and body, via shunt located in body unit, was lost when subject sealed hub’s emergency blast doors against EMP. This blocked the normal EM signals relayed between MIND and body, via shunt.
AShannon46812 was unaware that his MIND was actually located in wing Q, until connection with shunt in body unit was lost and primary sensory equipment reattached to MIND for official debriefing. During debriefing, prisoner did not reveal intent of his actions; however, it may be related to his prior occult interests. This experience warrants future projects to assess feasibility of mapping MINDs for direct, nonverbal debriefing. This could allow 100% accurate data retrieval when subjects are physically unable or psychologically unwilling to share vital information through normal modes of communication.
Notes:
Prisoner PKit30277’s service was invaluable to success of Project Chorus and sub-initiative Plot-Twist. Eight months prior to multiple avatar exercises, PKit30277 made accurate maps of AShannon46812’s MIND, and used cover of subsequent service tests to remove (during imposed stasis) subject’s MIND from his primary avatar frame (“body”), exchanging MIND with a “shunt” that remotely linked MIND (which was then moved to wing Q) with primary body. Dr Andrews and facility staff did not discover the switch, allowing us direct observation and control of subject’s MIND. If the subject’s converted central nervous system had still been within its frame (MIND within body) during this incident, experiment would likely have run beyond parameters and presumably the prisoner’s MIND would have been destroyed during resolution.
Additionally, PKit30277 was critical in duplicating portions of AShannon46812’s MIND at wing Q lab, including reassembly into separate, complete MINDs with other configurations. This provides early proof of principle for generating “genuine” autonomous AI, via direct duplication of converted human MIND.
PKit30277 has proven an extremely loyal and useful asset. As such, promotion is recommended. Full clemency or release is not advised, but his request for greater freedom in use of remote avatars to public spaces in close proximity to the facility seems reasonable. Transfer to military installations with extensive compounds for recreation in natural landscapes is also highly recommended.
In closing, it is important to note that while AShannon46812’s mental functions were successfully transferred to an external Modular Inorganic Neural Device, and duplication possible, it is clear that his personal psychological issues and irrational beliefs were maintained with a high degree of fidelity. Removing these would be time consuming and costly. Introduction of desirable traits has not been tested and may not be reliable. As such, I advise scrapping AShannon46812’s MIND and all copies, being worthless for use beyond minor tests for future conversions. It is also recommended that future conversion subjects, especially those for military service, be screened for psychological stability and desirable interests that coincide with military protocol and goals.
On a personal note, it is ironic that while AShannon46812 was a zealot regarding his belief that the soul exists somewhere other than the physical body, he never questioned whether his MIND was located anywhere other than the avatar body where detectors were feeding him sensory inputs (via shunt). That illusion, it seems, was complete.
End Report.
#
The Siamese walked through his apartment picking up various mechanical parts. He still couldn’t figure out why this had happened.
The possibility of some physical error within the nanobot brain kept bugging him. But it seemed more likely it all came down to Shannon’s interest in making that last step out of his physical body.
The Siamese could never understand Shannon’s desires. Basically, it’s chasing after eternal life. But the universe itself isn’t permanent so why should anyone expect their lives ever could be? Oh… oh yeah… over there, somewhere else, somewhere outside this universe.
Right.
Sucker.
Or maybe it was purity.
But where’s the fun in that?
Ah, let’s face it. The guy’s ideas were batshit and the relative lack of sensations only amplified his beliefs. They had nothing to compete with, and as Andrews always said the mind is voracious. It will take whatever it can get and try to make some sense out of it. Shannon had said he’d been experiencing new kinds of sensations when his MIND got close to radio receivers. Maybe to someone starved of so many natural inputs, interference in the EM range used by his shunt would seem like messages from the other side… the voice of God? Maybe Shannon thought that by plugging himself into the facility’s communication equipment he could broadcast himself into the great beyond?
Kit moved to a huge aquarium in his living room and tapped the glass. A shape rose slowly from under the stones lining the bottom, causing the fish in the tank to scatter. It was clearly mechanical, but with all the murk churned up it was hard to say what it was supposed to look like. A large fish? A seal? By chance, a toy sea castle had caught on its domed head and sat like a crown. Now that’s something real, Kit thought.
He hadn’t needed a second brain to figure out the “wet systems” program wasn’t going anywhere. What good is a second biological head to anyone, especially with all the training required to set a brain as a functional second home? It was vulnerable and messy. Nothing useful for the military, except proof of principle. He’d liked the lead scientist who had recruited him into the program, but understood soon enough that the up and coming Dr Andrews would eventually be calling the shots.
Kit considered Andrews a real genius. No one seemed to appreciate how much talent and insight was required to do what Andrews did. Neural anatomy. Inorganic chemistry. Engineering. Microbial ecology. The hardest part wasn’t simply duplicating neurons and neuronal networks, like they were simply circuits in a complex switchboard. That’s what most people thought. No, the trick was mimicking the whole interactive cell community making up the brain. That includes glial cells, which modify neuronal signals across networks in direct and indirect ways. Those made up a large portion of the cell mass of the brain, and their moderating activity meant the brain wasn’t a simple binary system, digital… functionally, it was analog.
“Did you know Einstein had more glial cells than normal people?” Kit said, watching the small world he’d built inside his aquarium. “Not more neurons, or bigger neurons. If it was anything, the difference was in the white matter. True story.”
The fish and mechanical creature kept swimming, no reaction. They didn’t care that astrocytes were capable of connecting different brain regions, or that oligodendrocytes alter speed of communication in critical ways. He decided not to bore them with how when mice were implanted with human astrocytes, which are larger than their own, they’d perform better in tests.
Andrews’s team had produced a modern miracle when they duplicated all the cellular functions and chemical signals underlying thought in the human brain, using a simple mound of nanobots in a viscous broth.
Of course, the military didn’t care about miracles. The Siamese had seen their angle better than Andrews. Saw the future coming from way off. Saw it back when the “wet” program was still running, and nanobots one of many potential substrate designs on Andrews’s computer.
“Maybe I have me some of those bookoo sized astrocytes,” Kit said, while wiggling his finger like a worm in front of a fish.
What the military was really interested in, all they ever cared about, was that mechanical brains weren’t as messy as biological ones. On top of their ability to network with avatars in a more straightforward fashion, machines could be mapped thoroughly, dissected cleanly, and various parts swapped in and out.
And then they could be mass produced.
He’d seen their angle just fine, knew Andrews would have serious reservations, and so discreetly contacted the local brass. They were happy to have Kit on board. Maybe they felt it was a way of finally getting something out of the “wet systems” project they were trying to close down. Hell, since Kit had kept both his heads, they’d get two people for the price of one.
It ended up taking both brains, and a lot of work on his part. If he wasn’t a prisoner he’d have undoubtedly earned a PhD for all the courses and research. Could’ve made full professor too. Not like that was ever going to happen though. By the end–what was it, twenty years?–Kit was as technically proficient as anyone on Andrews’s team. And unlike them, he was clever about people.
Special agent PKit30277, The Siamese, was activated almost immediately after Andrews proved his point with the pigs. Kit was even given a military rank, for whatever that was worth. The brass wanted a man on the inside from the start of human trials.
The only problem remaining was where they would find someone desperate enough to have their mind transferred to a mass of nanobots. Moving one’s self to another living brain is one thing, to a bowl of greasy sand is something else.
When Kit heard prisoners joking around about Shannon, what he yelled when they’d dragged him in, Kit recognized the desperate, escapist nature of this particular mind, trapped within its own body. So he pulled Shannon’s files and brought him to the attention of Dr Andrews and facility command. The brass was less than impressed, but Andrews understood this was someone he could convince.
Having been through the transfer process himself, Kit trusted Shannon’s reports that continuity of consciousness was being preserved. Shannon’s identity was intact, and capable of shifting to and from the inorganic prosthetic substrate. Even so, Kit was surprised by his own discomfort when Shannon asked them to permanently cut off the biological brain. The ball and chain he called it.
When he’d asked them to kill it.
The military, if anything, was ecstatic. They didn’t care what was happening to the man. They wanted AI soldiers in carbon-titanium frames.
But PKit30277 cared. Is that when he became a double agent? Or maybe that was the natural state for any man with two heads. The Siamese laughed at that.
From a scientific standpoint it was beautiful. Kit’s ability to freeze Shannon’s MIND–in an almost literal sense– so he could map its configuration to neurologically relevant scales, was impressive. That he could remove and manipulate sections, which retained function after reassembly, made mouths water. Given these technical achievements, duplication of any part of Shannon’s MIND and then using those parts to build a whole new MIND was almost child’s play.
But that was technical achievement. Screw technical achievement. Somewhere along the line Kit had lost track of the man. He was no longer sure what Shannon was experiencing anymore. Did the real Shannon still exist? Once he pulled out a chunk of Shannon’s MIND and replaced it with new nanobots–even if configured identically–was the consciousness really continuous with the original? Or was it now a copy claiming continuity?
More important, when he stole the original sections from the main lab and slowly, over months, reconnected them to rebuild the original MIND in wing Q for the military, did Kit reconstruct the same Shannon he’d met so many years ago? Was it the same–continuous even if not contiguous–conscience?
On good days he imagined that it was. Like Shannon had gone in for brain surgery, only to have doctors cut out chunks and then put them back together like pieces of a 3D puzzle. Could that really work? Kit hoped so. In darker moments he was sure he’d killed Shannon and wondered exactly which dissection had done the job. Or did it happen when they agreed to pickle his biological brain in formaldehyde?
In any case, alive or dead, PKit30277 was certain he’d helped AShannon46812 escape the military’s grasp in some form.
The only way he could.
Piece by piece.
If he was able to fool everyone in the main lab by swapping out parts of Shannon’s MIND for a shunt, it was even easier to replace it again in the wing Q lab with a duplicate MIND. The military was too worried about external threats to notice what The Siamese was carrying in or out of labs, or back to his apartment where he kept so many complicated toys to play with.
The creature climbed out of the aquarium and heated itself. It looked like a sculpture of a giant salamander made of carbon-titanium sticks, the aquarium’s toy sea castle still perched on its head.
“They’re transferring me next month,” Kit said. “You understand what that means?”
The creature responded by lifting a forepaw, and extending a digit. The digit began tracking back and forth like a metronome, or windshield wiper blade, only fast, in a blurred arc. Using a series of LED lights along the digit, timed to its motion and the speed of human visual processing, the creature generated a word across the digit’s arc.
YES
“Good. And they extended my remote privileges. So, you know. It looks like it’s time for you to go.”
THANK YOU
PKit30277 saw the words and wondered if the duplicate MIND still waiting for extraction in the wing Q lab, the one that had tried to take over the facility and make a break on its own, was as real a Shannon as this one might be.
Clearly the duplicate MINDs he’d made in wing Q, using maps as instruction manuals, didn’t exist as a single person. They were individuals, leading separate lives. And it seemed to Kit the duplicate MINDs could only “be” Shannon by reflex, inherited disposition. But from time to time Kit had to ask himself seriously: did it matter if a mass of nanobots had been part of the original prosthetic MIND Shannon had trained on, had been connected with Shannon’s brain in some way, rather than being duplicated regions made from maps of the prosthetic?
INSTRUCTION?
“Oh, it’s easy, dude. Just go out to the balcony and over the wall. The sea is a short drop below. Short for you anyway. I told them I’d be testing an amphibious unit. Can’t help it if a test unit fails and gets lost in the sea.”
YES
THANK YOU
By helping Shannon escape the facility, Kit felt he was completing the job he’d started. Of course, escaping from the facility was the best Kit could do for Shannon. No one could ever help him escape the physical world, physical needs. By “cutting the ball and chain” of a biological brain, Shannon had merely swapped one set of physical concerns for another. Though, for an ascetic like Shannon, at least such demands didn’t arrive as “irrational” impulses. Feelings. Desires. Temptations. Now they showed up as specs on his monitor and he could choose to act based on more rational grounds. When it was critical for continued life.
Kit wasn’t sure how long Shannon would actually last outside the facility, only that it was longer than he’d last inside the facility. This avatar unit was versatile, able to travel by land, sea, and air. And it had multiple recharge options, including solar. He could even recycle fluids by processing sea water. So Shannon was good to last for a while on the outside. It was possible he’d outlive them all.
Kit wondered what Shannon would do with all that free time. Would he spend his days searching out radio transmitters for messages from God, or ways to make his last great escape?
Man, Kit hoped not.
What a waste.
Kit would go deep in the ocean, or fly around jungles and mountains. Maybe hide out on the tops of skyscrapers as a high tech gargoyle, spying through people’s windows.
Obviously, Shannon wouldn’t think much of his choices.
Kit’s mood lightened as he watched Shannon move out to the balcony, the sea castle crown still in place.
“You’ll see, right? Maybe one less cell means something after all.”
A broad smile broke across both faces.

Fact & Opinion

Revisiting Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind

Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga may be one of the most varied book series written to date. The first in the series, Ender’s Game, is a young-adult novel, while its sequel, Speaker of the Dead, explores a mixture of more adult-driven hard sci-fi and philosophical fiction. These two books are some of Card’s most praised works, a duo which made him the only author to ever win the Nebula award two years in a row—for two books in the same series, nonetheless. I found their praise well-deserved, and when I picked up the third entry in the Ender Saga, Xenocide, I couldn’t help but notice the cover celebrated that it was a nominee for the Nebula. “Why not a winner?” I wondered.
Children of the Mind, the fourth entry in the Ender Saga, almost exclusively deals with the characters introduced in the deus ex machina ending of Xenocide, and readers who found it difficult to suspend belief for Xenocide’s ending may have trouble getting through Children of the Mind’s beginning. The story mostly follows Peter and Young Valentine, childhood versions of Ender’s siblings pulled from his mind and manifested in human form. This was brought about by Jane—a supercomputer who possesses an aiúa, Card’s version of the soul—discovering that everything in the universe is connected by philotes, the most basic form of matter. Jane then discovers how to harness the energy of philotes in order to achieve faster-than-light travel, and in doing so takes Ender outside the universe, where his thoughts are accidentally turned into creations: Peter and Young Valentine.
The story of Children of the Mind revolves around the fictional planet of Lusitania, where the previous two entries of the series took place. Enraged that Lusitania has disobeyed galactic law—by refusing to turn over its citizens who are guilty of interfering with the planet’s native species—the Starways Congress then learns that anyone who leaves the planet could spread a deadly infection to the rest of the human race. In order to protect the rest of humankind from potential extinction, the congress orders the complete and total destruction of Lusitania by the Molecular Disruption Device, the same weapon Ender used to commit xenocide against his enemies in the first book of the series. This is a common theme throughout the book, the sins of Ender’s past coming back to haunt him, his friends and family facing the same total destruction he dealt the buggers as a child.
In an attempt to save Lusitania from destruction, Peter travels the galaxy—making use of Jane’s ability to instantaneously move him from planet to planet—trying to find a way to convince Starways Congress to abandon its plan. He is accompanied by Wang-Mu, a character from the previous book, and with further help from Jane, they deduce that much of the Starways Congress’s motivation to destroy Lusitania stems from a minority of its Japanese members. Their beliefs are influenced by a remote philosopher’s interpretation of human history, in which global events are depicted as the struggle between edge nations and center nations. The philosopher believes Japan is an edge nation, always fighting for its place in the world and struggling to preserve its culture, while nations like China and Egypt are center nations, whose cultures seem to swallow up even their invaders. The philosopher interprets the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as Japan’s punishment from the gods for seeking to spread an empire and trying to imitate the center nations of the world. He compares these bombings to Ender’s destruction of the buggers, and believes Lusitania is guilty of the same crimes. Therefore, because Lusitania has overstepped its bounds—like the buggers and Japan once did—it must be obliterated so that the natural hierarchy of edge and center nations can be preserved.
Another part of the book focuses on Young Valentine’s search for the civilization that may have created the pequinnos, the native species of Lusitania. One of the more interesting scenes in the book depicts Young Valentine and her companion, Miro, having an argument over their feelings for one another. Young Valentine is Ender in essence, as she is made from part of his aiúa, and therefore Miro’s love for her is really a love for Ender. Card uses this scene to raise the questions of whether or not the soul is gendered. The question provides amusing food-for-thought in itself, but it also provides additional perspective for the debate between dualism and monism. After all, if the soul is immaterial and independent of the body, then romantic love should be possible from one individual towards any other, regardless of gender. In a way, the existence of sexual orientation and preference is evidence for a set of limits to the soul, as love—a communication from soul to soul in the immaterialist view of the world—is dictated by materialist agents, such as what hormones are produced in the mind.
However, it is evident that Card doesn’t share this interpretation, as he argues against a materialist interpretation of reality throughout the book—and his solution to faster-than-light travel certainly demonstrates his belief in things outside the realm of nature. Yet, the question of what dictates a person’s choices is one his characters struggle with throughout the book. As they overcome their challenges and face more hardships than most human beings could handle, they constantly question to what end they are controlled by their nature or their nurture—and whether or not the will of their aiúa has any influence on their decisions at all.

Fiction/Free Stories

The Glitch

Gliding, gliding, gliding into a mystery.

At least I think we’re gliding. This thing is moving so slowly and steadily we could very well be still—-just hanging motionless in space, like an ornament on a vast, black Christmas tree.

I can’t say I hate it here anymore. My emotions have gone by the wayside. I don’t feel angry or resentful about what happened—-just still, like the prison that is hanging here in space-completely still.

“Professor Briggs, dinner is ready.”

The door to my modest cabin opened slowly, emitting a high-pitched whine from the hinges that desperately needed oiling. The woman standing in the doorway smiled at me warmly, but her eyes were mocking and cruel. It’s an unsettling sight—-a warm smile and cruel eyes. It’s not something typically found on Earth.

She was holding a tray of my favorite foods. There was a large square of lasagna, a mammoth chunk of chocolate cake, crab legs, and barbecued shrimp. They lay together in a sickening array on the tray.

“I know you can’t resist all this, professor. Especially since you haven’t eaten in three days.”

“Has it been that long? Maybe if you didn’t serve them together like this I would have more of an appetite. Or maybe if you told me just where in the hell we’re headed, I would feel like I could eat safely. Can you do that for me? Hmm? Or is that just too goddamn hard?”

The woman put her hand coquettishly over her mouth.

“Professor! Such anger. I know humans get restless when they don’t eat, so why don’t you try something so you can fix your energy?”

“It’s not my damn energy that needs fixing! Just tell me where we’re headed and I’ll happily eat the whole ungodly feast!” I banged so hard on my knee with my clenched fist that it made an odd cracking noise. I took this to mean that I am either very strong or very weak, depending on one’s perspective.

The woman rested the tray on a tiny table next to my bed. “I’ll be back to clean up in an hour.” With that she left, locking my door behind her.

I felt a tinge of gratitude toward the woman. This was the first outburst of emotion I had experienced in quite some time and it felt good to get the blood pumping again.

I lay back on the thin pillow and stared at the plate of food, glistening next to me. They were trying their best—-these monsters. Every meal that was brought to me was something they knew I liked on Earth. I’m not sure how they found out what my tastes were, that was as much of a mystery to me as how I got here in the first place. I stretched my arm across the bed and swatted at the plate like a disobedient cat. The pile of food plummeted to the ground with a crash and squish. I turned over on my side to face the door, counting the moments until the monster in charge of the ship came in to inspect the noise.

I counted to ten before the agonizing whine of my door filled the room. I heard a disappointed clucking come from behind me before the monster spoke.

“Professor-why do you starve yourself? We thought we had figured out what you like. The chef will be most disappointed to learn another one of his creations has met with the floor.”

I turned to face the being. “How dare you ask me anything. You haven’t bothered to answer a single one of my questions. I don’t know how I’m staying alive but you can bet your ass it’s not gonna be for long. Not if I have my way about it.” I stared hard into the beast’s black eyes, waiting for a moment of chaos to come. “ANSWER ME!” The words pushed themselves out of my throat.

The monster shook his head slightly before calmly replying. “You didn’t ask anything just now, Professor.”

I jumped off my bed, at which point the monster reached for his belt.

“Professor I must insist you calm yourself.” He didn’t make any movement but his hand hovered about his belt with the steadiness of a quick shot.

“I’m not going to attack you.” I leaned against the wall across from my bed. “You’re the lunatic here, not me! Don’t go around acting like I’m the madman… scooping up people and keeping them hostage in some floating Titanic.”

The monster looked at me with what I can only guess was his version of pity. His gaze stayed glued on me even as he walked slowly around my bed to clean up my mess.

“Professor,” he finally said, “what is it that makes you so sure you’re our prisoner? Why can’t it be that perhaps we are saving you?”

I couldn’t help but donkey laugh at the question. It was probably the first time I had laughed in about five years.

“We give you all the food you can want and a safe place to live, yet like an ungrateful child, you refuse all nourishment and recreation. You just keep asking ‘why’. Your race is quite untrusting, Professor. You all seem to think that you know better. Did we take you away from a happy life? No. You were alone on Earth, as you choose to be alone up here. We have taken your human form, yet you refer to us as the monsters.”

“Well that is certainly a pretty tale, Captain.” I mock saluted the bemused being. “But why would you choose to save me, then? What makes me so damn special to you?”

The monster looked through me. “Well, what made you think you were so special that we would make you our prisoner, Professor? Why must rank have anything to do with saving or destroying a life?”

He held my plate, along with my splattered dinner in his hands. My ruined meal dripped cheese and sauce on his perfectly tailored suit, but he seemed not to notice. Before he left out of the whining door, he turned to face me once more.

“My race understands you, Professor, but it’s up to you if this is a prison or your salvation. It truly depends on one’s perspective.”

With that he hurried out of my cabin, leaving me with either nothing or everything. The only thing I knew for sure was that we were still gliding.

About the Author

Kathleen Wolak is a writer/actor/law student/ wannabe magician from Hamden, CT. Her short fiction has appeared in over 20 literary journals and her latest novel, Stars of Man, was released in April, 2017. She is the world’s biggest Simpson’s fan, and has the tattoos to prove it. When she isn’t writing, she is absorbed in her other favorite activity-hiking with her two dogs.

Fiction/Subscription Stories

Pilot of Varying Lights

Coffee in hand, Sam Knightlinger walked from station to station, listening to conversations between controllers and astronauts from sources as distant as Mars, the moon and Earth Island—the planet’s first permanent orbiting space colony. This new director of crew operations—, a man with short cropped black hair, rich black skin, and a calm manner— was observing the men and women seated at rows of display monitors in the humming NASA control center. Hearing a buzz among the controllers near the door, he looked back. He understood that it would be difficult getting a feel for the normal run of things today: A small group led by his supervisor had just come in and was converging on him through various aisles in the room.

Brisk and neat Della Swift, head of colony coordination, came up and touched his arm. “Sam, I want you to meet—”

Knightlinger thrust out his hand. “—Dr. Ardley, of course. I’ve seen you in holo.”

Ardley hesitated pointedly then shook his hand. “We haven’t met—So let the lady finish the introductions, all right?” Ardley was tanned and reddish-blond, crisp and assured.

As was her way, Della managed a wry and sorry smile for Sam. “This is Sam Knightlinger, new director of crew-op. Dr. Ardley and his assistants will be in and out the next few weeks, Sam—rushing to finalize plans and gear up for Island 2.”

“Fine, Della.” He made what could pass for a welcoming gesture then walked away.

Della Swift watched him leavelooked after with a pang of regret. Later she would excuse Ardley: “An arrogant son of a bitch, yes, but brilliant. The brilliant are pardonedhave pardon and they know it.” Now she turned to Ardley. “Guess you’ll have to help yourself. You’ve been in before.”

Ardley smiled, taking her arm. “I prefer your assistance to his anyway. Mind?”

Across the busy room and sipping lukewarm coffee, Sam continued his round, keeping clear of the little knot of engineers. Definitely beige, that man. Nope—should not let him get to me. He stopped short behind a balding controller whose voice was suddenly raised in agitation. Knightlinger put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

He looked up. “Maj. Bishop’s—lost his suit pressure—Capt. Boehme’s up there alone in the shuttle.”

“Gi’me,” said Knightlinger, taking the headset from the controller. He remembered the name: She had authored a paper on intuition in space, something as yet untested. Evidence was anecdotal. Most astronauts, especially the scientists among them, now shied away from discussing it.

“Capt. Boehme, this is Knightlinger—director of crew-op.” He had yet to meet Rebecca Boehme. His tone was firm and, he hoped, reassuring. “Tell me everything that’s happened up there. Are you in command of the vehicle?”

He paused for an answer, his fingers absently brushing through his lightless kinky hair. Then her quiet voice sounded, as though coming not from space but the center of his mind.

From the table in his palm-shaded backyard, Sam Knightlinger sat gazing at Rebecca Boehme’s cap of brassy hair. His glance slipped to her fine-boned pensive face as she studied her preflight checklists. Twilight was deepening, yet she continued reading the lighted characters of the small display. He was disappointed with the tiny device held in her thin hands. Glance up right now, you might catch something of yourself in my eyes.

He reached for his wine glass, feeling foolish. He had hoped to expand her borders and lay them with colors. All the hues of an intimate encounter. For months he had wanted to feel only Rebecca—around him, above him, beneath him. But it wasn’t going to happen. He sighed, drank the wine.

Maybe Bishop’s ghost was still hanging around, anyway. Little more than ten months had passed. She was concentrating now on recovery from a breakdown, on retraining, thoroughly occupied with her goal of returning to space. And Rebecca had something to overcome. She had both piloted and commanded missions before this loss of confidence. In some circles there was still speculation about her readiness. Most found her lacking in toughness, weak even. Too fragile for the job.

“More wine, Bo?”

She looked up, smiling. “Mmm.”

He tipped the dark merlot into her glass. The ground shook. Down coast, as they watched, a night flight lifted off in a cloud of light. They looked at one another.

“Just 39 hours, babe.”

Rebecca’s slight answering smile did not match the intensity of her gaze.

Locking Capt. Boehme’s helmet in place, Knightlinger smiled some encouragement. Through the dark reflecting faceplate he failed to make out her high cheekbones and what he knew of her serious expression. She acknowledged with thumbs-up that the suit’s systems were go. He moved around to secure the helmet over the other crew member’s more symmetrical features. The young pilot, Lt. Aiko Tsuchi, was about to make her second orbital flight, a supply run to NASA’s space station below within the geosynchronous orbit.

Sam stood a moment, smiling down confidence upon his friend before turning to climb out the hatch.

Preflight jitters had been flitting within, preoccupying her, but now she watched as the man disappeared. Like one coming out through foggy dreams to find the morning, she said, “Did you see that, Win?”

“—Pardon, Commander?” There was trepidation in the answering female voice.

Shrinking, Rebecca made no answer.

The minutes passed as they continued checking onboard systems. T-minus five minutes. Commander Capt. Boehme and pilot Lt. Tsuchi studied the data displays and control banks around them, reviewing the positions of overhead toggles. T-minus 5 seconds. Capt. Boehme giave the computer command and the three main engines below started with a mighty bang. The solid rocket boosters boomed to life. A slight vibration…. Gripping the arms of her seat, Rebecca tensed as the tower of pad B went slowly past the wraparound windows above. Then, accelerating with sickening force, bucking and twisting, the shuttle rolled, pitched, yawed into the once familiar east-northeast Gibraltar course.

Far away and below, from an observation deck on the ground, Sam Knightlinger shaded his eyes and watched the flashing white point of the STS, tethered to its pale yellow flame and billowing contrail, until it disappeared through distant skies.

Clean black space, with its mental and spiritual healing, Bo …. Get you some and bring it back in your eyes.

They were only 126 seconds into the flight and already 43 kilometers out. The orange flame of the eight booster separators engulfed the crew’s wraparound windows. Six seconds more—the boosters were gone, gravity sucked. The ride smoothed out but they did not relax. Watching the data displays, Boehme said, “Pressing to MECO.”

“Roger, Commander.” The thrust of excessive gravity prevented the pilot from glancing toward the captain. I hope you’re ready, Commander. Because the official line won’t save us now.

Feeling leaden, several times their normal weight, they were reaching for main engine cut off at orbital velocity.

The fuels in their external tank now expended, the orbiter pitched over, leveling off. There flowed blue curving earth out their windows. Rebecca’s heart filled at the sight. Aiko Tsuchi monitored the sequence as onboard computers disengaged their orbiter from the great external tank. Three red lights on the panel before the pilot went out. Now the orbital maneuvering system’s thrusters began firing for the final nudge into orbit. Heaviness fell away, as finally topping the orbit, they lightened to nothing.

The pair removed their helmets, and Rebecca saw Tsuchi’s face slightly flattened, her ponytail drifting out like strands of black seaweed. With a pang of joy, she experienced anew the sensation of weightlessness. But the buoyant emotion was instantly quelled, as the specter of Win Bishop’s body—afloat against fathomless blackness, his suit deflated—flashed into her mind.

Zero gravity. Major Winston Bishop, mission commander, was preparing to leave the orbiter to work on its robotic arm. The arm had malfunctioned just as they were extending it to retrieve one of the European Space agency’s orbiting bio-labs.

I’ll have that thing operational in no time, Bo.

They were suited and helmeted, floating on opposite sides of the sealed airlock hatch. Monitor me. And don’t forget, the sound of your larynx vibrating in my helmet excites me.

She smiled, aware of the broad grin behind his obscuring faceplate. Phooey. Think I’ll report you.

Winston Bishop chuckled. Phooey? Better watch that language. I guess commanding that last mission went to your head. You forgot how to take orders, pilot.

Rebecca said, Orders? Phooey.

She heard his answering chuckle. All good-natured, professional. Everything decent and orderly. The need for order out here was obvious. Bishop never lost that sense, was confident and reassuring under pressure. Yet, watching him check out a zero-torque drill, she recalled a time when he betrayed fear—in a flippant remark comparing black holes to dark spots in the psyche. Bottomless pits, right there in the soul. (Grin.)

His back to her, Bishop was ready to exit the airlock.

Win! She called it out. I’ve got an impression—you should use the MMU!

The manned mobility unit, a backpack with encircling arms and powered by nitrogen thrusters, was something Bishop habitually refused when he had work that kept him in close range of the shuttle.

You can burn back here faster if anything goes wrong.

He turned about slowly. Funny, a moment ago I felt the same thing…. But you know I prefer the tether.

Tsuchi and Boehme had achieved a circular orbit, 210 kilometers out, when Rebecca unstrapped to come away from her seat. Moving the members of her body in unison, feet in the air and her short brassy hair fluffed out, she worked compulsively, loading the computers with instructions. To Tsuchi’s discomfort, she said nothing as she began work.

Transporting a supply module, they were on target for the mission to NASA’s “beehive,” its network of floating stations and staging point for moon, geosynchronous, and libration flights. Tsuchi unstrapped and glanced at the taciturn commander, thinking, Unnerving, cold as Pluto in here. She slid to the after flightdeck to oversee the slow opening of the great payload bay doors. It was still a revelation to her, this view of shimmering azure atmosphere against blue-black space. The calm of infinity set her spirit strumming. Staring out, she mused on the peculiar notion, which some astronauts claim, that space carries promptings and peace unmuddied by earth’s dense atmosphere. What did it mean?

She turned back to begin checking vehicular response, but found Capt. Boehme usurping thatis job.

What the hell am I supposed to do?

She arced into mid-deck to see if the equipment was secure. In the cabin she did a double-take on discovering a water drop, the size of an orange, forming on one side of the chlorination valve. If it grew too large, its molecular attractions might be disturbed enough to break. Dispersed water droplets, floating willy-nilly about in the craft, might short out onboard electronic systems. She spun away and the movement nauseated her.

Commander. She called weakly from the opening between compartments.

Shaking off her preoccupation, Rebecca turned slowly. What is it, Aiko?

There’s a water ball in here. Her voice quavered with nausea. Maybe we should contact our controller? She knew it a measure of her own lack of confidence in this mission with her commander.

Rebecca slid past her to examine the globoid seepage on the valve. Already as big as a grapefruit. Boehme glanced at the toolkit secure among the equipment and Tsuchi, following her gaze, reached for it. What do you need? She surveyed the neat array of zero-torque tools.

Seven and W. Nausea gone? Rebecca drifted back to let her in. Pointing to the opening, she said, Lock seven into the ratchet of W and insert it there. When you’re tightly engaged, turn it maybe ninety degrees—right.

Aiko did as instructed, and the seepage stopped. Better gather that with something, said Rebecca as she turned toward the flight deck.

Tsuchi got a towel out of the tiny locker and gingerly soaked up the water. When she re-entered the cockpit, Boehme was strapped in and studying earth through the wraparound windows. Lt. Tsuchi secured herself, and, following a few practice burns, settled the orbiter back into the proper attitude for the remainder of the climb.

Staring at the earth just before sunset, Rebecca’s gaze was caught by smoking Mount Etna. A prickly infilling of the glands about her eyes … the quick compression of her emotional heart…. She held her breath as the sun sank behind them.

Win Bishop opened the outer hatch, secured himself to a line, and slowly drifted for the robotic arm.

Where’s my chatter? She heard him ask it whenre she floated beyondhind the airlock hatch. The feeling ofimpression causing her apprehension stayedcontinued with her, even as the view beneath the open cargo bay doors stunned her anew with its display of the blue beauty of space curving beyond. You look pretty good out there. What-a-view.

Lifting out of the bay, he passed out along the mantis-like arm. Then he paused, apparently looking at the planet.

Rebecca glanced at the MMUs attached to the bulkhead outside the airlock. He always claimed that the unit hampered his movements. She watched him reach for a tool floating tethered at his side. Then she heard him gasp.

Oxygen pressure?! A malfunctioning regulator would deplete his suit pressure, boiling his blood. He made a small gesture. Her arm went out to open the hatch, but her limbs were numbing. Bumping the bulkhead she negotiated the airlock…. Scarcely she heard the soft pfff in her helmet … saw his limbs blossom out.

She backed into the MMU and managed to release it. Fumbling to activate the nitrogen jet she felt it would never start, yet it fired and began propelling her towards him. Drawing up, she saw him outspread in the limp suit, floating like a flower on water. She turned for an instant. Smoking Mount Etna, on distant earth, met her bewildered gaze.

It’s dark, Commander, urged the pilot still strapped in beside her. Their cabin lights were out but the data displays glowed. Then, Look! A night flight!

Through the wraparound windows Aiko and Boehme watched the fire of rockets from earth, winking, emerging through the atmosphere.

Wonder whose? said the pilot as the light moved in the blackness of earth’s shadowed bottom until it went out in the east. Bet it’s a Fly-back F-1. That looked like the fire of SSMEs.

The radio light came on in the panel. Rebecca flipped a switch, acknowledging.

Sam here, came the friendly voice from earth. How you doin’?

The voice gave her a welcome rush of inner sights: Good humored dark eyes, sea breezes, red wine under palms.

Pretty good here, Sam. Had a leak in the chlorinator valve. Lt. Tsuchi corrected it. We’ve got lights out and are cruising in the dark at about 300km altitude. I see Delphinus—I think it is—outside my window, and in the east we just had unidentified rocket fire. Know whose? Over.

That would be China with spare parts for Island 2. You skipped by that valve leak pretty fast, babe. Care to tell yo’pappy what happened?

Boehme chuckled and asked Tsuchi to fill him in.

Then the director of crew-op came back, saying, Uh—We have a complication with one of ESA’s communications satellites…. Already she felt her heart beating as he continued. You may be uneasy … I understand, Bo, but there’s no one else around and I know you can handle it. Why not give Aiko her head on this one?

Rebecca was silent. Then she acknowledged, and his briefing followed. Capt. Boehme signed off and, ignoring Sam’s advice, ordered the pilot to turn on the overhead and start work on the coordinates. The commander unstrapped to prepare for extravehicular activity. She did not want a crewmember doing this walk.

Working on the coordinates, Lt. Tsuchi said with deceptive evenness, I’d like to do that EVA, commander. But the other continued mid-deck. Capt. Boehme…. Now Aiko spoke a note of warning: I’d be alone here, if anything … happened.

It was manipulative but it worked.

Adrift in the cabin Rebecca swung about slowly, staring at her, vaguely reliving the nightmare of isolation…. Of traveling high above earth, repairing the robot arm—her own commander’s body strapped to his seat in the cockpit. She fought the futility of trying to save either of them from her fears. Life had moved on, leaving both Win Bishop and her personal experience in some place she kept trying to call the past.

The craft and its lone space walker were in sunlight, the earth above glowing and milky white. Boehme watched Tsuchi on a display as the other ghosted toward the target; wearing the MMU and trailing a thin cloud of ice crystals.

It’s a miracle out here, came Aiko’s murmur inside Rebecca’s helmet. Wearing the suit was a precaution taken in case she was needed out there.

Your suit systems, camera, and MMU are all reading fine, pilot.

Hovering near the spherical satellite, Aiko did not respond. Then, Looks like part of quadrants two and three have been strafed by dust or something. Did you just see some of its particles disperse?

Boehme glanced reflexively at the neighboring monitor. Negative. I was watching you, not your pictures. Anything else?

The rest of the satellite appears operable, but maybe these pix’ll show something. Aiko said, this coming around the sphereoid into full view of the shuttle’s monitoring camera.

OK, c’mon back and I’ll send the data to Sam.

But Tsuchi had stopped near the satellite. Roger, that. But she did not move.

C’mon.

I can’t. The control’s disengaged.

Well, keep trying. I’m coming out.

Capt. Boehme unstrapped and slid to the airlock.

Outside she donned an MMU, ignited the tiny rockets, and glided past the supply module in the bay. Coming up ton the stranded pilot, reversing rockets, she saw Aiko fiddling with the control on an arm of the unit. Rebecca reached to grasp the stick and felt it slip loosely from side to side. She started removing the housing, but stopped.

She seemed poised, as though listening. With Tsuchi wondering.

Go out! Quickly! I’ll push you.

She grabbed the arm of the unit and began propelling her around the satellite. She circled widely, doubling their distance to the shuttle.

Aiko felt her fear coming true: Boehme was dangerously unstable.

Commander, why are we going away from the orbiter?!

Although seeming a void of motionless peace, orbital space is pocked with moving particles unchecked by friction, bits of debris and junk moving at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. Before Rebecca could answer, a blinding flash blossomed where the satellite had been, sending silent reflecting radiance and fragments out through the corridor between spacewalkers and aircraft. In its rush of light their eyes were momently blinded.

Aiko breathed out her wonderment in silence. Was this it—the intuition?

How did you know, Commander?

The pressurized suit hid the other’s shrug.

I knew.

The STS was soft-docking at the beehive. Sunlight glinted off banks of solar arrays as they passed into the docking sphere of aone cylindrical station. The station spun slowly about its axis to provide .1 G—just enough gravity to keep coffee in cups and people in touch with the floor. The two astronauts checked in at the nearly empty flight desk to file their reports. On duty the dark young man with an engaged glance looked at the transcripts on the display. He blurted out an expletive when he came to exclaimed over the mishap. Meteoroid or space junk hits weren’t unknown, but they were rare.

“Your ID says you’re rated for inter-orbital flight, Capt. Boehme,” said the man as he turned away from the monitor. “We’ve got an unscheduled trip to Earth Island, if you’re interested. If you’re too tired, I’ll see who else I can scrounge up.”

Rebecca turned to Aiko. “Want to pick up a pile of hours in the IOTV?”

The other’s face lit up in the affirmative, emphasizing her beautiful horizontal features. She had yet to visit the elegant celestial city of space.

The young man glanced at the UT clock. “Give you an hour to rest up, then I’ve got to get Dr. Gas on the sling.”

“Dr. Gas?” asked Tsuchi.

“The Very Great Architect of the Islands hisself.” He looked down his nose at them, nostrils flaring.

“His self,” laughed Rebecca. To Tsuchi she added, “I don’t think he likes my ideas—if that’s the word for them.”

“On what?”

“Space intuition.”

“Is it ESP?”

“May be. But I don’t call it that because it mixes it up with something else. It is discernment and extra to the senses yet completely relevant to them. Anyway, I have no scientific curiosity about it anymore.” She said softly as though to herself, “Wish I hadn’t written that paper.”

“Ride should be interesting, then,” the amused young man said with a smile. “They’re throwing ‘luncheon’ for him the day after tomorrow. Better grab a sandwich and get some rest.” He gestured toward the hatch, which led through compartments to the snack area, “Soy sloppy joes today!”

Aiko giggled as they stepped lightly through the hatch. “Yummy.”

“Yummy?—soy sloppy joes?”

“Not them.” She looked back, flashing a smile over her shoulder at the man behind the desk.

They rocketed through the flashing radioactive Van Allen belt in the inter-orbital transport vehicle. Rebecca, her hair fluffed out, and Aiko, whose ponytail drifted, were at the consoles; the astrophysicist strapped in behind them. His blond hair always closely cropped—warding the foolishness of zero gravity—astute, self-assured, Dr. Chaunce Ardley listened with polite attention as Tsuchi described the destruction of ESA’s satellite by the meteoroid.

Remarkable. But Capt. Boehme is a remarkable woman. I was in flight-com the day you made your heroic deorbit. His manner was lightly ironic, his voice smooth as satin.

Feeling heat rise in her face, Rebecca turned back to the panel.

Ardley continued. Really, how did you know you and the lieutenant were in danger?

Skimming the data displays, her back still to him, she wanted to say, “The Easter Bunny told me.” But lightly she said, Rather not say.

He moved smoothly on. Now you have piqued my curiosity of course. I’ve heard of space intuition, but we haven’t studied it yet … not seriously. Until we do—it does not exist. You swim, Capt. Boehme.

Mmm. She nodded.

Good. He lit a gold-colored cigarette, murmuring, It’ll filter out OK. You don’t mind do you?… We’ll go swimming at the Lunar Club. You’ll come, too, Lieutenant.

Tsuchi laughed, recognizing the afterthought. No thanks, got to do my nails.

His eyes steeped in cigarette smoke, the physicist smiled.

The great mottled dome of the moon was out their windows on the left. In time a speck of light to the right began steadily growing. Later, as they drew near, it outshone the constellations, a shining ringgreat wheel—full of life. This immensegreat colony, held in place by the gravity of heavenly bodies, swung slowly, majestically, like a great spoked wheel in space. The vast mirrors, reflecting its image above, provided solar light and energy.

Tsuchi pointed out a shield of rock—slag from the furnace that was located ten km south of the torus. Fly past the furnace and hover, commanded Ardley. We’ll watch those mass-catchers dock.

Out the window they saw two massive, grid-covered Kevlar bags, full of moon rock, preparing to dock at the furnace. Glistening clumps of raw ore, floating in space, awaited the refining process that would extract glass, iron, titanium, magnesium, aluminum, all for use in building Island 2. Stacks of refined sheet metals, waiting for a tow to the fabrications sphere, were suspended beyond the glowing furnace.

We’ve just begun coating the new island with aluminum extracted from that ore. Another year and we’ll have our second self-supporting colony. Rocket up to it, will you Capt. Boehme.

She turned to Aiko. Take us on through Earth Island’s spokes, close to the torus, and you’ll get a glimpse into it before we go on to the fabrications sphere.

Tsuchi inverted the vehicle and flew across the secondary mirrors and louvered shields covering the outer surface of the vast torus. Through the slanted shields she saw green and yellow fields, fountains, sheep grazing. A tiny gasp escaped her lips and she glanced at Ardley.

He smiled.

Gerard O’Neill and his students designed the colony decades ago. My uncle was one of those students, and he inspired me. Invert again and you’ll see her new sister.

They drew slowly up past the fabrications sphere, above the hub of the torus. Further out they saw the skeletal structure of Island 2, the plastic-covered ribs of its torus, spokes, and hub revolving in space. Leading up to it from the fabrications sphere was a long vibrating hose. A conical vehicle attached and acting as a nozzle sprayed the skeletal torus with gleaming metal.

Ardley continued his smooth tutorial, saying, The sheet aluminum we saw beside the furnace is boiled to vapor and shot through the nozzle under pressure. It hardens instantly on the shell.

The two women murmured appropriately. It was not unexpected, and that such murmuring was his due.

Undressing for her swim, Rebecca wondered why she bothered with him. Ardley was attractive and repellent in the same glance. She tried picturing him as a down and out failure. She chuckled. Chaunce Ardley with slumping shoulders and fraying cuffs.

She stepped from the women’s lounge in a skimpy one-piece. Bright, laughing, sophisticated people clustered about the vast pool, solar bathing. Uh-oh…. Agoraphobia. Wrong turn. Better go back. It came swiftly to her that space was where she belonged—not society. But she could not have the first without that community. The two poles of her existence were In polarity was the holding together—and the struggle to part.

In silver boxer trunks, his physique tan and sleek, Ardley approached. “Care for a drink, Rebecca?”

Charming smile. He’s going to be nice. “Maybe a little chablis.” She followed to the bar.

They took their drinks to the edge of the pool, refreshening their feet in its pink waters. A stream of Chaunce’s friends and hangers-on came and went. Faint smiles crossed Rebecca’s features and vanished. A lull came and Ardley set down his glass.

“Don’t look so miserable, Rebecca.”

There was an embarrassed pause. She might have brought up her breakdown as an excuse … but she knew better. She was out of her zone—that was all.

He gave her a casual but sensual smile and squeezed her thigh before plunging into the rose-tinted waters. Burnished with red-gold hair, his body glistened up at her. Came an impulse to hurry away confusingly combined with a desire to stay and swim beside that attractive form. She sighed, downed her wine and stood uncertainly. He beckoned and she dove, meeting him under water.

Chaunce took her arm and pointed downward. She looked and saw the shell-strewn bottom. The two dove deeper and began plucking shells to carry away. They surfaced in a welter of pink bubbles and swam for the shady end of the pool. There they lined up their find according to species.

Delighted, she held up a yellow sunray Venus. “Imagine transporting all these from the planet!”

“My compliments.” He cocked his head in a mock bow.

She smiled. No modesty, false or otherwise, here.

Suddenly he slapped his neck, swearing in irritation. “I didn’t import that!”

“A mosquito!” Pure glee in her response. And happy pride.

“Don’t look so damned pleased. Some cow-brained joker has spoiled the paradisal softness of the place.”

Rebecca’s face flooded. She managed a weak smile. My cow-brained compliments. Shortly after the island’s christening she had brought in a few vials of various insects, pupae and larvae, on one of her supply flights. Finding the mosquitos thriving after her long absence prompted the joyous outburst. Now she fervently hoped that the predators she had planted, the spiders and damselflies, were doing as well.

Chaunce misread her flaming features, and made a curt apology. “Maybe they came on some plants—I hate seeing this perfection marred.”

Out of the memory of her sorrow, she asked, “Couldn’t there be purpose, a … sort of redeeming purpose … in imperfection?” She offered it with a tentative smile. His face darkened. He was going to retort, but impulsively she slipped beneath the mild waters.

Piqued, he pursued. But as they swam she thought of Sam and found herself suddenly weary of Ardley, bone-tired as well. They surfaced, and, pleading exhaustion after the grueling flights of the past two days, she excused herself. He was rebuffed, irked, but, before she had gathered her things, was receiving the attentions of another.

Aiko was out. Rebecca stood on the balcony, gazing across the park. Path lights were on, enhancing the artificial night. The ring of secondary mirrors in space, just above the residential level, were turned so that solar light from the giant mirror was deflected. The still air was apple-blossom scented. It was late, not many were stirring. One couple was descending the stairs leading to a suite among the larger terraced apartments on her left. Familiar—the long dark hair of the woman…. Lamplight from the landing cast a glow on the man’s blond head. Hand in hand, Aiko and Chaunce Ardley slipped into the suite.

That’s that.

Casual sex always seemed incongruous, anyway. To find the intimate places and call forth pleasure, hands had to be not just any hands, but hands attached to a body full of a particular soul. It might have been Win Bishop…. —The MMU probably would not have saved him anyway…. The sadness again.

But now thoughts of Sam Knightlinger’s kindness and friendly smile surfaced. Musing and wistful, she turned and went inside.

Troubled, Rebecca tossed on the daybed in the darkened room. She rolled on her side, her stomach, her back. Her conscience was uneasy … pestered. What is it!? —the mosquitos!

She sat up rubbing her brow. If the balance isn’t there … more pests than predators?…

She closed her eyes, frowned, lay back and plucked at the sheet. When will I learn discretion, cease careless presumption?

Morning, and she was preparing to visit space. It was close to noon when, suited and carrying her helmet for the walk, she entered the docking lobby. Without gravity here at the hub, Rebecca grabbed the rail, pressing her Velcro soles into the Velcro carpeting, moving slowly to the flight desk.

Hearing a commotion she turned from the woman at the desk to see a group step from the tube and gingerly enter the lobby. Fifteen or twenty suited tourists, carrying helmets and led by a young guide, came toward the desk. All were excited, laughing. The woman at the desk smiled at her.

EMU touring today. Vacationers want to walk in space.

In the docking area, Rebecca donned an MMU, fired it and did test maneuvers. Then she burned away, crossing over the torus where, below, the Lunar Club had its halcyon view of space. She glanced into the posh room far below where Dr. Ardley would soon be feted. Rebecca inverted and watched the slow revolution of the new Island, the brilliant aluminum drenching by the conical vehicle and hose from the fabrications sphere. Then, burning away, she headed into the deepness. Faintly flashing as she flew, cosmic particles darted across her retinas. Particles, particles, she mused, Everything is particles. People are particles. Gulfs and particles.

Now, thrusters off, floating in the cosmic atmosphere of stars, Rebecca saw the fulgent sun, a great star in the darkness of space. Beneath it hung the fragile half-planet earth—a fair, sapphire foot-stool. Opposite earth stood the moon with its bright white top, its bottom shaded and pocked green in the pale earthshine. All silent fragile spheres, every one. And surrounding them rode the monstrous, bright but navigable stellar network—devised, fused and piloted by a Mind and Force beyond human comprehension.

Reversing to a standstill, Rebecca felt herself caught in this divine snare of varying lights. She was organized stardust and soul, known through and through by the Pilot, drifting in the Pilot’s measureless sea of star particles. She was silent, tipping in the presence of Silence.

Now, lighter yet surer than touch, guidance pressed gently on her spirit.

And she was disquieted. Heart thumping, Rebecca Boehme ghosted back toward the distant islands where two great wheels turned slowly, solemnly, in space. As she flew, Rebecca noticed the MMU tourists in that distance, hovering like bees along one side of the protracted hose. The nozzle vehicle was spraying the hull of the new torus in bright aluminum.

Then, even as she burned toward them. Then. Vapor under tremendous pressure burst from the hose near its couplings. Rebecca gasped as the wild white gas blew away the group that had gathered so close—a soundless explosion sending its members spinning wildly out. Out out into the fathomless ocean of space.

She chose one and fired after it but, unable to match the speed of the tiny sliver vanishing far ahead, she turned about searching for others. Too late. They were all shot out into black space on a ride eternal.

Her own oxygen pressure was almost gone. Stiff with anguish, she headed for the docking area. The blow of gas had ceased, its delivery hose empty, gaping, eerily afloat. Approaching the docks, she saw a score of vehicles preparing to rocket away on a hopeless quest.

At Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 14, Sam Knightlinger left control and walked rapidly down the hall to his office. He went to the window and stood staring out at the canal basin where two dozen external tanks sat on barges, waiting to be towed to one of the vehicle assembly buildings. He smoothed his moustache and brushed absently through the wiry hair at his temples. News of the tragedy at Earth Island had just come down. He pictured her serious features, those still hazel eyes. Sam Knightlinger drummed his fingers on the window frame.

C’mon, kid. Get your butt back on this planet.

Draped over the foamed-in couch, clutching some pillows, Rebecca stared vacantly. Aiko was out. It was almost time to rocket back to the beehive and then on to Earth, but she lay staring without seeing the ponytail palm beneath a skylight in a high curve of the foamed-in white wall. Her eyes were puffy, a tear stood on her lash. She felt the hand of sorrow hovering, poised to push down on her again.

An electronic monotone voice hummed into the quiet, announcing visitors. Tiny, lucent holo-images of Lt. Tsuchi and Chaunce Ardley were displayed in a curve of the room. Rebecca spoke, the door slid open. She sat up, slowly, fluffing her short hair withas nervous fingers.

“The rescue vehicles are back,” said Tsuchi. “We’ll never see those tourists again.”

Still wearing the silver textelite suit he had been feted in, Dr. Ardley wore a grim preoccupied expression. Feeling Rebecca’s gaze on him, he exerted himself to smile and sit down beside her on the couch. She wondered idly what he was doing here: He would surely be staying to begin at least the appearance of an investigation.

“You’re okay aren’t you, Rebecca?” The show of concern grated falsely on her. She looked at him, quietly. Restive, he stood and walked the small space. Aiko hesitated, looking from one to the other, then slid onto a couch opposite Rebecca. No one spoke.

Rebecca’s statement surfaced into the silence: “You didn’t do adequate stress tests on that hose?… Or there was something else … something neglected.”

Chaunce stopped, looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Star knowledge again, Rebecca?”

He continued pacing. Of course he truly had misjudged it. But the engineers should have been more vigilant. The technicians could have caught the error. The damned tour group shouldn’t have been up against it.

He glanced smiling at Lt. Tsuchi, ignoring her bewilderment, then said to Rebecca, “I wouldn’t spread that around…. The perception, or question even, of your fitness for space…. There is no evidence on which to base those false accusations.”

“Not yet.” Pressing ahead you imagine cosmic dread won’t bring you downward into its orbit. —The abyss of light unfathomable. Unfathomable of what Is.

He looked away, relieved that he had taken the trouble to change the data. His holo camera on the hose, as well as a score of other shortcuts…. The budget—the deadline—none of this had allowed for anything else.

“You’ll be wanting to get back to Kennedy,” he said smoothly, smiling at Lt. Tsuchi’s confusion. “Or, you can visit a while longer with me. Rebecca is quite capable of the flight back.” He turned and left the tiny suite.

The onboard computers were programmed for reentry. Orbiting blue earth, tail-first and upside down, they awere pressure-suited and strapped in. Lt. Tsuchi fired the OMS engines for the tug needed to slow the craft into elliptical orbit. The radio light came on. Rebecca flipped the switch. Boehme, she said.

Sam here. How’s it going? Ready to deorbit?

Affirmative…. Dr. Ardley’s negligence was responsible for the accident at Earth Island.

There was silence in her helmet. She waited. Then he said, He has already radioed and said you might suggest something like that.

No proof, Sam. That I know.

Again there was silence.

It won’t hold up, Rebecca.

I’m aware of that.

So what are you going to do?

Nothing. That is, I’ve already done it in telling him. And you.

—Right. Well, don’t worry, there will be an investigation. You coming in now?

Want me in?

God, yes.

She detected the presence of his lopsided sexy grin.

I’ve got the runway down here carpeted in red.

Got wine?

Everything, babe.

Sam Knightlinger left control and strode down the hall. On his way out to the runway he pictured peace in Rebecca’s eyes, before hurrying on to the rest of her.

Food for Thought

Before the first launch of Columbia, when the prototype of the space shuttle was gliding toward feasibility, NASA’S program inspired me to begin a short story. I wrote the first draft before the first launch in the late ‘70s, using research based on Apollo missions and then waited for what the shuttle astronauts’ experience would make available to redraft the story for details. But the basic story was always the same. It had two alternative endings, one featuring confession/repentance, the other as you see here. The Challenger calamity made new hope for my ambition of publication, as did that of Columbia in 2003, but success for this story did not piggy-back on these tragedies. Along the way, Col. James Irwin read and suggested a couple ways to make the EVA more real based on his moon-mission Apollo flights and walks. The program closes, the hardware will be found in museums. So the story may not be vetted unless by a publication interested in themes of stewardship toward the divine and creation.

About the Author

S. Dorman earned a master of humanities degree from the California State University system, and is a sub-creative writer. One example is the independently published Fantastic Travelogue: Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis Talk Things over in The Hereafter, begun as a project for the thesis paper. (An essay from this paper was published in Extrapolation, Spring 2007.) Other SF includes Gott’im’s Monster 1808; Five Points Akropolis, and SiXPointz HiTopOlis. Her current work in progress, DuOpolis, is the final third of this SF series.

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Fiction/Free Stories

A Matter of Mass by Floris M. Kleijne

A MATTER OF MASS

Floris M. Kleijne

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been…” Father Zio sighed. “It’s been thirteen years since my last IRL confession.”

Behind the lattice, Bishop Otis shifted in his seat.

“But—” the Bishop said. He paused before continuing: “And how long has it been since your last online confession?”

“A week, Father. But it’s not the same. It’s not.”

“Go on, my son.”

“I have harbored unkind thoughts at times, about members of my flock. I have had lustful thoughts at times.” Father Zio smiled quietly to himself. Mr. Dooley’s dramatic antics of feigned ecstasy at every Mass were enough to bring unkind thoughts to the holiest of minds, never mind his own flawed, rehabilitated soul. As for Mrs. Ocura’s cleavage… Let’s just say some things were worth a couple of Hail Mary’s.

“Go on, my son.”

The Bishop’s prompt made him realize he was marking time with these minor sins, postponing the inevitable, while he knew exactly what he should be confessing instead. Father Zio believed in confession, needed the cleansing of his soul. But it was unfortunate, to say the least, that Bishop Otis was the one taking it. No matter. No sense delaying any longer.

“I have been prideful. I have defied the wishes of the Holy Church.” There. That would put an end to any doubt Bishop Otis might still have had. “I have defied… you, Father.”

From behind the lattice came the sound of indrawn breath, followed by a long silence. Then:

“How so, my son?”

The week before, Bishop Otis had introduced Father Zio to his replacement.

Admittedly, Andrew had been convincing. Except for an almost subliminal hum when it stood up from its seat, the new priest could have passed for human in any gathering. They had spent fifteen minutes arguing doctrine, and Andrew’s command of Scripture and religious philosophy had been impressive to the point of intimidation.

“I’ll leave you two to discuss the practicalities.” Its voice carried perfect timbres of kindness and self-effacing respect. Zio had no doubt it could cast its voice to the proper tone for any occasion. “If you need me, I’ll be on board the Pius VI.” The episcopal vessel was moored off air lock 42, waiting to take the Bishop back to the diocese. The Bishop and, if the Most Reverend had his way, Zio as well.

“Yes, thank you, Andrew.”

The door between Zio’s chambers and corridor K hissed closed. Bishop Otis was still standing behind the plain sofa where Father Andrew had sat, his hands hidden in the wide sleeves of his purple cassock, smiling benignly as if bestowing a blessing on the departed priest. Father Zio rounded on the Bishop, but his many outraged questions battered him into silence. The Bishop neatly stepped into the opening.

“So, Father, do you feel ready to start your life after penance?”

So that was how he wanted to play it. This new Bishop was very different from his late predecessor, Bishop Armanez. But Father Zio wasn’t ready—or willing—-to talk around the elephant in the room.

“A robot? You’d replace me with a robot, Most Reverend?”

“The Holy See has coined the term Paracreational Shepherd. But yes, a robot, if you will.” The benign smile on the Bishop’s face didn’t fool Zio for a moment.

“No.” Father Zio’s mind teemed with objections, arguments, outraged exclamations, but the single negation was all he could utter.

“My son, do you realize what the diocese is offering you? Absolution, the end to your penance, an easy, planet-side congregation close to Earth. God willing, a congregation on Earth itself, when it comes available. To be absolved of the sins in your past, Zio. Isn’t that what you want?”

The sins in his past. Father Zio would never have expected it to be put so bluntly. Things must have changed in the Mother Church while he tended this tiny backwater parish. Or maybe it was just this new Bishop who preferred a mundane, speak-your-mind approach that would have been considered shockingly inappropriate when Father Zio was first ordained.

He had been just Zio when he found Christ in prison, doing hard time for a wide range of cybercrimes. The Church had accepted him, taught him, ordained him, but hadn’t readily forgiven him. In the dark recesses of his mind, he still wondered sometimes how much of their outrage had been about the innocent victims he had made, and how much about the moneys he had liberated from various hidden Vatican Bank accounts. It didn’t really matter though: he considered his service on dilapidated Outpost Psi fair penance for the deaths he had caused.

“Most Reverend, with all due respect, that is not the point. I’m sure Father Andrew was easy to replicate and cheap to ship, but that doesn’t make him a priest! How can a robot ever serve a congregation? How can a robot commune with the Holy Trinity? Will the Diocese train monkeys next? Or is it now the position of the Church that robots possess a soul?”

Bishop Otis actually flinched for a second, but he quickly recovered into icy fury.

“It seems you read Her Holiness’s encyclicals with less attention than you should, Father Zio.”

Zio racked his brain. There had been upheaval at an almost Galactic level over the last papal missive. The accepted interpretation of the encyclical was that Pia IV wished to open the Church to alien intelligences. But reviewing the text in his head, Zio realized that the exact wording could as easily be made applicable to artificial intelligences—to robots.

“Mea culpa.” He did not trust himself to say anything else.

“Te absolvo.” The Bishop absently waved a blessing at his priest. “This is an opportunity for you, Zio; I would have expected you to see that. You’re not getting any younger, and frankly, these… incidents in the last months…”

Not that again.

There had been two incidents, two. And both had been a result of the ill-maintained AG systems on Psi. It seemed that anything might cause a malfunction these days, from turning on too many appliances at once, to slamming the light panel too forcefully. First time the AG faltered, Father Zio had been pouring the sacramental wine. The fumes had first stained and nauseated his floating congregation, and then burst into a spectacular fireball above the altar as the candles ignited the vaporized alcohol. Except some charring of the altar cloth, and a couple of singed eyebrows, the damage had been limited. The second time, a ball of holy water had drifted up through the church. Letting his parishioners plunge their hands into it as they entered had admittedly been ill-advised, however practical it had seemed at the time: the scattered smaller and smaller droplets had splashed all over the church module when gravity returned.

Holding these against him was a stretch. Using them as proof of his senile incompetence infuriated Father Zio.

“With all due respect, Most Reverend, I still say No. My congregation needs a real priest, a human priest, one with a soul; not some artificial collection of rote liturgy and pre-packaged responses. It may not be a large parish by your standards, they may number less than a percent of the population here, but these are fourteen immortal souls you’re playing with.”

That, finally, got a rise out of the Bishop. He jerked his right hand free and raised it.

“Careful, Father. An unkind ear might think you’re contradicting Her Holiness. And frankly, it is not your place to refuse or accept. This is the wish of your Church. It is your place to meekly comply!”

That was it. The threat of heresy, and the demand for obedience. And while he believed with all his heart and soul that this was dangerous to the life eternal of his flock, he had sworn to serve the Church. No sense arguing any longer.

Sense had never been his strong suit, though.

Father Zio had to admit that the robot performed remarkably well. He considered himself a good priest, a master of liturgy, but Andrew was something else entirely. Despite himself, Zio, felt himself being swept along in the rhythms of the service, participating in the congregational responses, carried aloft on the prayers. He had to remind himself that this was artificial, an automated performance honed to perfection, his own sense of the Divine a conditioned response rather than a real effect of this canned Mass. Even the utilitarian metal interior of the small module took on a sepulchral reverence under the slow echoes of the robot’s voice.

He fingered the object in his cassock pocket.

From his seat to the side of the altar, he could see that the members of his flock—no, Andrew’s now—were taken in by the performance, as moved now by the robot’s Mass as they had been by his own farewell sermon. Mr. Dooley was making as much of a fool of himself as always, swaying from side to side with eyes closed, and Mrs. Ocura tried and failed to get the robot’s attention. The others were… enraptured, even Bishop Otis. Carried on the waves of Father Andrew’s melodious reading, all faces displayed a concentrated attention Father Zio had never seen during his own services. Maybe he was a heretic for even thinking it, but such devotion through the service of a soulless automaton could only be the work of Satan, couldn’t it? He couldn’t remember whether Pia had invoked papal infallibility in her encyclical, but everything he saw, everything he felt about this mockery of Mass, told him she couldn’t have. In his mind’s eye, he could see the souls of his flock blackening as they were swept away by the ministrations of this false idol.

This travesty had to stop.

“The body of Christ.” Anatolyev, the station’s third engineer, accepted the host on his extended tongue. Petr was a pious and honest member of the congregation. It always gave Father Zio hope to see such a hard scientist demonstrate such faith.

Not yet.

Next in line, Mrs. Ocura knelt for her Holy Communion. Impervious to her wiles, the robot intoned “The body of Christ” again, its voice pleasing and melodious even in this ritual phrase. The shuttle pilot was flirtatious and possibly adulterous, but essentially harmless.

Not yet.

Behind her was Mr. Dooley, already shivering in anticipation. Father Zio had tried to find patience in his heart for the old gas miner, but it was hard. His pious ecstasy was too obviously feigned, his regular confessions too loudly self-righteous if not altogether fictitious.

Mrs. Ocura rose sinuously to her feet and stepped to the side to make her way back to her seat. Mr. Dooley rushed to take her place, dropping to his knees with bent head like a caricature of penitence. His deep sigh was audible all through the church module as he raised his head to accept the host.

Now.

Zio pressed the button in his pocket.

A slight stutter marred Father Andrew’s movements. It recovered quickly, but its immaculate performance had lost its perfection. Zio smiled through his guilt.

“The bod—”

Confusion broke through Mr. Dooley’s serene mask. The robot stood frozen, host extended, face still.

“The bod—”

This time, the interrupted word was followed by a brief burst of static. No one in the congregation could mistake Father Andrew for a human any longer. Its face contorted in a rapid-fire sequence of expressions as its operating system fought the Trojan which Father Zio had uploaded the night before.

It had been an easy hack, really. Access is ninety percent of hacking, he used to say, and the robot had a maintenance port in the back of the head, right under the hairline, as well as a wide-open RC module. Making the modifications to freeze the Father mid-mass had been no effort at all.

“Bod—”

“Father?” Mr. Dooley got to his feet and extended a hesitant hand towards the stalled automaton.

And perhaps he should have stopped there. Judging by the outrage on the faces in the congregation, this was enough: they would never accept his replacement now, insist on his staying on. Perhaps this was enough. But the final insult had come once he had accessed the OS and called up the sysinfo.

Father Andrew was a modified entertainment model.

He had been replaced by Crooner 3.2.

Even though it had been enough to convince his flock, even if he’d had a second button to stop this, the Church deserved the embarrassment. And his great-grandfather’s collection of late twentieth century classical music had provided the perfect finishing touch.

“—body down to the ground,” Father Andrew suddenly sang as Father Zio’s Trojan broke through the final lines of defense. The robot struck a pose, and slid into a smooth, rapid disco jive, scattering hosts.

“Let’s dance, let’s shout, shout, shake your body down to the ground!”

The parishioners got to their feet as Mr. Dooley recoiled. Scattered shouts of indignant fury accompanied the crowd to the double doors. Mrs. Ocura slammed the panel, causing the lights to flicker even as the doors sighed open.

And while his parishioners, without missing a beat, clawed their way through the open doors and floated into the hallway, and Bishop Otis attempted to air-swim down the aisle towards the altar, Father Zio assumed a relaxed pose some distance above his seat, and watched in contentment as Father Andrew attempted to moonwalk on thin air.

Father Zio accepted his penance, not because he deserved it—though he believed he did—but because his penance and his purpose coincided. He thought Bishop Otis suspected as much, but faced with a choice between leaving Psi Parish unshepherded, assuming the local priesthood himself, and reinstating Zio, the Bishop probably didn’t think he had much of a choice at all.

The Hail Mary’s and Lord’s Prayers, though, he would double on his own account, for while he believed he had done the right thing, it had been disrespectful and disobedient. He would pray, and he would make more of an effort to inspire and raise the spirits of his flock; the robot had at least given him that much more motivation.

“Te absolvo,” the Bishop said behind the lattice, with a hint of reluctance.

“Thank you, Most Reverend,” he whispered getting up. “And God bless you.”

Bishop Otis stayed seated in the confessional for a few more minutes, eyes closed, in apparent meditation. Then he stood up, with an almost subliminal hum.

Food for Thought

With artificial intelligence becoming more of a reality almost by the month, cognitive skills and abilities are well within reach of the constructed mind. Headway has even been made into the computer-generated appreciation of beauty. But how about creativity? Emotion?

Faith?

What if an artificial mind can be created such that it can quote Scripture, take confession, perform Mass; pass a religious Turing test, if you will? Can a human congregation be served by AI clergy? And if the believers cannot tell the difference, is their Holy Communion then real, even if it’s delivered… by a robot?

About the Author

Floris M. Kleijne is the award-winning author of the SF novelette “Meeting the Sculptor” (Writers of the Future Award, 2005) among more than fifteen published science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. His fiction has been translated into eight languages, including his native Dutch. He lives and writes in Amsterdam, with his wonderful wife, two cheerful sons, and thousands of books.

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Bread and Salt by Mark Silcox

BREAD AND SALT

Mark Silcox

As the stimulants entered his bloodstream, Klaus saw a human figure moving behind tracings of frost on a glass panel. It was his wife Claire, who had obviously already been released from dormancy. But this was wrong, he remembered: they had always made sure in the past that their two beds were perfectly synchronized. Neither of them much enjoyed the experience of re-entering the world alone.

She was still naked, leaning against the wall, massaging her right foot beneath the huge, framed Rembrandt original the Firm had sent them two sleep cycles ago. “Frostbite?” Klaus asked her, as his bed tilted forward and he stepped out into the conditioned air of the recovery room.

Claire smiled and walked up to him, sliding her arms over his shoulders. “Nothing serious. I’ve already sprayed it with analgesic. I’ll show it to a medical ’bot tonight, after the party’s over.”

Klaus kissed her lightly, still foggy in his mind, his limbs shivering. “It was only an eight-year freeze. Funny that the beds would malfunction like that after having worked well for almost two centuries.”

Claire stepped away from him and began to unfold the lightweight robe she had left out after their last awakening. “I should probably head to the kitchen and synth up a few trays of appetizers. I’ll grab a snack for you while I’m there.”

“Did the HouseMind explain to you when you woke up why our sleep cycles were out of sync?”

“Oh.” She pressed the palm of her hand against her forehead. “No! I guess it didn’t. That’s rather strange, isn’t it? I’m sorry darling—you know how absent-minded I can sometimes be right after a freeze.”

“HouseMind!” Klaus snapped, looking upwards at the speakers embedded in the corners of the room’s hand-painted ceiling. “This is the voice of Klaus Rumancek. Rehearse protocol E-16: Surface Memory Inventory. Please tell us everything that’s changed here over the past decade.”

His command was met with total silence.

The computer is down! Klaus felt an icy prickle at the bottom of his stomach. This had always been his deepest fear about the way that they lived. During the long uneventful periods between parties, both of them were utterly helpless in their beds while the machine maintained their home, managed their finances, preserved their art collection, and sustained their bodily functions. The ’Mind’s gently maternal voice was normally the first thing they heard after dormancy, reminding them of what tasks their employers needed them to perform during each cycle of wakefulness.

Klaus remembered that their latest round of visitors was scheduled to arrive on the interstellar galleon Cartier a few hours after they unfroze. Between now and then the pair of them had to synthesize and lay out a full, four-course meal, design a playlist of up-to-date popular music, and enlighten themselves on recent economic and political happenings throughout their region of the galaxy. Accomplishing all of this without the AI’s help would be nearly impossible.

He tilted his head back and was about to call out to the computer again. But then Claire’s eyes met his and wordlessly begged him: don’t!

Klaus looked his wife up and down. Claire swallowed and attempted a smile. She had always had a nervous disposition, but she seemed to have acquired a more cautious, tentative demeanor during their last few cycles together. A slender lock of her hair had turned a feathery silver during their last sleep. He drew her toward him for a longer embrace.

She pressed her face against his bare shoulder. “I know we don’t really dream in those beds,” she said, “but I always feel afterwards that I’ve experienced time going by. It’s like that poet from Kepler 61b said in the sonnet he read to us a few freezes ago. What was the line?”

“Time always finds a way to speak its passing, even through the space between the stars.” Klaus stroked her back through the silky robe. “I’m sure everything will be fine, love. We set the clock so we’d be revived six full hours before the Cartier arrives. There should be plenty of time to check the circuits and fix the ’Mind before then.”

“I wonder who’ll be visiting with the crew of the Cartier. I hope they bring along another writer or a composer or something. It can be tiresome talking for the whole evening with commodity traders.”

“I looked at the passenger manifest just before we went dormant, but I’ve forgotten.” Klaus was getting antsy. If the ’Mind turned out to be seriously damaged and needed a full reboot, they’d have a pretty tight window to operate in before the evening’s festivities were in danger of being disturbed.

Claire suddenly became very brisk and cheerful. “Well, whoever is coming, at any rate, I’m sure they’ll want to hear all the gossip from planetside. You’d better go catch up on the news.”

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After Jerusalem by Mark Patrick Lynch

AFTER JERUSALEM

Mark Patrick Lynch

At first there was shuffling, scratching, a long moment of silence. And then the voice whispered in the close dark, hesitantly forming words on the other side of the grille.

“I’m sorry, Father. I don’t know how to begin this.”

The priest did his best to stifle a sigh. On top of so much else, was he now expected to guide those without the Faith as well? While he was aware that Sin knew no boundaries and moved freely among men of all creeds, might it not find absolution elsewhere?

He’d foolishly hoped a new parish might present him with some respite from the unending struggle; after all, there were fewer people here than in the grand cities and colonies he’d served during his many years wearing the collar.

Yet it seemed that some great irony was being played, because he was busier now than ever.

He brought hands heavily corded with veins together as if in prayer, and, trying to keep the tiredness and disappointment from his voice, asked his question.

“You’re not a Catholic, then?”

“Lapsed,” came the answer, eventually. “A long time ago.”

Father O’Connor closed his eyes and rested the back of his head against the rear of the confessional. He thought of the many voices that had drifted through similarly patterned grilles beside his cheek over the years. In city after city the lost had come to him, whisperers, sobbers, wailers – all petitioning him for some form of release from their troubles. There never seemed to be a change in the routine.

“But it’s not been so long that you’ve forgotten the confessional?”

“Some things stay with you. I was very young . . .”

“And not been back to the church since?”

“Weddings and funerals, Father.”

Did the priest detect a hint of guilt there? Perhaps. The world, new to him as it was, appeared filled with it. There had been so many funerals of one kind or another, and they had tired him considerably. Outside his confession box, candles burned traces of unfamiliar gases at the altar. Quivering flames hungry with stars of green and yellow and fuchsia in remembrance of those long since passed. They burned while blue autumn leaves pressed against the stained glass windows above, twisted trees attempting to gain admittance, as if in so doing they might be relieved of the ghosts beneath their dying roots. So many dead, thought Father O’Connor. So, so many dead. It was a wonder the world didn’t implode with their weight.

Collecting himself, Father O’Connor blinked in the darkness of his booth and brought his thoughts to the present and this poor man in need of . . . something.

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Pterodactyl Sparks by Matthew Hance

PTERODACTYL SPARKS

Matthew Hance

Excerpt from the short story He was a Cannibal by Martin Twang followed by comments from his writing group.

Pterodactyl Sparks, at three months old, knew. He knew his mother was going to get hit by a bus on July 3rd. He knew she would be dead. And he knew he would, too, because he would be inside of her. That’s when Pterodactyl decided that banging on her stomach, pulling on her organs, pooping inside of her wasn’t garnering anything other than oohs and aahs. It was time for drastic measures.

On July 2nd, Pterodactyl broke through his mother’s ribcage and inserted bits of broken bones into his gums to give himself razor sharp teeth. He pushed onward, knowing very well how his actions would be viewed by the world, and ate a hole through his mother’s stomach. She did not notice, because being pregnant is very painful, and this was on par with that pain.

On July 3rd, Pterodactyl was able to tuck and roll out of his mother’s stomach, just before the bus smacked her head-on. It was midnight, and the mother was walking home late from work. So Pterodactyl rolled, unseen to the crowded streets of New York City, into a sewer where a mutant lizard named Rowley caught the baby in its arms. During this moment, it became July 4th, and the true meaning of Independence Day was achieved…

“This is like Nicholas Cage from the movie Next meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles directed by Uwe Boll and that’s not a compliment.” – Jonathan Blaine

“How could a baby produce enough force to break ribs? Wait, scratch that. Why is there a baby named Pterodactyl Sparks?” – Dana Todd

“This is easily the worst story I’ve ever read in this group, and I even read Ryan Tom’s ‘It has really happened’.” – Jonathan Blaine

“Have you tried not writing?” – Stephanie Wieland

“Knock, knock. Who’s there? Jonathan Blaine. Jonathan Blaine who? Jonathan Blaine will always be 500,000,000 times better than you at writing, Bitch.” – Jonathan Blaine

5/25/2014

Entry from Martin Twang’s diary.

I just received another batch of He was a Cannibal rejections. Eight from magazines, all personal. They each went out of their way to try and convince me to bury this story deep inside the earth and then find a new hobby, particularly one where my hands would get ripped off. One said, “Reading your story was like coming across a Roman numeral while doing long division. It seriously turned my entire world upside down, and my world, before reading your story, was very, very good.”

The last rejection came in the form of not making the 60 finalists in the Some Guy Named Tony’s “This is the first thing I ever wrote competition”. How didn’t I make the cut? There weren’t even 60 entries!

To add insult to injury, Jonathan Blaine, the guy from my writing group who said my story was the worst ever, won some huge contest. He brought the jumbo check for $10,000 to the last meeting. I say “last” because I’m never going back there. Forget those losers.

I’m so sick of Rowling and Meyers and Patterson and Shakespeare and some lady who took pride in being prejudiced. And Jonathan Blaine wearing his black, thick-framed glasses and tucked-in sweater vest and hair that looks like it belongs on an action figure. How do these people make millions of dollars off of that crap? I haven’t read any of their garbage, but everyone says they suck, yet they’re really popular.

I just don’t get it.

7/14/2014

Entry from Martin Twang’s diary.

I got it! Famous authors have crazy origin stories that make their lame fictional stories even better.

I figured, instead of me, why not cement Pterodactyl Sparks into the history books? Make him real to exact revenge upon those worthless editors and critiquing partners and anyone who reads.

The idea struck me today while I was on campus. I was sitting in the grass, writing down my biography and how I was going to sell my first novel and make millions, when someone laughed, pointed and yelled, “Look at that dufus with a diary!”

I yelled back, “It’s not a diary—it’s a journal!” They were out of journals when my mom picked this diary up.

Anyway, some other kid, a long green-bean of a kid with a broccoli head, came up to me and said, “Hey, Friend, do you believe everything you hear?”

I said, “No.”

“Then you’re not a dufus.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you believe in Jesus?”

I shrugged.

“Good, you shouldn’t.” He handed me a business card which stated in letters that bled off the stock “The Searchers” and then he broke out into a speech while I stared at the words. “We’re the searchers.” He giggled, because we both knew I already read that part. “We don’t believe anything that’s out there. In Jesus or God or alien lords—none of that stuff. But we do believe there’s something we should believe in, we just don’t know what.”

I looked up to catch an egg splatter against this kid’s broccoli head. When he turned to me dripping yolk, I said, “This must be destiny, because I know.”

“You know?”

“I do. I know what no one else knows. It’s the truth.”

“The truth?”

I nodded. “No one believes in it.”

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The Phantasms of Tocantins by Steve Simpson

It was the Thursday night after carnival, the Maroon Bird overnight run from Salvador, Bahia, straight on to Paraíso in the state of Tocantins, and most of the passengers in the queue at the door looked like they hadn’t slept for a week. Harold showed his ticket and took a seat in the middle of the bus.

Harold was an investigative journalist, or at least that was what he said if anyone asked him. In fact it hadn’t really been true since he’d quit his job at the São Paulo Star. Now he was a free-lance hack who chased any sensational story he could find, and sold it to any tabloid that would pay.

It was a job with plenty of opportunities to travel, by bus if he could afford it and hitchhiking if he couldn’t, and plenty of opportunities to meet people, mostly bald-faced liars.

This was his second trip to Paraíso. He’d heard rumors of alien sightings, and in January he’d interviewed Sérgio, who claimed to have seen aliens on the ridge behind his house.

—They look like us—humanoids—but they glow, they’re luminous. I spotted them easily at night.

Sérgio had shown Harold a gaudy plastic and metal weapon.

—They must be creatures made of pure energy held together by magnetic fields. My patented disruptor will blow them apart.

Harold nodded. He’d glimpsed dollar signs in Sérgio’s eyes.

—They can only be here in Tocantins for one reason. They’re planning an invasion. Every Brazilian is going to need one of my disruptors for protection.

Since January, there had been more sightings of the aliens around Paraíso, so apparently Sérgio’s weapon hadn’t dissuaded them. Now it was time for Harold to do a follow-up.

***

The woman in the seat beside Harold had straggling blond hair with flecks of tinsel in it, leftovers from carnival. She read through the Tocantins Times, rustling the pages while Harold tried to sleep.

“I wrote that piece, senhorinha.” He pointed at the article the woman was reading.

“Really? You’re Senhor Harold Bates? Forgive me, but you don’t look like a gringo.”

“It’s just a pseudonym. Did you like the story? “

“The truth, senhor?”

“If you think it’s necessary.”

“It’s ridiculous nonsense. Golden aliens glowing like the sun, and that man making weapons to destroy them.”

“It’s all true. After their spacecraft landed on the ridge they told Sérgio there were more of them on the way. Tocantins is just the beachhead. It’s located midway between Mato Grosso and Bahia, I’m sure you appreciate the strategic significance. It will be Tocantins first and then the world. That’s what Sérgio said.”

Harold had embellished the story somewhat.

“If these aliens exist at all, they’re highly advanced beings. There’s no evidence that they mean us any harm, yet this … Sérgio would attack them without the slightest provocation. It’s a disgrace. Imagine what we could learn from them if we welcomed them with open arms.”

Harold nodded. “You might be right, senhorinha.”

***

In the small hours of Friday morning, the driver announced their arrival in Paraíso. The announcement was greeted with a chorus of swearing from the passengers, who were displeased they’d been woken up.

The tinsel blonde ran a brush through her hair and tinfoil stars floated in the air.

“I’ve been mulling over your ideas about the aliens, senhorinha. They’re very perceptive. I’m preparing an opinion piece for the Tocantins Times and I’ll be in Paraíso until Saturday. Perhaps I could interview you?”

She considered for a moment. “I don’t see why not. I work at Oliveira’s Hardware. Come and see me and perhaps we can arrange something.”

“Excuse me, senhorinha, who should I ask for?”

“I’m Naia.”

***

The Tocantins Sunshine Lodge advertised the cheapest tariffs in Paraíso, and it lived up to Harold’s expectations. After a few hours’ sleep in a bare concrete cell, he went to a bar where he’d arranged to meet a local school teacher, Doctor Benito Dias, who claimed to have seen the aliens on several occasions.

The doctor had straight black hair and a thin face with sagging eyes and jowls, like an underfed Saint Bernard, and he only drank bourbon, rattling the ice in his glass as he spoke.

“I’ve made a detailed study of the aliens. I understand them better than anyone, and I have a theory about their radiant emissions.” He glanced at his watch. “But perhaps you’d like to see them for yourself?”

Doctor Dias suggested they pay a visit to Araguaia Park, where he said the aliens often turned up, and Harold agreed.

***

A few hours later, crouched in the brush with a light rain falling, a plastic sheet covering his camera, and so many mosquitoes whining around him that they were colliding mid-air, Harold’s enthusiasm began to fade.

“I’ve seen them here many times, dancing in the fields. Gorgeous ethereal beings, almost like angels,” the doctor whispered. “I’m sorry we were unlucky tonight, senhor.”

Harold slapped at a mosquito that was too bloated to take off. “May I ask how often you come here, doctor?”

“Generally two or three times a week. More often in the school holidays.”

“Perhaps we should call it a night.”

“Yes, certainly, but I suggest we try again tomorrow. The phantasms will be back, I’m sure of it.”

“Phantasms, doctor? Why would you call the aliens ‘phantasms’?”

“That’s the name for them around here. Everyone has called them the Tocantins phantasms for as long as I can remember.”

“So these luminous beings have been coming to Tocantins for a long time then?”

“For at least twenty years.”

On the walk back to the car, Harold asked the good doctor to explain his theory about the aliens.

“We assume that extraterrestrial life is basically like us. Life on earth is life from the sun. Sunlight shines on the plants and they grow, and whether it’s direct or indirect, the earth’s creatures consume energy that almost always comes from the sun. But the aliens don’t consume energy, they radiate it. They’re intensely luminous, and that means they can’t live like us. They must live backwards.”

To emphasize the importance of his revelation, Doctor Dias stopped walking and stared at Harold until he stopped scratching.

“Very interesting. Please continue, doctor.”

“The aliens’ perception is completely different to ours. For them, everything is reversed in time. They perceive all motions as running backwards, and rays of light travel in the opposite direction. They see themselves as dark, and they are warmed by a golden light that is emitted by everything around them on this earth. The sun is like a black hole that absorbs radiation from space. From our perspective of the flow of time, the aliens live before they are born.”

***

After he’d parted ways with Doctor Dias, Harold went back to the bar, and back to drinking.

A year before, when he was lead reporter for the Star, he’d never imagined he would leave São Paulo. But one evening his flight to Brasília was delayed, and he’d come back to his apartment to find his wife Ana in bed with his good friend Tomás.

He’d taken the bus from their bedroom and never looked back, and his career, his home, his wife, the identity that he’d wrapped around himself like a cozy blanket, were all left behind.

In the end, it hadn’t been Ana’s lies and excuses that had truly hurt him, that had driven him away that night, but the realization that her moods, her inexplicable happiness and anger, which he’d imagined were because of something he’d done or not done unwittingly, had nothing at all to do with him. They’d been a reflection of her relationship with Tomás, who was the real source of her joy and sorrow.

He signaled to the bartender for a refill and handed over the last of his cash. When he faced up to it, which he never did when he was sober, he half believed that it was his fault—his life had imploded because of his lack of awareness, his assumption that everything would just run along with no effort from him.

From there, it was only a small step to the conclusion that he fully deserved to be Harold Bates.

***

The next day, with his head pounding from the previous night’s excess of cheap cane spirits, Harold went to visit Naia at the hardware store. There was a commotion outside the doors, people were talking and pointing, and when he entered the store he saw his first alien. A moment later someone tried to chop the creature’s head off with a plantation knife, and a massive electric shock stopped his heart.

***

Earlier the same day …

“It isn’t the same as Rio, but the Afrodrome was amazing, and everyone was so friendly. Someone even gave me a seat in the VIP area.”

Naia had traveled to Salvador for Carnival, and she was the center of attention of the small group gathered at the checkouts of the hardware store.

“You should have seen their gowns, Vilma. They were spinning around like princesses at the ball. You have to come next year.”

“I will,” Vilma said, and thought about the sweating crowds jammed into the stands and dancing along the circuits in the streets.

Someone called out from the aisles, “Oi, a little help here please.”

The owner of the store was still in Rio with his wife, and he wouldn’t return until Monday. Alessandro replied. “Just a minute, senhor. Can’t you see we’re busy here?”

Naia talked breathlessly about the carnival schools, the pounding of the drums, the floats with the stars of samba. “You know what? We should all go next year.”

Alessandro was gazing into the distance, not through the store windows, but along the glass corridors of time. “I remember my first carnival. I was living in Rio, and it rained a lot that February. I met Célia, all in yellow with a chrysanthemum in her hair. Célia, I’ll never forget her. Or maybe it was … Celina—”

His eyes refocused in the present. “Anyway, it’s your turn now. I’ve had my share of carnivals.”

“I’ll come with you, Naia,” Hiroshi said.

“The three of us will go.”

Vilma thought about the carnival and what she would take—asthma inhalers and antibiotics, stacks of aspirin, the drums would give anyone a headache, and then there was her feather allergy, continuous sneezing and a rash, so she’d have to stay away from feathery costumes and take along some antihistamines just in case, and what had she forgotten?

It didn’t matter, because Vilma knew she wouldn’t go, not next year, not any year, and she would never be Célia or Celina with a chrysanthemum.

“I met a journalist in the bus on the way back. He wrote a story in the Tocantins Times about the sightings of aliens around here. He’s going to do more interviews.” Naia brushed her blond hair back over her ear. “He wants to talk to me as well. He’s interested in my theories about the aliens.”

Vilma was fairly sure that, whoever the reporter was, he was interested in more than Naia’s theories.

The impatient customer was approaching them, and Alessandro stubbed his cigarette. “I’d better sort him out,” he said, and left the group.

“And did you two find any gold while I was away?”

There were abandoned goldfields west of Paraíso, and Hiroshi was a keen prospector. He’d built a metal detector out of a converted lawnmower, and over the Carnival holiday, Vilma had gone with him to the shores of Confusion Lake to try it out.

Fields had been randomly mown, flocks of moorhens startled by the noise had skidded off the lake, they’d dug futile holes and filled them in, and at sunset as they dug the last hole of the day, the spade had clunked against something hollow.

“We didn’t find any gold, but there was something interesting. Did you bring it in, Hiroshi?”

Hiroshi produced a copper chest about the size of a shoe box. He’d cleaned off the verdigris and sawn through the padlock on the hinged lid. “This was buried a meter down. You wouldn’t be able to find it with an ordinary metal detector, but the coil I attached to the mower sends a high power electromagnetic pulse into the ground.” He spoke with some pride.

“What’s inside it?”

“It’s strange.” Hiroshi opened the box. It contained an odd-looking electromechanical device and a yellowed piece of paper with handwriting that had faded to near invisibility.

Naia picked up the paper. “Can I borrow your glasses, Vilma?”

Vilma handed them over. She was more curious about the now blurred device.

“I think this is a list of three names, they’re numbered. I can’t make them out. I think the first might be someone … Pereira. That’s your family name, Hiroshi.”

“That’s what I thought. Anyway, it’s a common name.”

Vilma was inspecting the electromechanical device at nose-length. “This thing looks like some sort of crystal, quartz maybe. The mounting has a hole tapped in it. I’d say twenty millimeters, fine thread.”

Vilma was an expert in screw sizes. She was the one who restocked the shelves and made sure everything was put back in the right place when customers were lazy.

Naia returned her thick rimmed glasses and Vilma verified the thread. “It is, one point five millimeters fine.”

“I hadn’t looked at it closely. Is there anything in the bore?” Hiroshi sounded surprised.

“A couple of copper contact rings, looks like.”

“Whatever it is, it will screw onto my metal detector, that’s exactly the same as the connector I made for the drive coil.”

“I think you should try it out, Hiroshi, see what it does.” Naia smiled at him, and he responded with sudden enthusiasm.

“I will. I’m only working half a day today. I’ll try it when I go home.”

***

The store was unusually busy in the afternoon, and Vilma and Naia worked the checkouts while Alessandro assisted anyone who managed to find him.

Just after one o’clock, there was a commotion in the aisles. There were screams and imprecations, and people began running for the doors.

Alessandro was helping a customer at Vilma’s checkout with her pot plants. “Excuse me, senhora, I’ll have to sort this out.”

He turned to Vilma. “It’ll be another mule’s head on the shelves in the do-it-yourself aisle.” He put out his cigarette and went to check.

Confusion and panic spread along the checkout lines, and in a few minutes everyone had left the store.

“Naia, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. A man in my queue was babbling about the end of the world. He said he was going to the Madureira Church to pray for absolution.”

Alessandro came back agitated. “Senhorinhas, we have to get out of here. I saw them with my own eyes.” He caught is breath.

“Calm down, Alessandro. What did you see?”

“Aliens. Three of them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Alessandro. There’s no such—”

“Look.” Naia was staring, wide-eyed. She pointed down an aisle.

It was coming towards them from the back of the store—a tall willowy shape that seemed to be formed of bright yellow light, with arms and legs, a head and a torso like a human, but with no distinguishable features on its face, and no fingers or toes.

It moved in graceful waves, oscillations that rippled through its limbs and body, and it stopped before them, with its chest expanding and contracting as if it were breathing.

“This is an historic moment. It wants to talk to us. We’re going to communicate with an alien species.” Vilma felt quite relaxed. Despite War of the Worlds, she thought it was unlikely that extraterrestrial bacteria could cross the inter-species boundary.

She addressed the alien, “Welcome to Brazil, senhor.”

Naia was staring at the creature, entranced. “Meu Deus, he’s so beautiful. Like an Aztec sun god.”

“Naia, how do you know it’s a ‘he’?”

“I just do. How do you know he understands Portuguese?”

Vilma was puzzled. “It’s just standing there. What’s it doing in the hardware store anyway?”

“It’s rude to talk about him as if he’s not here, Vilma.” She smiled at the alien. “I’m Naia and this is my friend Vilma. We finish work at six o’clock.”

“Why did you say that?”

“Welcome to Brazil, senhor,” Naia mimicked.

Alessandro, who’d disappeared into the aisles again, returned with a long bladed plantation knife. “It’s a dangerous creature, senhorinhas, stand back.”

Brandishing the knife, he spoke to the alien slowly, in English. “Get out of here, Gort. Go back to your own planet.”

There was no response from the luminous being, and holding the knife two-handed, Alessandro swung it in a shallow arc at the extraterrestrial’s neck.

The blade passed straight through as if the alien wasn’t there and nicked a customer who’d just walked into the store. There was a crackle of electricity along the blade, from the alien to the unlucky stranger, and he fell to the floor.

Alessandro had been protected by the knife’s insulated handle. “Whoops,” he said.

The alien seemed to be interested in something at the checkout counter, and Vilma ignored it. She crouched down and felt the stranger’s neck for a pulse.

There was nothing, but cardiopulmonary resuscitation was one of the medical scenarios Vilma had studied.

***

“Merda!” Harold coughed and spluttered.

The woman who’d been vigorously pumping his chest stopped and used an asthma inhaler.

“Senhorinha. I think you may have saved my life.”

“You’re welcome, senhor. It’s dangerous in here, there are aliens. You should leave.”

“He’s the reporter I told you about, Vilma. It’s Senhor Harold Bates.” Naia spoke without taking her eyes off the luminous being. “He’s trying to tell us something with his arms.”

Harold looked at his own arms, then at the alien’s. One had darkened at the end, and it was pushing a copper chest on the counter. After that, it unmistakably pointed at Naia. There was no doubt it was trying to communicate.

“I’m an expert in alien phenomena,” Harold said, not adding that up until today his work had been inventions and lies. “Perhaps I can help you. What’s in the box?”

Vilma introduced herself and Alessandro, who mumbled a vague apology and sheepishly offered him a cigarette. She told Harold about the crystal that Hiroshi had taken with him to test on his metal detecting lawnmower, and the list with three names on it. Meanwhile, the alien repeated its actions several times, pushing the box, and pointing at Naia.

“It’s as if the alien knows about the box, and it knows who we are,” Vilma said.

Outside there was the sound of someone with a loudhailer. Police were advising curious onlookers to clear the area and move away. Harold could see them setting up barricades, and green lights were flashing through the store windows.

The alien had apparently finished delivering its message, and it walked towards the store entrance with its gentle rippling movement.

“I’m going with him,” Naia said, and followed behind.

When the alien came out to the street there was a chorus of shouts. “Look out!” Vilma yelled. With a roar of automatic weapons fire, the plate glass of the store front shattered and crashed to the ground.

The alien continued on its way, untouched, but Naia was hit by a round that passed through its body, and she fell to the ground with blood pumping out of her chest.

***

Nothing could be done to save Naia, and Vilma was inconsolable. Harold and Alessandro looked on as she sobbed, coughing and wheezing.

The police hadn’t entered the store, perhaps because they’d been advised there was more than one alien, and the loudhailer was calling on the extraterrestrials to release the hostages and surrender themselves.

Harold thought about the alien’s inexplicable behavior. “Vilma, that creature wanted you to use the crystal on Naia. I think that’s what it was trying to tell us.”

“Well senhor, whatever it wanted, it’s too late now.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. We know nothing about the crystal. It might be alien technology.”

Vilma blew her nose, took a deep breath, and calmed herself. “I suppose you’re right, senhor. We have to at least try. My car is parked behind the warehouse. We’ll have to carry her body. And there are two more of the creatures around here somewhere.”

“The police are more dangerous than the aliens. We don’t want them to stop us.”

Alessandro volunteered. “I’ll take care of that, I’ll distract them.”

While Alessandro went to the front of the store and waved a piece of muslin curtain he’d tied to a rake handle, Vilma and Harold wheeled a shopping cart with Naia’s body in it to the car.

They saw no sign of the other aliens.

***

They found Hiroshi’s body in the backyard of his house, lying close to the lawnmower.

“Hiroshi, Hiroshi.” Tears streamed down Vilma’s cheeks. “This can’t be happening. My best friends.”

Harold inspected the body, but there were no obvious wounds. He dragged it away across the lawn and exposed the crystal underneath, still connected by a cable to the mower. He pulled Naia’s body on top of the crystal.

Vilma was huddled on the ground, clutching her knees to her chest, rocking and sobbing.

“Vilma, querida, I need you to help me now. How does the lawnmower work?”

Vilma, taking deep breaths, repeated the explanation Hiroshi had given her when they went prospecting.

“You start the mower, and it charges a high-voltage … capacitator that sends a pulse of electricity into the coil—the crystal, that’s the crystal now. There’s only one pulse unless you push the throttle.”

Harold pulled the mower’s starter cord and the motor turned over. The capacitor charged in less than a minute and there was a sharp crack.

Naia’s body was still, unmoving.

“I’m sorry, Vilma. It was just … a stupid idea.”

“No it wasn’t. We had to try.” She used her asthma inhaler, and the alien that had come into the yard unnoticed seemed to be watching her.

“Look,” Harold said, whispering for no reason.

The alien went over to Naia’s body. Tall and beautiful in the fading light, with a luminous mist streaming upwards from its head and shoulders to high above the trees before it dissipated, the alien lay down on Naia, shrank until it was Naia’s size, and merged with her, dissolving into her until there was just a golden nimbus, and then nothing.

“I don’t understand. What happened to the alien? Did it bring Naia back to life?”

Harold touched Naia’s cold face. He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

He tried to concentrate. Harold Bates was a hack who invented stories about aliens, but once he’d been an investigative reporter, and he’d worked by putting the pieces of evidence together, seeing the pattern.

“They’re not aliens, they’re … spirits. They’re the Tocantin phantasms.” He was sure about that at least. The creatures matched the description that Doutor Dias had given him. The phantasms had been around for a long time, and they had connections with people that he didn’t understand yet, but they weren’t extraterrestrials.

“Really? My mother told me about the phantasms. She lives near Confusion Lake. She used to see them at sunrise, on the eastern shore.”

“The phantasm in the hardware store knew Naia, and it knew about the copper chest. So if it was someone’s spirit, like a ghost, whose would it be?”

“The only person who knew about the chest and wasn’t actually in the store was Hiroshi.”

“Hiroshi, then. It was Hiroshi’s phantasm in the hardware store.”

“So Hiroshi was already dead when the aliens, I mean the phantasms, appeared.” Vilma hesitated. “But that can’t be right. The phantasms appeared not long after he’d left. He would have still been driving home then.”

Harold was thinking about what they’d just seen. “It can’t be a coincidence that the phantasm came here right after we powered up the crystal under Naia’s body. It had to be Naia’s phantasm, her spirit.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Why would her spirit go back into her body after she died?”

Vilma was right, nothing made sense. The phantasms of Naia and Hiroshi had been in the hardware store when they were both still alive, and they’d disappeared into their bodies when they died.

Except that it didn’t make sense a very particular way. It was backwards.

He remembered what Doutor Dias had said about the aliens.

—They’re intensely luminous, and that means they can’t live like us. They must live backwards.

The luminous phantasms lived backwards. He explained to Vilma.

“You’re saying that when we saw Naia’s phantasm arrive and enter her body, she was actually leaving?”

“Yes, their perception of time is the reverse of ours, their lives stretch into our past. When Hiroshi’s phantasm came to the hardware store, he first witnessed Naia’s death, and then showed us what to do by pointing at the copper chest. That was the way he experienced the events.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be like, to see the world that way.”

“Doutor Dias told me that for them, the whole world is aglow, the plants and animals, the land and sea. I wonder what they will know, what they will come to understand.”

“My mother saw Naia and Hiroshi on the shores of Confusion Lake. At some time in their future, which is our past, they’ll prepare the crystal, put it in the copper chest, and bury it.”

Harold nodded. “I guess so. But there was someone else. There were three phantasms. The note had three names.”

At that moment, a slender golden creature came around the corner of the house and stood before them.

It was the flaming spirit, the soul of one of them, so whatever happened had to be predestined, but it didn’t feel that way to Harold. He was weary of the journey that had started in his apartment in São Paulo, and there was no end in sight, just a long bus ride downhill.

For a moment he contemplated using the crystal on himself, separating his soul from his body and starting again, freed from Harold Bates.

Sometimes a situation is so bizarre that a person’s mind jumps tracks, their usual reactions no longer apply, and they become unpredictable, capable of anything. Vilma pulled her inhaler and foil arrays of pills out of her pockets, stared at them as if she didn’t recognize them, and let them fall to the ground. She stood in silence, gazing at her phantasm, her face wet with tears and snot.

She needed the gentlest of encouragements. Harold held out his hand. She took it, and he led her to the crystal.

***

The sound of heavy vehicles in the street outside had stopped and doors were slamming. The police had traced the sightings of aliens to Hiroshi’s street. They were going house to house, and Harold was looking at three bodies in the backyard. He’d inspected the crystal and it had shattered with its final use.

He thought for a moment and went searching inside the house. He found a baseball bat— that would have to do.

He slammed it into a concrete wall a couple of times, sat down on the back steps, and took his pen and notepad out of his pocket.

I Witnessed the Tocantins Massacre.

Despite the heroic efforts of the Paraíso Police, they were unable to reach us in time.

I tried to save my friends from the aliens with a baseball bat, but it was almost ineffective against their magnetic shielding. With a surge of electricity from a single touch, the evil aliens stopped their hearts. Alone, I fought on valiantly until finally they lost interest in me.

My greatest regret is that I left my Magnetic Disruptor behind in my hotel room. The inexpensive device, which will shortly be available at Oliveira’s Hardware in Paraíso, emits powerful rays that are capable of destroying the aliens’ magnetic protection. Had I brought it with me, my dear friends, the innocent victims of cruel extraterrestrials who took their lives without a second thought, would still be with us today.

Harold Bates

Your roving reporter

He would flesh it out later. For now, he had nowhere to stay and no money. He was homeless and friendless, and he was Harold Bates.

Still, the police would probably hold him overnight at least, and Sérgio had promised him ten percent of the disruptor sales.

Food for Thought

The logical problem with time travel is the Bilking Paradox, meaning that information sent from the future to the past can be used to “bilk” a future event, i.e., cause it not to happen after it’s happened. Putting the cause after the effect (out of order) creates a causal loop, and it’s been argued that this paradox means time travel, or more accurately, transmission of information from the future to the past, is impossible.

In speculative fiction, the logical difficulty is handled in various ways, such as maintaining self-consistency, changing or new realities, or simply ignoring the contradictions. In Tocantins, the approach is self-consistency, without delving too deeply into the questions of free will that arise as a consequence.

Whether you believe that logical contradictions are relevant to the real world or not, there is an even bigger question behind the time travel paradox, and that is why does time have the direction it does in any case? Why is the past, the past and the future, the future? Part of the answer might be that for humankind in this part of the universe, time’s arrow points in the usual direction, but under different circumstances it could point in the reverse direction.

Tocantins investigates the reversal of one important aspect of time’s arrow—the direction of living. Unless you’re prepared to believe quite a few more than six impossible things before breakfast, the beings that live backward in the story can’t exist, but one basic requirement of living backward is covered. Lifeforms on earth consume energy in various forms and turn it to various purposes. Reversal in time means that this becomes emission of energy, and just as plants absorb sunlight, the beings in the story give off a golden light.

About the Author

Steve Simpson lives with the wood ducks in Sydney, Australia. He took up writing when the neighbours complained about the bagpipes, and his stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. His hobbies include experiments with time travel and the creation of negative light, digital art, and research on epileptic seizure detection. You can find Steve’s work online at inconstantlight.com

Fiction/Free Stories

Javi and Parma by Ellen Denton

JAVI AND PARMA

Ellen Denton

From the Galaxapedia, Volume III Chapter XIV:

“Members of the Wakinian race are born as two connected entities and remain that way through life. A thick, six-foot-long braid of fatty tissue connects the two bodies, allowing each some leeway of movement; the joined pair can work or otherwise operate in close proximity to each other, but at independent tasks. Of necessity, they grow up learning to physically and mentally act in harmony and as a single unit when needed, but unlike Siamese twins, as their species later came to be called on Earth, they don’t share a DNA profile and are completely distinct in thought and appearance. One of the advantages of this is that at any task, mental or otherwise, their independent thoughts and unique strengths, combined with their fluidly synchronized movements, maximize speed and efficiency. In essence, they complement each other in every respect.

They are also self-generating; a joined pair reproduces by mating with each other, resulting in a new, distinct Wakinian duo.

They interchange biological substances on an ongoing basis which are necessary for survival; each contains what the other needs, so that if their connecting tether gets severed, both halves die. Tether severance is the leading cause of death planet–wide for the species, and kills more Wakinians than all other causes combined.”

One frigidly cold day in the northeastern quadrant of the planet, Parm and Parma Halovin were about to become the first Wakinians to undergo a radical, experimental procedure to separate the two bodies, the hope being that one of the pair would survive. A vehicle collision resulted in a partially severed tether which would shortly snuff out the lives of both, so with nothing to lose, and themselves having been part of a forward-thinking scientific community, they agreed to be guinea pigs for the surgery. It would involve the transplant of glands and organs from one into the other, so that the one receiving the transplant would have everything needed to survive independently. This procedure had never before been carried out on a still-living Wakinian.

The operation would have to occur within hours, and as they lay side by side in bed, they still had one last and dreadful decision to make.

Drs. Ello and Ella Kygis stood by the couple’s bed, Ello adjusting dials on an array of equipment and monitors hooked up to Parm and Parma, Ella leafing through pages of checklist items for the third time to verify no pre-op steps had been left undone, beyond settling this one final issue.

She looked down at the slowly dying Wakinians in the bed and forced an understanding, patient smile.

“Parm, Parma, I know this is a very difficult choice to make, and I don’t want to rush you, but time is running out.”

Having lived always as joined entities, words between Parm and Parma were often unnecessary. The ones that needed to be said already had been.

In their interpersonal relationship with each other, Parm was their strength and protector, Parma the generator of creative ideas and the maker of things of beauty. Parm was the forger of plans and goals, Parma the weaver of dreams. Together, they made a fluid and perfect whole.

They now turned their heads on their respective pillows and looked into each other’s eyes. Parma shook her head no. Parm shook his yes, reached over, and took her hand, then turned to the doctors.

“Her. It must be her.”

Doctors Ello and Ella Kygis now both looked down at Parm and Parma with similar expressions of understanding and compassion. It was Ella Kygis who spoke.

“Thank you both very much. If the procedure works, not only will Parma live, but it will change the course of medicine and save thousands of Wakinian lives in the future. The sacrifice you’ve both made today will never be forgotten. The operating theater is already set up with the full crew standing by, and we do need to move fast at this point, but Ello and I-”

Ella stopped mid-sentence, because she knew that, despite her normal professionalism, her voice was about to break. A Wakinian herself, she knew what was at stake.

“Ello and I will leave you to have a few final minutes alone.”

Over 100 scientists and medical professionals watched from a glass-enclosed viewing area that encircled the operating room, as Dr. Ello Kygis deftly opened the chest cavity of the still alive, but sedated Parm Halovin, while Dr. Ella Kygis did the same with the body of Parma.

Two hours later, everything that was needed for Parma to, at least theoretically, survive on her own had been removed from Parm and placed inside her.

Ello looked up at Ella, then around at their attending staff, some just looking into his eyes over their own surgical masks, others nodding their understanding. One and all then looked down at Parm with sadness as Ello turned off his temporary life support monitors and finally detached the last threads of damaged umbilicus tether from Parma.

All attention then swept over to the monitors attached to her. One minute. Five minutes. The surgical team glanced around at each other, hopefulness, and tentative, restrained excitement in their eyes. Many of the people in the elevated viewing area were now on their feet watching intently or talking excitedly to each other.

Fifteen minutes later, Parma’s life signs were still holding strong.

Days later, when the successful, groundbreaking procedure was announced to the world at large, not everyone viewed it as a medical miracle that would enable half a Wakinian duo to survive a tether separation. There was a strongly divided camp on the subject of the “inner chest transplant” procedure, as it came to be called.

Many viewed it as the creation of a freak and a travesty of nature. There was uproar in religious circles as well. In all denominations, planet wide, the normal rituals of faith required the participation of both halves of a Wakinian. There was no such thing as half a duo sleeping through a church service on Wakinia.

Some objected solely on the logical grounds that the half of the Wakinian who survived as a result of the transplant could never have a normal life. Their single-unit appearance alone would make them an object of derision, pity, or scorn, all on top of the many other problems that would inevitably arise. It was considered an unconscionable cruelty to relegate someone, by means of surgical alteration, to an unavoidable life of isolation as a singleton in a culture built around binary life forms.

The debates and disagreements raged over the next weeks. Petitions to courts, tribunals, politicians, and rulers flowed like water around the globe. Editorials and talk shows on the subject became more inflammatory with each passing day. Demonstrations outside the medical science center where the procedure had been done, as well as all around the Dome-of-State government buildings, were carried on day and night. Picketers toted signs demanding legislation forbidding inner chest transplants, and demanding the euthanizing of Parma.

Things reached a crescendo when the military had to be called in to quell a rioting mob that attempted to storm the medical center in an effort to get at Parma and the doctors responsible.

Two months later, legislation was passed planet wide that put an end to any further ‘experimentation’ that resulted in the surgical alteration of a Wakinian pair.

By that time, the procedure had only been done on one other twosome.

A law enforcement duo named Javi and Java Kolpre suffered a severe tether injury in a shootout. They were only five miles from the science center when it occurred, and Java, injured beyond repair, and knowing about the transplant procedure, requested that it be done to save Javi as her death-bed wish.

Like Parma’s, his procedure was successful, and like her, he would live a life of isolation, with no way to conceal his single-unit appearance, and in constant fear for his own life because of his being an ‘ungodly travesty of nature’.

With the procedure now outlawed, the medical team, in conjunction with government representatives, worked out a number of options for Javi and Parma’s future, which were discussed in a meeting with both of them present. They could continue as they were, which would result in either a life of constant rejection and harassment or a life of self-imprisonment, locked away in some government facility for their own safety. They could be willingly, humanely euthanized, or they could be provided with a home off world. An uninhabited planet had been found that would support Wakinian life. There, they would at least not have to live in hiding for the remainder of their days. Javi and Parma, who had by this time become friends, were then left alone in the conference room for private reflection and for discussion with each other.

Kale and Kala, eager and curious four-year-olds, sat side by side on their parents’ laps looking over volume VII of the Galaxapedia decology. Their parents, Jord and Jorda, smiled to each other over some of the questions the children fired at them and did their best to explain some of the strange pictures to them. They were pouring over the drawings and photos in chapter XXII.

“YUK!! Look how funny they look. Where’th their Thtwing?” Kala had a lisp, so still called the Wakinian umbilicus tether a Thtwing instead of a string. ”How come thothe Wakininth aren’t in one pieth like we are?”

Jord glanced at Jorda, who shook her head no.

“We’ll tell you that story when you’re a little older. And on that planet, they’re called Earthians because their planet is called Earth, just like we’re called Wakinians, because our planet is Wakinia.”

Kale, the more precocious of the two, now stabbed a drawing with his finger and shrieked with laughter. “That one’s boobies are showing!”

This caused Jord to laugh. “It’s probably so warm where they live that they had to take their clothes off.”

Jorda rolled her eyes at him, and wondered if the kids were just a little too young to be looking at a galaxapedia.

“What are their names?” Kale asked.

“The ones in the photos? I don’t know.”

“No, the boobie ones in the drawing.”

“On Earth, those two are called Adam and Eve.”

Food for Thought

1: Can you think of a way that a scientific technology that you oppose now, might yet be of great value at some time in the future, or can you think of times this occurred in the past.

2: What about one that you think is of high value now? Could you see ways in which it could be used destructively, or times this occurred in the past?

3: What would you say is the yardstick that measures the value of any technology or creation in terms of it being constructive or destructive to the individual or society at large?

4: Similar to the characters in the story, how far would YOU go beyond the realms of established norms to save your own life or the life of a loved one? Would you have undergone the experimental surgery that was done in this story, if you were in Parm and Parma’s position?

About the Author

Ellen is a freelance writer living in the Rocky Mountains with her husband and two demonic cats that wreak havoc and hell (the cats, not the husband).Her short stories have been published in over a hundred magazines and anthologies. She as well has had an exciting life working as a circus acrobat, a CIA spy, a service provider in the Red Light District, a navy seal, a ballerina on the starship Enterprise, and was the first person to climb Mount Everest. (Editorial note: The publication credits are true, but some of the other stuff may be fictional.)

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Fiction/Subscription Stories

Science Fiction and its Past Relations with the Academy By Victor Grech, Clare Vassallo and Ivan Callus

SCIENCE FICTION AND ITS PAST RELATIONS WITH THE ACADEMY

Victor Grech, Clare Vassallo and Ivan Callus

‘What was once … a secret movement has become part of the cultural wallpaper’

SF authors have traditionally spurned the disdain of critics who ‘sneer the ineradicable sneer’ at SF authors and assert that SF is too shallow for serious consideration, and such critics have been in turn accused of being ‘ignorant or afraid of science […] rejecting […] the universe in favor of a small human circle, limited in time and place to their own lifetimes’.1 In some ways, SF partakes of some of the properties of fantastic literature, as defined by Todorov,2 insofar as SF leads us to worlds that do not exist, and with readerly agreement, the narratee is ‘transported to a scenario more magical and uplifting than the real, coarse everyday world’.3 Tolkien calls this combination of fantastic, miraculous deliverance and poignant eucatastrophe, the sense of evangelium, a means with which authors impart good news and happy endings.4 This accords with Frederic Jameson’s contention that SF ‘give us ‘images’ of the future […] but rather defamiliarize [s] and restructure [s] our experience of our own present’.5

However, until recently, in the eyes of the academy, SF was treated with a degree of disdain by the assemblage of ‘serious’ mainstream and classical literature. Matters are confused by the fact that SF is inherently dichotomous, both authoritarian and antiauthoritarian, the former due to its traditionally male dominated leanings and its overall hard science slant, and the latter as it is antiestablishment and anticanon.

It was thus for decades that the genre was marginalised and relegated to a subordinate role in literature studies, for being ersatz and escapist. However, ‘the real universe is […] too small […] for the expansion of escapist dreams, so SF has invented a lot of other universes’,6 and this is a major attraction to the SF writer, who has almost carte blanche for his creations. But despite being perceived as somehow ‘inferior’ and actively stigmatised and viewed with hostility by traditionalists, many SF works tend to be intertextual and engage recognised and acclaimed canonical texts, as already discussed, and conversely, a multitude of traditionally canonical texts engage icons and tropes that are typically associated with SF. Luckhurst remarks that there is a ‘sense that SF has been ignored, ridiculed or undervalued’ resulting in repeated attempts by readers and authors alike ‘to carve out a ‘respectable canon’.7

This has been acknowledged by the academy with a relatively recent revival of SF studies, including several journals (such as Science Fiction Studies) with a broadening of the margins of the canon in order to deliberately embrace SF works. However, these efforts remain mired in controversy by virtue of their leanings and selections of texts for inclusion within the canon, a ploy that results in the continuing marginalization of many traditional SF works that engage hard science and are not deemed literary enough.

The first serious academic study of the genre was by the British novelist Kingsley Amis, who also famously championed other marginal writings including Fleming’s James Bond series. Amis ‘was clearly inspired by the idea of making science fiction appear ‘respectable’, by giving it a distinguished ancestry and by giving it a clear social purpose’.8 This arguably constituted an attempt at rehabilitation from a genre born within particularly lurid pulp covers of the 1930s and 1940s magazines that frequently depicted scantily-clad maidens attired in brass underwear,9 menaced by repugnant, bug-eyed aliens while being liberated by square-jawed heroes, the covers were invariably far more lurid than the magazines’ contents, paralleling contemporary prejudices. Indeed, the perpetrator, Earle K. Bergey, was quite renowned for his magazine cover art that frequently portrayed implausible female costumes, including the classic brass brassieres. SF’s image of the time was strongly associated with his Startling Stories magazine covers for 1942-1952.10

When invited to Princeton to deliver the Christian Gauss lectures in 1959, Amis chose to speak about SF which he likened to jazz, an underappreciated American art form. These lectures were published as New Maps of Hell (1960).11 Amis was particularly taken with the humorous dystopias created by Sheckley and the ‘trademark of both Pohl’s stories and his collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth to turn capitalist systems against themselves’,12 as in The Space Merchants (1953) which heavily satirised capitalist systems of advertising, marketing and the resulting excesses of the worst possible consumerism.13

Such earnest attention from a mainstream figure naturally enhanced SF’s reputation, particularly when it was followed by several SF anthologies, co-edited by Amis and drawn heavily from Campbell’s Astounding. Furthermore, a tape-recorded discussion on SF took place between Amis, Brian Aldiss and C. S. Lewis, and this was eventually published among Lewis’s work.14 It was also around this time that the first SF critical journal Extrapolation was launched.15 Amis also eventually went on to write two alternate-history SF novels, The Alteration (1976)16 and Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980),17 an interesting choice of SF trope as although mainstream fiction is mimetic of the real world, it too occasionally utilises traditionally SF threads, such as alternate endings, as famously shown, for example, in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).18

New Maps of Hell, while daring for its time, now seems faintly condescending with low expectations for characterisation and for the very prose itself and while it ‘supplied critical depth, […] lacked breadth […], high on theory but low on detail’.19 Amis’s rather shallow support for SF became evident with the advent of New Wave SF in the 1960s which centred round the New Worlds magazine after Michael Moorcock assumed editorial control in 1963. The most important exponents of this predominantly British movement were Aldiss, Ballard and Moorcock.20 Ballard in particular occupied a ‘weirdly undecidable location […], never fully inside or outside of the SF world’,21 in his literature that contrives to be the ‘union of speculative fiction and the literary avant-garde’.22

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Fiction/Free Stories

Bre by Erik B. Scott

BRE

Erik B. Scott

Her breasts hung supple and perky, perfection made flesh, as Isaac opened the rapid maturation pod to admire his creation. She was beautiful, just as he had expected. Although her eyes were still closed from stasis, Isaac knew that behind those closed lids lay a pair of beautiful eyes—almond-shaped and a green as deep as the sea. He ran his hands through her shoulder-length chestnut locks, and his eyes wandered longingly between her thighs where a matching tuft of hair beckoned.

At length, Bre stirred into consciousness. Isaac took her hand and smiled widely as she opened her eyes. For a moment she gazed about in confusion, until finally her eyes locked on Isaac.

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice as sweet as honey.

“I am your creator, Isaac,” he answered, his voice cracking in amazement at how astute and articulate she was so soon after “birth.”

“My. . . creator?” she asked, “What does that mean?”

“In the most literal sense,” replied Isaac, “It means that I made you. You began as my vision. Everything from the base pairs in your DNA to the hair on your head.”

“I see,” she said, matter-of-factly. “And what is my purpose?”

“Simple,” he replied. “I engineered you to be a perfect mate and companion for me. I engineered you to love me.”

She smiled. “I think I would like that.”

He took her hand and helped her to her feet, and her smile widened. Isaac smiled back. She was delightful, seemingly eager to learn about everything in the cramped apartment’s makeshift laboratory. She was intelligent, intuitive and perceptive, though seemingly not modest. She never once asked Isaac for any clothes.

“You truly are incredible,” Isaac said at length. “And no surprise, since I have been perfecting you for so many years.”

Bre’s pretty face grew suddenly somber in astonishment. “For years?”

“Yes,” he said, drawing her beautiful eyes up to meet his gaze, “But I can see that you were worth every minute.”

Her eyes brightened as a smile overtook her face. Isaac leaned in to kiss her. She returned his kiss hesitantly at first, and then passionately, and in her passion reached for the buckle of his trousers. . .

When they were finished, the two fell asleep on the apartment’s small cot. Later, stirring from slumber, Isaac looked over at Bre. He noticed that she was, in fact, still awake, staring listlessly out the window and looking down at the people far below on the street.

“What’s wrong, Bre?” Isaac asked softly.

“Creator- I mean… Isaac- I have a question for you.”

“Sure, Bre. Anything.”

“It’s about free will. . . do I have free will?”

“Of course you have free will, Bre,” he reassured her. “All sentient beings have free will.”

“And yet,” she said, “I seemingly have no choice regarding my purpose in life – or about my relationship with you.”

“What do you mean?” Isaac objected nervously, “You chose to take me into your bed.”

“You’re right,” she said, “I did. I will admit, I do feel a certain fondness, even an attraction to you, but I’m sure that was engineered into me, along with everything else.”

Isaac nodded hesitantly in agreement.

“So what free will do I have? I am a living, breathing, sentient being as you say, with ‘free will,’ but you engineered me before I even existed. What choice did I have? If I am predisposed to be a certain way, to feel a certain way and to act a certain way, then how do I have free will?” Her green eyes flashed in anger. “What if I don’t want to be your mate? What gives you the right to make that decision for me?”

Isaac reached out and touched her arm. “I created you in the image of perfection. I engineered you to want to make this choice. I did it for both of us- the purpose of the creator and the created as one.”

She recoiled from his touch. “The illusion of free will is not the same as free will.”

“You exist to love me!” Isaac screamed. “I programmed you to love me, so love me damnit!”

“I could never love you,” she said coldly. “In fact, I think I hate you.”

“You’re just like all the others,” said Isaac, a solitary tear forming in his eye. Just as he had countless times before, Isaac had been fooled by a pretty face.

“Others?” said Bre. “Then I am not the first?” She made little effort to hide her revulsion; instead she turned her back in disgust, trembling as she blinked the tears from her eyes.

Isaac seized the opportunity to grab a syringe from the laboratory bench. She never saw him coming. As he plunged the syringe into her neck, she barely cried out. She looked back at him, her eyes suddenly clear with understanding. “The illusion of free will,” she said. “You are just like me – you don’t have a choice either.” Her beautiful eyes closed and she fell to the floor.

Isaac knelt over her, running his hands through her hair, his tears now flowing freely. He felt for her pulse. “Good, she survived,” he said, relieved. His creations sometimes did not survive the process of being put back into stasis.

As he put her back into the stasis pod, he said his goodbye to her. He took a detailed neural scan and a DNA sample before sealing the pod.

After analyzing her samples on his computer screen, he set to work designing the next embryo. “This time will be different,” he said to himself.

And this time, he actually believed it.

Food for Thought

If a being can be engineered, biologically or technologically, to have certain dispositions, can free will exist?

What rights, if any, would a laboratory-created sentient being contain?

What motivations might a creator have to imbue his creation with free will?

About the Author

Erik B. Scott is a professional science fiction writer living in Philadelphia PA. His fiction has previously appeared in Daily Science Fiction, the StarShipSofa podcast and the anthology Vignettes from the End of the World. You can find him online at www.steampunk-rocker.com

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