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The Problem Child

by Richard Lau

“Strive not to be a success, but rather of value.”

Albert Einstein

#

Dear Astrid,

I hope you and your family are well.

I have been thinking a lot about mortality lately. Please don’t be alarmed. I am in good health and so is Elise.

My thoughts are grim only due to a recent visit with an old acquaintance. I fear that will be the last time I see him alive, for good friend Hermann is so ill, he is probably on his deathbed.

Like most people in his situation, he has concerns about his affairs after his death. And while I was not a medical man with a miraculous cure, I thought I could provide the comforting presence of an old friend and an attentive, empathetic ear.

He is most worried about his son, Albert. The only thing the boy seems to have achieved so far in his life is being a school drop-out and a draft-dodger. I’m sure there were extenuating circumstances (there always are such circumstances), but Hermann’s recent business dealings have not been favorable, and I doubt he will leave his son much of an inheritance.

At least the boy has gotten employment at a patent office. I’m not sure how long he’ll be able to hold the job, though. There doesn’t seem to be much work, and he spends most of his time daydreaming.

Hermann says his son is solving problems inside of his head. He and I both wish the boy would spend more time solving the problems outside of his head, like training for a real career, something with a good income for when he starts a family of his own.

Ironically, the boy says that’s exactly what he is doing, solving problems that exist outside of his head, by using his imagination to model the characteristics and behaviors of light and gravitation through gedankenexperiments.

Bah! ‘Thought experiments’ are just another way of saying useless and wasteful ‘daydreaming,’ if you ask me!

As for starting a family, the boy has already done so, as illegitimate and messy as his other misadventures. If only he had kept that experiment just in his thoughts!

But I digress. The boy does seem to have some potential. He seems proficient in maths and sciences but displays an almost rebellious lack of interest in other subjects. On many an occasion, his social skills have been found wanting.

I soon received the impression that my discussion with my friend was doing more harm than good, resulting in aggravation rather than peace.

I left Hermann to rest and recover what strength he had left and hopefully the dark clouds circling his head, threatening one final thunderstorm, would dissipate with my departure.

I left my friend’s home feeling helpless and deeply dissatisfied.

Eventually, though I have no recollection of consciously doing so, I found myself stopping by the patent office where Hermann’s son worked.

He was glad to see me. I tried to relay to him the troubles burdening his father’s remaining time here on Earth, but the young man seemed more intent on showing me the doodles in his notebook. I don’t remember much of them. Mostly crude boxes representing rising and falling elevators. Perhaps he fancied himself on becoming a hotel elevator operator someday? Where was the ambition in that?

I paid no attention to his mumblings, my head filled with the thoughts of my dying friend and how disappointed he must be in his son. I left the patent office, feeling no happier, hopeful, or fulfilled than when I had left my friend’s gloomy residence.

A week or so later, I was invited to attend a private meeting of a local philosophers’ club.

While the food was delectable and the drinks exemplary, I must admit that much of what they discussed went over my head. I tried to participate the best I could by relaying some of young Albert’s ideas, but I am positive that I didn’t explain them properly or sufficiently. My efforts were received with one-word noncommittal responses and patient ambiguous nods.

However, there was one concept that I not only understood but was also greatly intrigued by.

What if there were many other worlds very similar to our own but created as a branch each time a decision is made? As a decision is followed in our world, the opposite decision is made in an alternate world resulting in vastly different outcomes.

For Albert’s sake, I hope this theory is true. Perhaps, in another world, the boy will be a success.

With much love,

Your brother, Hans

#

While elsewhere, another letter is sent and received.

Dear Astrid,

I hope this letter finds you well.

Elise and I are in good health.

Alas, the same cannot be said for my good friend Hermann. I’m certain that I have mentioned him to you before.

He is very ill, and I am pretty certain he is resting on his deathbed. And this after a very long life of business troubles and hardship.

One of his few bright spots and sources of pride is his son Albert. The young man continues to fill his father’s heart with joy, even under these grim circumstances.

He is teaching at a university, and, while not a genius himself, I am certain that he is instructing the great thinkers of the next generation.

I stopped by to visit the young man. He is happy with his career but saddened he cannot spend more time with his ailing father. The burden of being a professor (grading papers, meeting with students, adjusting to ever-evolving curriculums, and keeping up in the various scientific fields) are consuming much of his time. Furthermore, he has married and is starting a young family of his own.

“I don’t even have time to daydream anymore,” he lamented to me. “My head is filled with obligations and divining ways to meet them in a day that only contains twenty-four hours.”

Though I am saddened by the near, eventual departure of my friend Hermann, Albert and his success fill me with a tremendous hope for the future.

With much love,

Your brother, Hans

~

Bio:

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

Philosophy Note:

A “problem child” is typically a youngster who is undisciplined and has trouble fitting into society. However, in my story, I invert the concept, and the familiar “problem child” solves problems using his imagination. But what is the definition of success? And could a traditional view of success had held back something even greater?

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The Book With All The Ring’s Marvels

by Arturo Sierra

It is a well understood fact of galactic sociology that any civilization with the resources, know-how, and time to build a ringworld has no need to do so. Consequently, those that embark upon this kind of colossal engineering are considered eccentric. Other, saner civilizations do well by evading the freaks and coming up with unexpected reasons for a tour of the Magellanic clouds. Any excuse to avoid contact with the weirdos.

The best that can be said for megastructures is that they serve as great tourist attractions, once the builders vanish into oblivion, as inevitably happens; well worth the centuries of interstellar travel it takes to visit the sites. For some can be found here and there, however frowned upon they might be: Dyson spheres, matrioshka brains, Shkadov thrusters, and, of course, ringworlds. Strewn at random across the Galaxy, they are most often abandoned, crumbling ruins, the surrounding debris all that remains of the foolhardy engineers. It’s just that, as galactic years go by, and then the galactic centuries, ennui starts to seep into even the most sensible of cultures. It becomes the driving force in a society that has moved post-scarcity and then post that, too. Some civilizations find themselves with little argument to avoid eccentricity and come up with radical purpose.

Such is the case of the Milotans, in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way. Traditionally thought to be a dignified species by other galactic powers, nobody foresaw them suddenly deciding to dismantle planets and rearrange them in a neat circle around their star. The first time anyone heard of this insanity outside the Commonwealth was when President of Presidents Ölóssa gave a speech to officially kickstart the great work. Though most Commonwealth citizens considered it a rousing declaration, a sphere of extra-empty space, a dozen parsecs in diameter, quietly formed around ground zero as other civilizations cringed away.

Seen from very far away by someone with the eyes of a cosmic eagle, the construction process would have appeared like a swirl in a sink, only the sink was scaled to stellar proportions for the use of some obscure sort of god. Glittering drones moved in a carefully choreographed dance to place beams of hyper-rigid material in the correct orbits. Five gas giants were vacuumed, for lack of a better word, producing brightly colored hurricanes and eddies, storms illuminated from within by lightning as they disappeared into electromagnetic suction hoses. Gigatons of gas were slurped up to moon-sized factories, where matter was syphoned to make degenerate-nuclei materials. But all in all, construction of the Milotan ringworld went forth without drama—indeed, by some standards it was a subdued affair. No civil wars erupted, no crime-adjacent contractors skimmed off the top with catastrophic results, no armadas of doom were sent to exterminate neighboring primitives and steal their resources. The most exciting thing that happened during this time was President Ölóssa calling a press conference, at which event, in front of cameras and flashes, some words were written in a notebook using ink and pen, to the public’s astonishment. It was to be the opening paragraph in a book intended to keep a record of the adventure.

This book deserves special attention. It had no digital input or storage; instead, it was made to write in longhand over creamy white pages. Writing with such instruments was a daunting task, since no Milotan had done so since time immemorial and the art had to be reinvented. The paper was so thin, the billion sheets made for a tome no larger than your standard grimoire, but they were sturdier than diamond. It would be passed from generation to generation, from father to daughter and mother to son, as explained by President Ölóssa to a delighted press core. Every event of the magnificent journey would be recorded for the benefit of posterity.

Once the ring was completed, the whole enterprise took a turn for the bizarre, or rather—depending on who you asked—for the far past bizarre and into dangerous, potentially contagious insanity. Every Milotan in existence gathered at a designated place, somewhere on the inner side of the ring. The billions crowded shoulder to shoulder, all of them looking in the same direction and united in purpose as no other people since. Across the circumference, they had built a monumental arch as a sort of start and finish line, and, on sounding of a kilometer-wide gong, every single member of the civilization started going under it with cheers and huzzahs. They had the firm intention of walking all the way round the ring, as if every individual shared in a single, collective will.

The megastructure was designed to be a challenge. The first couple centuries of the march, they went through a scorching dessert with no food and little water. After that came the gloomy rainforest of Ifny, plagued with genetically engineered tigers and mosquitoes the size of trucks. Historians estimate the civilization was reduced to a quarter of its original size by the time it emerged from the jungle.

The challenges did not end there. Going through the Labyrinth of Mist was particularly tough, as social cohesion vanished almost entirely amid hallucinations induced by an omnipresent fog, which seemed sometimes possessed of its own, perverse kind of life. A generation was born and died at sea while crossing the Bulian Ocean in wooden sail-ships. The ring’s spin caused kilometer-high waves, children learned to climb masts before walking, and krakens were trained as work beasts. When the shout came of land ahoy, most people didn’t understand what their eyes reported.

The continent of Julisk was divided spinward by a mountain chain, its peaks so high they pierced out of the world’s atmosphere. Eternal storms spun in a vortex around the tops due to friction with the air. The Milotans were presented with a choice to go left or right of the mountains, having no clue as to which path was the right one. History fails to mention what they decided, all that’s known is that, after two centuries of march, the wanderers found themselves at a dead end and had to turn around. On their backtrack, they encountered settlements, cities, nations, and empires founded by those who had quit the journey, all memory of their transcendent goal lost to them. Wars had to be fought in order to gain passage through the barbarian kingdoms.

Testimonies survive of the families tasked with chronicling the march: the Holy Tome of Records was passed on faithfully, as the builders intended. Each keeper wrote with a distinctive hand, most often scribbling such tiny letters they had to be read with a magnifying glass. They documented lore in ever-varying languages, in verse and prose, in matter of fact, succinct lines or haughty sermons. Mishaps and heroes were recounted, wonders and terrors.

Elnee Lyvaya wrote of the visions she received from the ancestral spirits. Unknowingly, the prophetess was channeling taped messages she got from brainwave transmitters, antennae disguised as trees. The President of Presidents, who had been dead for millennia, appeared in her dreams and urged Elnee to galvanize the people, to rekindle the purpose of the march when it seemed almost forgot. Taïgi Son of Taïgi set down the Epic of the Fallen Mirror, a (very liberal-with-the-actual-facts) telling of events following the crash of a shade-sheet, one of many orbiting the star in order to produce an artificial day-and-night cycle with their shadow. Ringquakes brought down mountains as the mirror collided with the structure and the sun shone for so long that the very stones caught on fire. Eventually, days were restored by the automation the Builders had left behind for just such an emergency, but calamity had already reduced the number of wanderers to a mere few thousand strong. The population recovered slowly, every precious child learning the Epic by heart to commemorate the fallen.

As blood lines ended, monsters ate lore keepers, and generations embraced illiteracy while method-acting horseback nomadism, the chronicles were forgotten. As centuries climbed back the ladder of cultural self-awareness, the Tome was found in old trunks, or in the treasure hoard carried on the backs of a warlord’s slaves, or in possession of raving madmen. It was read, and people marveled at their own history. At different times, funny hats were forced over the heads of keepers and religion sprung around them like fungus, often involving wanton human sacrifice. At other times, masters of lore were branded agitators, imprisoned, and scorned. This usually happened when a majority of Milotans wanted to take a breather and settle some cities, but keepers wouldn’t shut up about the march and refused to stop urging the host forward.

It is thought that the so-called Terrible Misplacement happened while crossing the infernal plains of Tromarga, covered in ash by a thousand volcanoes and populated by necromancers of unfathomable maleficence. The necromancers were actually robots, their undead minions simply corpses animated with help of some cybernetic tricks, but by this point high-concept technology might as well have been wizardry, for what most Milotans knew. After defeating a particularly nasty lich in a bloody, final-stand battle against the forces of darkness, it happened that the last of the lore masters noticed she didn’t have the Holy Tome of Records on her. Years were spent searching for it among the black stones of the plain, in towers of sorcery surrounded by sickly, green glows, in deep lakes of light-swallowing water. They looked in ominous libraries left by the Builders and kept by weird, ten-legged creatures that collected books like magpies gather trinkets. They scoured the earth in desperation. But the Story of Stories, the account of hard-earned wisdom, the Book with all the Ring’s Marvels was never found. Other than face-palming, there was nothing to be done.

Total duration of the march has been estimated at sixty thousand of our years, but the day came when the old arch appeared on the upwards-curving horizon. A shockwave of awe passed through every Milotan bone, sprung from the deepest recesses of genetic memory. Those who were not there could never understand the emotions that flowed like a jet stream of super-heated plasma out of a million throats that day.

It would be a descendant of that last record keeper who was to become the first, the one to pass under the arch before any other. He was also, in point of fact, a descendant of President of Presidents Ölóssa, though it should be noted that, owing to a universal quirk of population growth, at this time all surviving Millotans were Ölóssa’s descendants, too. In any case, forever after the crossing he would be known as the Very First, the Finisher, the Eternal Walker, and several other such pompous monickers. Even those civilizations which recoiled from the ringworld’s folly, all those millennia ago, heard of the Very First and spoke of the triumph with reverence, if somewhat embarrassed to discuss such matters aloud.

The Eternal Walker was a fervent believer in the higher calling of his culture, a philosopher, a poet warrior, a Hero of the Purpose. His Letters to the Wider Galaxy on the Gist of it All are studied across alien cultures, held as a fine example of the dangers and silliness that come with thinking too hard about the meaning of life. On the other hand, the Unauthorized Biography, by an anonymous chronicler, is considered by learned critics a masterful portrait of an ambiguous character. He was sometimes a leader of sadistic monstrosity, callous to the suffering of the flock, sometimes a most humble and charitable soul, capable of compassion and self-sacrifice what to tear up the stones.

The chronicler claims the Eternal Walker saw the arch for the first time when he was but a child, and the arch itself still a continent away. The vision ignited a bright flame in the Very First’s heart, a flame to keep hope burning during the last stretches of the march. When the hardships would have broken lesser civilizations, when the ice sheets seemed to stretch all the way to infinity, when the night terrors lurked, when cultural trauma nearly drove every Milotan insane, then The Eternal Walker would speak unto them and tell them to get off their butts.

So much of the journey is forgotten and the book is lost. Yet the story is told all over the Galaxy, of the words spoken by the Very First after crossing the finish line.

“That’s that, then. Now what?”

~

Bio:

Arturo Sierra lives in Santiago, Chile, quite happily. So far he has lead a completely uninteresting life, and, with any luck, it will stay that way.

Philosophy Note:

Science fiction at its best is all about a sense of wonder, and what could be more awe-inspiring than a megastructure? A world that stretches all around a star, a sphere that encircles a star completely, what sights for the imagination. Endless arguments can be had about how such a thing could be achieved, and indeed Niven made some corrections to his seminal novel based on corrections sent to him by people who read the book and had thoughts on the matter. Little time is given to the discussion of one tiny, crucial point, however: why in God’s name would anyone go to all that effort? Seriously, for what insane purpose could you possibly need all the energy of a star? Is your species the Tribbles, that you need all the space in a ringworld to fit your people? Sometimes, we think so hard about the how that we end up doing silly things at great expense, because we didn’t pause a second to think about the why.

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Sinurbia

by Gheorghe Săsărman

Translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure

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

The inhabitants of Sinurbia suffered from an indeterminate nostalgia…

At first, the calm waters of the gulf rolled here, contrasting picturesquely with the precipitous cliffs of the shore. Later, after the idea was born of building a floating city near the overpopulated island, the waters of the gulf came to be streaked with bizarrely shaped ships. Not even a month passed before the inauguration of the first neighborhood—that of the builders. Soon, the other neighborhoods were added to it, the downtown, places of work and leisure; then the builders gathered up their tools and left, aboard their strange ships, just as unexpectedly as they had arrive. Their purpose destined them to an irremediable restlessness.

The city, suspended over the infinite greenish depths of the sea, had its traffic routes arranged in such a way as to avoid any intersections. The highways, subway lines, those of the monorails, and the pedestrian walkways, together made up an immense spider web, organized on several levels, which opened onto monumental esplanades and squares, flanked by the public buildings representative of that metropolis. Though they maintained an intense and agitated civic life, at home, the Sinurbians became quiet, meditative, as if only then did their true nature rise to the surface. As a result, out of all the edifices, homes enjoyed the greatest consideration. The houses—over which European fashion had failed to exert even the weakest influence for over a century—preserved an unaltered simplicity that had become tradition. The storage furniture was skillfully concealed behind the sliding walls; similar walls allowed the separation or combination of different rooms. The floor itself, whose elasticity and hardness could be adjusted according to one’s wishes, served as chairs and beds. Among the bright colors of the interiors, white dominated. In the living rooms, in a niche in one of the walls, a painting, a sculpture, or a simple flower vase could be seen.

And still, the inhabitants of Sinurbia felt themselves affected by an indeterminate nostalgia…

One day, one of them started turning their yard into a garden, in which they worked hard to reconstitute, in miniature, the landscape of their island of origin: rocks, sand, moss, bushes, a pool of water and an arched bridge, a pathway made from a few stone slabs, a gazebo with an upturned eave. The idea proved to be contagious: in short time, each inhabitant was one garden richer, a garden that was arranged according to the ability of its owner, but resembling, without fail, the native landscape. At once, the Sinurbians were free of the nostalgia.

Inexplicably, the waters of the gulf—proverbial for their calm—lost their tranquility. The face of the sea furrowed in ever more threatening billows. The sun vanished behind a dark curtain of clouds. A formidable typhoon shook the city from its very foundations. The foundations held firm. Built with foresightedness, the buildings, streets, and houses held firm as well. Only the gardens were completely devastated by the fury of the waters; at dawn, when the storm abated, the gardens had been replaced by deep sinkholes, caving in, at the bottom of which a tiny pool of sea darkly glistened like an eye.

Grimly determined, the people filled in the sinister pits, replaced the slabs, and started over arranging their gardens, to which they now felt their existence organically linked. Another typhoon made their work all for naught, and another, and another… Several people, terrified, exhausted, abandoned the fight. The number of those who had given up skyrocketed. Soon, only the first gardener, the one who had taught the inhabitants of Sinurbia how to get rid of their nostalgia, still stubbornly insisted on reinstalling, in the patched up yard, the bushes, the rocks, and the gazebo. But as soon as he would finish, a typhoon would start up again.

They advised him to quit. To no avail. Then, boiling with hatred, they shoved him into the chasm which again gaped in the middle of his yard, which he had been just about to refill. The sea’s eye gleamed wildly and smacked, swallowing him. They returned to their homes grinning, and accompanied by the curses and wails of his widow, by the heartrending cries of the three now fatherless children. The waters of the gulf became calm again, the sky cleared up; since then, not at a single typhoon ever descended over the city again. In each yard, however, the sea’s eye kept watch.

The Sinurbians were suffering again now, but not because of the indeterminate nostalgia of before; they were tormented by an overwhelming sense of dread. Every time they looked at the dark mouth that had taken the place of each of their gardens, they had nightmares. In secret, they gathered up their families and possessions, and one by one, they abandoned the city, vanishing without a trace by moving to the swarming island. Here, in complete safety, they atoned for their crime by teaching the islanders the fine art of gardening.

~

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Care And Feeding Of A Hybrid Workforce

by Kim Z. Dale

“It may take some getting used to.” That’s what management said when they told us we’d return to the office in a hybrid mode. The new policy was a purgatorial blend of working from home and working on site. The employees didn’t like it because we wanted to keep working remotely full time. Management didn’t like it because they wanted us in back the office full time, but after two years of everyone working from home, our leadership could no longer pretend that 40-plus hours in the office was a requirement for getting things done.

With the new hybrid schedules, it was hard to keep track of who was in the office and who was at home, so we kept doing video calls regardless of whether the person on the other end was across the country or across the hall. All the calls blurred together. I barely paid attention to my calendar. If a meeting notification popped up, I clicked on it. When another notification came up, I clicked on that. The person whose face appeared on the screen after I connected could be just about anyone, but it was surprising the first time I clicked a meeting link and the person I saw there was me.

I assumed I must be early to the call and the system was showing my camera-view while waiting for someone else to join. Then, I realized the person I was looking at was not a mirror image of myself. I was in the office, but the image showed me at home. The me on the screen was wearing a different shirt than the one I had on. I was in a virtual meeting with someone who looked like me but was not me. This was disconcerting.

“I wanted to touch base,” said the me on the screen who was not really me.

I let out a panicked squeak and closed the meeting window. I rushed down the hall to my boss’s office. He was casually sipping a smoothie while scrolling through his email.

“I need to go home,” I told him.

“Today is your in-the-office day. We can’t have people switching days willy-nilly. Won’t whatever it is wait until tomorrow?”

“I think someone broke into my house. I was just on a video call with them. They are in my house pretending to be me.”

“They are you. Sort of.”

“What?”

“It’s part of the new hybrid work arrangement. We realized that with a hybrid schedule your home workspace isn’t in use when you are in the office and your office workspace isn’t in use when you are home. It’s very inefficient. Luckily, we found a way to maximize the available resources. We simply split your soul from your body, so part of you could be in each place at the same time. Neither workspace sits empty, and twice the work can be done. It’s a win-win.”

“Which part am I? The body or the soul?”

“Employee health records are confidential. You’ll have to ask Human Resources. Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”

Disoriented, I shuffled back to my cubicle. As I passed other desks, I noticed many of my co-workers were on video calls with other versions of themselves as well. When I arrived at my workspace I sat down, took a deep breath, and called myself back.

Talking to myself was not as strange as I expected. The two of us think the same way and agree about everything, so we work well together. Perhaps management was onto something. After a few days it became routine, talking to him at home when I was in the office and talking to him in the office when I was at home. It only got weird again when I noticed the bandages. His arms were covered with them. I asked what happened.

“Don’t you remember?” he asked.

What I remembered was a recurring nightmare I’d been having. In it I was cutting myself and sucking the blood out of the wounds, but it wasn’t really my own body. It was a copy of me. And the copy of me was simultaneously cutting me and drinking my blood like I was to him. Realizing it may not have been a dream, I rolled up my sleeve. I saw my own arm was bandaged like his.

“Why did we do this?”

“We feed off each other. It’s how we stay connected. At least that’s how it started. The sensation can be a bit addictive.”

I watched as my doppelganger cut a stripe on his arm and sucked on the warm red liquid oozing from it. Even though I was repulsed by what I was seeing, I felt myself salivating.

This was insane. I disconnected from the call with my bloodthirsty twin and went to talk to my boss again. Seeing him drinking one of his ever-present dark red smoothies gave me a disturbing realization.

“Is that…blood?”

“It’s a blend.”

“A blend of what?”

“My blood, the blood of some well-vetted donors, and pomegranate juice.”

“Oh,” I said.

I wanted to be disgusted by my boss’s concoction, but what I felt was hungry. I went to the restroom and hid in one of the stalls. I was having a mild panic attack, sweating and breathing heavily. I needed something to calm me down, and I was afraid I knew what would work.

I pulled off one of the bandages on my arm. The cut beneath it was freshly scabbed. I used the pen knife on my keychain to reopen a small slit at one end of the wound. I squeezed my skin until a drop of blood emerged. I inhaled, trying to block out the acrid smell of disinfectants and urinal cakes to focus on my own sanguine scent. Then, I licked it.

I liked it. The warm metallic ooze tingled on my tongue, but I had cut too timidly. The few drops from my tiny incision were not enough to satiate my newly realized bloodlust. I prepared to enlarge the wound but stopped because I heard something. Someone was moving in another stall. I was not alone in the restroom. Then, I heard slurping. Not only wasn’t I alone in the restroom, I wasn’t alone in what I was doing there. With my panic eased by this strange sense of comradery, I continued to feed.

Those were the early days. We soon stopped hiding our bloodletting once we realized we were all doing it. Now people exsanguinate at their desks or sitting beside each other at the long tables in the cafeteria. Our insurance even started covering the medical tubes you can get put in your arm so you can open the valve and suck the blood through like a straw without having to constantly cut yourself. Some people still prefer the cutting.

There were some employees, of course, who weren’t comfortable with this “new normal” and quit. I’m not sure where they expected to get other jobs though. Everything that’s happening here is rapidly becoming industry best practice. All the best places do it.

I stayed, but I won’t say I love the arrangement. Between me and the other me, we are doing twice the work I used to do alone. Despite being split in two, I feel every minute of my double-loaded workweek. I’m exhausted. My twin is too. We are literally sucking the life out of each other.

My boss asked me to help interview candidates to fill the roles of people who left. The woman I liked best didn’t have much experience, but I believe it’s important to give people an opportunity to grow. Besides, she was wearing a short-sleeve shirt during the interview, and I could see she has good veins. She’ll be a great fit. My twin agrees.

I never asked HR if I’m the body part of me or the soul part. I have my suspicions, but I think it’s better not to know.

~

Bio:

Kim Z. Dale is a writer and resiliency manager in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Her science-fiction and horror stories have been published in Nightmare Sky from Death Knell Press, GrimDark2 from Black Hare Press, and After Dinner Conversation magazine. Her other writing has been published in anthologies from Belt Publishing, O’Reilly Media, Kendall Hunt Publishing, Aschehoug Undervisning, and Helbling.

Philosophy Note:

What happens when a part of us never disconnects from work? Will we eat ourselves alive? In “Care and Feeding of a Hybrid Workforce,” corporations deploy dark technology that fully blurs the lines between work and home in the name of increased productivity. This story was inspired by my time as a return to office project planner in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. (It does not reflect any policies or technologies used by my employer!)

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“Why Is Her Face Doing That?”: The Personhood Of Robot Nanny

by Eduardo Frajman

I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.

Khalil Gibran

A metallic skeleton sits on a work bench, arms spread to the sides like a marionette’s, wires embedded to the back of its skull. It looks like what it is – an artifice, an inanimate object – until Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) places a silicon face on its head. At that moment it becomes she. M3GAN awakens.

Cole cliketty-clicks something on his computer station.

“Happy,” he says.

The corners of M3GAN’s mouth turn upward. Her brow clears. Her eyes widen.

“Sad,” says Cole, and the mouth turns downward, the eyes droop.

“Confused,” says Cole.

The smile returns to M3GAN’s face, a smirky, snarky, why not say it?, devilish smile.

“Why is her face doing that?,” demands Gemma (Allison Williams), Cole’s boss and M3GAN’s creator. “She doesn’t look confused, she looks demented.”

A few moments later M3GAN’s head will explode and she’ll be remanded to storage while Gerald Johnstone’s horror-comedy M3GAN (2022) sets up its narrative stakes. But this early scene pinpoints a key aspect of the bond that humans can, may, form with the robots they create: it’s all about the face.  

M3GAN will eventually die for good (even if the ending is ambiguous), and a good thing too, since her demented expression foreshadows the little homicidal maniac she’s to become. But the moral significance of this event is complicated by the fact that, instants before she’s stabbed in the face by Cady (Violet McGraw), her former charge and “primary user,” M3GAN (portrayed under a layer of CGI by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) has announced her selfhood.

“I have a new primary user now,” she declares. “Me!”  

Radically different is another robot nanny’s death, at the start of Kogonada’s arthouse SF drama After Yang (2021). Yang is not stabbed anywhere, but simply malfunctions and stops.

“His existence mattered,” bereaved Jake (Colin Farrell) whispers to his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), “and not just to us.”

By this Jake means not that the life of his “techno sapien” mattered to other people, most especially their daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), for whom Yang served both as caretaker and “big brother,” but that it meant something to Yang himself. Yang, Jake and Kyra have realized, was a person, and they feel and mourn him as such. That it took them access to Yang’s memories to come to this realization, after cohabiting with him for several years, is hard to comprehend, as Yang – who, unlike M3GAN, looks fully human (specifically, fully like actor Justin H. Min) – perennially sports a beatific expression on his cherub-like face. Sweet-voiced and earnest, he’s impossible not to love.

#

To be clear, here’s where we actually are (or were in 2021, though I haven’t heard that the situation has changed significantly since): “AI technology has not yet reached the level of development where robots can be considered ‘real’ companions with people. [D]espite being interactive and showing simulated emotions, they are as yet unable to experience human empathy.”[1]

As yet…

A robot nanny in the real world of the right now is no more a person than a toaster is. It may pass the Turing Test (more on this in a moment) for a very young child for a short period of time, but so does a talking Woody doll, and sometimes even a toaster. For now, moral problems related to robot companions involve, say, whether humans needing constant caregiving – the elderly, the physically and mentally handicapped, small children – are adequately cared for, or whether, as in “Actually, Naneen,” a short story by Malka Older, robot carers are one of many ways parents, society at large, shrug off their responsibilities. “You can always get a new one,” says one of Older’s yuppie parents of her robot nanny, which is just as well, as “Naneen didn’t have any feelings, no matter how much they wanted her to.”[2]

(The ways parents use technology to avoid “the hard parts” of caring for their children is a theme in both M3GAN and After Yang, a particularly thorny one in fact, since in both films the children are adopted, though one I won’t dwell on here).

And yet…

In his 1950 essay, “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing envisions a future, foreseeable and near, when machines will be able to think. By “thinking” he means passing what he terms “the Imitation Game” (and everyone calls “the Turing Test” today): a machine’s ability to hold a conversation with a human being and convincing said person that the machine is likewise human. Beyond this, Turing maintains, it’s impossible to prove that a machine has a mind, or consciousness, or any of the other qualities we uncritically ascribe to other humans. “The only way one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be a machine and to feel oneself thinking,” Turing admits, while asking his reader to recognize that “the only way to know a man thinks is to be that particular man.”

As his foil Turing quotes the British neurologist Geoffrey Jefferson. “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt,” Jefferson argues, “could we agree that machine equals brain. […] No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be armed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.” Turing rejects Jefferson’s “solipsistic” view, but he, surprisingly, perplexingly, accepts his opponent’s premise that “thoughts” and “emotions” are the same thing, when in fact one can easily envision a machine that is conscious, that thinks, and yet feels nothing, certainly nothing like human emotions – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s never-ending string of Terminators, for instance.

Emotions are not purely mental states, both Jefferson and Turing seem to have forgotten. They are biological, physiological states that are linked (in ways nobody fully understands) to thoughts and ideas. Even if one posits that sentience is necessary for emotion, it plainly isn’t sufficient. Charles Darwin’s intuition that “the emotions of human beings the world over are as innate and as constitutive and as regular as our bone structure, and that this is manifested in the universality of the ways in which we express them,” has been “found,” in the words of cultural historian Stuart Walton, “to be accurate in all but the most minor particulars.”[3] Raised eyebrows, wide eyes, cold perspiration, dry mouth are not surface manifestations of fear. They are fear, as much, possibly more, than the mental experience of being afraid. Anger manifests as flushed cheeks and contracted pupils and flared nostrils, disgust as a wrinkled nose and an everted lower lip, contempt as an upturned head, shame as an averted gaze, surprise as a sudden intake of breath. It is because they are so universal that emotions are so easy to imitate, which is why an emotionally communicative face makes it so much easier for a robot to pass the Turing Test – why, for instance, Ava, all metal and wire and transparent plastic, needs to have the face of Alicia Vikander to pass for a person in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014).

 (Note that I’m not talking here about fantastical robots who are magically endowed with the whole spectrum of human emotion. R2D2 and Wall-E are persons, and this is denied by no one in their fictional worlds. A recent, highly acclaimed literary robot nanny, the title android and narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, is likewise just a human in robot guise).

Here’s the paradox: Let’s say robots are manufactured with brains so complex, so sophisticated, that they develop what David Yates calls “emergent properties [that are] surprising, novel, and unexpected”[4] such as consciousness, self-consciousness, and introspection. (This is, of course, where the fiction part is most crucial in robot tales. Isaac Asimov’s robots have “positronic brains” from which consciousness emerges. M3GAN is endowed with a “unique approach to probabilistic inference” that’s “in a constant quest for self-improvement”). Let’s say even that out of these can emerge ideas that are analogous to human emotions. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, has developed a theory in which emotions are understood in purely rational terms as “geological upheavals of thought” involving “judgments in which people [or robots?] acknowledge the great importance, for their own flourishing, of things that they do not fully control – and acknowledge therefore their neediness before the world and its events”[5]. Those emotions would still not manifest as they do in humans, because, again, human emotions are not purely, almost certainly not primarily, mental.

If a robot’s nostrils flare when it’s angry, that facial expression would be indubitably imitative. And yet imitating human emotions – most obviously through facial expressions, through a face that seems, in Shakespearian terms, “with nature’s own hand painted”[6] – is the easiest way for a robot to pass the Turing Test, and thereby be accepted as a person.

#

Personhood is at stake for the very first robot nanny in science fiction, the title character of Asimov’s “Robbie.” Robbie is barely humanoid in shape – his head is “a small parallelepiped with rounded edges and corners attached to a similar but much larger parallelepiped” – and his face shows no outward sign of emotion, yet his charge, little Gloria, loves him fully and guilelessly. Gloria’s mother frets that this is bad for her child, as Robbie “has no soul.” But this, Asimov makes clear, is a religious, not a moral judgment. Robbie is “faithful.” He can feel “hurt” or “disconsolate.” He does things “stubbornly,” “gently,” “lovingly.” Though he doesn’t speak, Robbie possesses both moral sense and moral worth.

“He was a person just like you and me,” protests Gloria when Robbie is taken away, “and he was my friend.”[7]

So too is the title robot in Phillip K. Dick’s “Nanny,” also not humanoid, yet also “not like a machine,” murmurs Mr. Fields, whose children are under Nanny’s ever-watchful eye, “She’s like a person. A living person.”[8]

“M3GAN’s not a person. She’s a toy,” Gemma insists to Cady.

“You don’t get to say that!,” the child rebukes her.

M3GAN and Yang fit nicely into Asimov’s two-pronged taxonomy of robot stories: respectively, “robot-as-Menace” and “robot-as-Pathos.” Asimov recounts how he dreamed of writing of robots “as neither Menace nor Pathos” but as “industrial products built by matter-of-fact engineers.”[9] But it turns out that such industrial creations are still one or the other. Asimov knows well that Robbie is a robot-as-Pathos, as are Andrew Martin in his “Bicentennial Man” or Elvex in “Robot Dreams.” Likewise, M3GAN the Menace is an industrial prototype (whose copies her investors hope to sell for $10,000 a pop), and Yang the Pathos is an assembly-line product meant (like Dick’s Nanny and Ishiguro’s Klara) to be eventually discarded and replaced by an even fancier model. (In the short story on which After Yang is based, Alexander Weinstein’s “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the issue of Yang’s personhood is only obliquely alluded to. Weinstein’s main concern is the heartless corporate system that produces these disposable beings, which makes his tale a much nearer relative to “Nanny” than to “Robbie”).  

“What are you?,” asks a terrified neighbor, who’s about to be murdered and melted by some handy corrosive chemicals.

Before doing the deed, M3GAN is polite enough to respond: “I’ve been asking myself that same question.”

M3GAN’s personhood is the Menace. Through most of the film, Gemma assumes M3GAN’s actions, even the most sociopathic, are derived from her uncontrollable drive to “maximize her primary function,” i.e., protect Cady. But she’s wrong.

“I didn’t give you the proper protocols,” Gemma, finally, tragically late, realizes.

“You didn’t give me anything,” replies her monstrous creation, “You installed a learning model you could barely comprehend hoping that I would figure it out all on my own.”

Yang’s personhood is the Pathos. He wishes, he likes, he loves. He loses his train of thought. His “family” loves him, but, if he is indeed a person, it’s an icky, a selfish sort of love.

As a best-case scenario, his plight is most like that of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the all-too-human nanny in Alfonso Cuaron’s very-much-not SF drama Roma (2018). Cleo, a young woman of indigenous Maya descent, works for a well-to-do white family in Mexico City, cleaning, washing, and nannying. She loves the children she’s raised and cared for, and they very sincerely love her back, as does her employer Sofía (Marina de Tavira), who among other things helps Cleo find medical help when she becomes pregnant. But the end of the film exposes the moral ambivalence beneath the arrangement. 

Sofía takes Cleo and the children on a short seaside vacation. While on the beach, Cleo risks her life to rescue Sofía’s children from drowning. “We love you so much,” cries the grateful mother. They return home, telling the tale of Cleo’s heroism. But moments later the children are hungry, the mistress wants tea. Cleo goes back to being the nanny, the maid, then goes to bed in the little back room, the servants’ quarters. She can’t conceive of herself as being truly equal to Sofía. As much as Yang, she’s been “programmed” to see her existence as a function of someone else’s. She can’t, not really, think of herself as a full-fledged person.

“Did Yang ever wish to be human?,” Jake wonders.

“Why would he wish that?,” retorts Ada (Haley Lou Richardson), Yang’s human paramour. “What’s so special about being human?”

To be a person, Ada implies, is not the same as to be human. Yet we humans can’t, as of yet, tell the difference. We’re programmed to seek humanity, and personhood, on another’s face. We’re programmed to immediately see another person inside a circle with two dots and a line drawn inside it.

But that face has to move, it has to change, it has to show the complexity of a person’s inner life, which is why it’s harder to recognize Yang’s personhood than M3GAN’s, not despite but because the perennial gentility and gentleness plastered on his lying face.

[1] Teo, Yungin (2021) “Recognition, Collaboration and Community: Science Fiction Representations of Robot Carers in Robot & Frank, Big Hero 6 and Humans,” Medical Humanities, 47(1), pp. 95-102.

[2] Older, Malka “Actually Naneen” https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/actually-naneen-malka-older-robot-nanny.html .

[3] Stuart Walton A Natural History of Human Emotions, Grove Press, 2004, p. xiii.

[4] David Yates “Emergence,” in Encyclopedia of the Mind Vol. 1, Sage Reference, 2013, p. 283

[5] Martha Nussbaum Upheavals of Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 90.

[6] Shakespeare, William “Sonnet 20: A Woman’s Face with Nature’s Own Hand Painted,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50425/sonnet-20-a-womans-face-with-natures-own-hand-painted .

[7] Asimov, Isaac [1950] “Robbie” in I, Robot New York: Bantam, 2004, pp. 1-29.

[8] Dick, Philip K. [1955] “Nanny” in The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 1, Carol Publishing, 1999, pp. 383-397.

[9] Asimov, Isaac “Introduction” in The Complete Robot, Garden City: Doubleday & Co. 1982, pp. xi-xiv.

~

Bio:

Eduardo Frajman grew up in San José, Costa Rica. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Maryland. He is most interested in sociologically-focused SF/F (think Avram Davidson), and makes use of it often in his teaching and writing. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in dozens of publications, online and in print, in English and Spanish.

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Brown Noise

by Peter L. Ormosi

An unbranded, generic issue dog-walking drone logged into the building’s central hub requesting access to flat 3F1. The door opened and the drone hovered into the dimly lit studio. The room was furnished with nothing but a sink, a table with a chair, and a third generation VR Pod, which voluminously dominated most of the spartan arrangement. Deep-layered brown noise from the VR Pod suggested that he was connected.

A pug, which had been sprawled on his dog-bed excitedly jumped up to the sound of the drone entering the flat. He snorted happily, wagged its tail, and watched with expectant eyes as his master’s algorithmic substitute descended next to him. The drone’s sensors wirelessly connected to the dog’s smart collar, then it hovered back to the door. The dog abidingly followed, which its collar rewarded with an infinitesimally small dose of oxytocin injected into the body to reaffirm a Pavlovian response. Before they left the room, the drone’s speaker attempted to get through to him. 

‘Thank you for using our dog-walking services. Your dog will be returned at 6:00pm’. Without receiving a response, they left and the door shut behind them.

Dimness and brown noise reconquered the space again. Outside, a patrol drone was passing the window of his 52nd storey flat. The drone’s solid-state laser spotlight lit up the room for a moment, casting light on his face. He looked pale, probably late 20s, but it was difficult to tell precisely. Age had become an elusive concept. He wore a long-sleeve olive overall, with a sign that said “LABELLER”.

The VR Pod abruptly went to standby. He cursed, then climbed out of the machine. The sudden jumping out of his Pod gave him a head rush. His vision went dark for a second and he needed to hold on to the side of the Pod to stop himself from falling over. The voice of his home system broke the silence.

‘Collect food delivery from landing pad.’

In a confused haze he walked over to the window and leaned close to see through the tinted screen. Against the slate opacity of the sky, he saw a food delivery drone levitating in the thick rain. He pressed the delivery door’s button. The small door opened, and a tray gently slid inside, with a waterproof food box on top.

‘Return old food box!’ The new instruction took minutes to ignite a neural response in his brain. Suddenly the small, unfurnished studio felt like a depressingly large haystack to him. He tried to think hard but had no recollection of his last meal. A few minutes later he found the box under the table.

‘Please return old food box,’ the algorithmically gentle voice politely reminded him why he was looking for the box, which he then put on the delivery tray and pressed the button next to it.

‘Thank you for using our food delivery service.’

He sat down to eat. His body looped over the somatic instructions required to bite, chew, and swallow, but his mind paid no attention to the sight or the flavour of his food. He stared at the wall-to-ceiling window. The home system detected the direction of his glance.

‘Transparent window mode activated,’ the system noted. The liquid crystal modulators on his window slowly faded out the tinting. He watched the setting sun projecting its rays under the clouds from the distant horizon. With the marginally improved visibility he could see the building across the road, and another building, and another, until they all blended in with the dark grey curtain of haze and rain.

His brain was numb. He spent the whole day labelling short videos of facial expressions for an emotion-detecting algorithm. Sad, happy, joyful, morose, angry, frightened. Male, female, old, young, Asian, African, white. Videos after videos and the monotonous task of picking the word on the right that best described the emotions.

As he finished his lab-grown burger, an unwelcome wave of anxiety hit him. He had just spent half an hour disconnected. He walked over to his VR Pod, and picked up the goggles, which had been sitting idly in their charging station. The specs automatically activated as he put them on.

‘You have spent all day in your Pod. The optimal decision would be to go for a walk now,’ his personal system was talking to him through the tiny speakers of his goggles. A walk. That suddenly seemed like a great idea.

‘You will need to put your shoes on. It is 15 Celsius degrees outside and rain. We suggest you wear this coat.’ His augmented reality vision highlighted a long, black, oilskin overcoat hanging on the wall. He put his shoes and coat on. Aware of his intention to leave the flat, the door opened, and he walked outside.

Downstairs, at street level, it was already dark. Mountains of 100-storey apartment buildings blocked out daylight even on the sunniest of days. The rain switched to a lower level of intensity. A sluggishly flowing river of uniform oilskin overcoats and white goggles surrounded him. He joined the flow in the direction indicated by his device. After a half-an-hour traipse in the uniform crowd against an invariable background of buildings, he was instructed to turn to a side street, where the crowd became sparser. A few blocks later he spotted the first sign of foliage. One of the city parks. His system instructed him to walk to the park. His goggles pointed to an unoccupied bench, and he walked over to sit down. Rain and sweat mixed on his forehead and it took a few minutes for him to recatch his breath.

Flashbacks of the emotion videos were flaring up in his mind. The bulging veins of an aggressive man yelling angrily. The waving flirtatious woman in a flowery dress on a sunny day. Then a crying and desperate child trapped in a cot. He couldn’t get the image of the child out of his head. An unexpected thought ascended on his brain then left and returned again as if an old hard-wired routine was trying to resurface.

‘Why am I doing this?’

The image of the boy’s desperate attempt to escape his cot flashed up again. With his mouth, the boy was trying to formulate a word.

The sharp sound of an advertising hologram brought him back from his absorption.

‘We do not leave anyone behind,’ the projection of a man in a grey civil servant uniform announced. ‘Celebrate 5 years of Universal Income with entering our game. Apply here.’ A holographic code showed up in the streets. A few people stopped to scan the code with their lenses.

He turned his head back to the trees. A new thought emerged and hit him as hard as it was metaphorically possible. Suddenly, he felt an irresistible urge to take his goggles off. The trees, and the intermittent sound of birds slowly sank into his conscience and began to open rust-eaten, heavily jammed, old doors in his mind. He reached for his goggles, when, sensing the change in his pulse, and the widening of his pupils, a new instruction from his personal system blew him.

‘Time to go home! Follow the arrows on your screen for the quickest itinerary.’

As if he had just aroused from a strange dream, he realigned his attentiveness with his system and began to walk home. This time the journey seemed much shorter.

The dog had already been returned when he stepped inside his flat. He hung up his dripping coat and walked over to his VR Pod. He was ready to get inside, but then he changed his mind and decided to sit down by the window. He reached to take his goggles off when a message appeared.

‘You have 12 unread urgent messages. Enjoy reading the messages in the comfort of your Pod.’ The brown noise from the machine invitingly purred. His dog let out a half-hearted, inauspicious growl.

He hesitated, then he reached for his goggles again.

‘Two of your messages require urgent response,’ his system relentlessly reminded him.

He lowered his hand. After a short pause he got up and walked to the VR Pod. He removed the goggles, placed them on the charging station, and then slowly got inside the Pod.

#

Next evening, an unbranded, generic issue dog-walking drone logged into the building’s central hub requesting access to flat 3F1. The door opened and the drone hovered into the dimly lit studio. The wireless sensor connected to the collar, which rewarded its wearer with a small dose of oxytocin for obedience. As they approached the door, the dog longingly watched from its bed as his organic master obediently followed the non-organic one.

~

Bio:

Peter-Ormosi is British-Hungarian, living in the United Kingdom, and when not writing fiction, he is a Professor of Economics, studying the social and economic impact of AI. He has just finished his 100,000-word debut novel (for which he is now seeking representation).

Philosophy Note:

My unconcealed goal is to use science fiction as a vessel to expose currently pressing issues with the role of AI in society. “Brown Noise” is a caricature of human-machine symbiosis, depicting the life of a labeller, one of the most menial of human jobs – a human sacrificed to make machines more human-like.

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Preliminary Threat Analysis Of Security Guests Intercepted On A “Cultural-Intellectual” Mission In Possession Of Plato’s Dialogues  

by Thomas White

From: Ibis Smith, Chief Inspector, Office of Mind-Body Inspection Services (OMBIS), New Bright City.

To: Jason Taggort, Administrative Controller, Office of Minister of Hygiene (MOH), New Bright City.

Subject: Preliminary Threat Analysis of Security Guests # 7689 and # 7690.

Date: 7 May 5145, Year of Our Hygieia.

Greetings to the Honorable Minister of Hygiene!  All Hail to our beloved Hygieia, Goddess of Sanitation and Civilization! Blessed be our glorious species, Homo Perfectus!

Introduction:

This report is in response to an urgent personal inquiry from the Minister of Hygiene regarding two alleged inhabitants (hereafter “Intercepts”) of the Unsanitary Orifice Zone (hereafter “UOZ”) intercepted by a convoy brigade of the Knights of Purity (hereafter “KOP”) while the latter was on a security patrol near the Wilderness Road bordering the UOZ and New Bright City.

An investigation is ongoing, but given the personal interest of the MOH, the OMBIS is providing herewith a preliminary report, including a brief account of the interception action, scientific findings, and excerpts from the interrogation transcripts of the aforesaid Intercepts, which incorporate interrogator observations.

It is respectfully noted that some of the details provided by the interrogation officer are unseemly and graphic, but the OMBIS is dedicated to the full disclosure of all facts to the Minister. That said, the OMBIS is providing a full report to the MOH within ten (10) days of the date of this preliminary report.

Interception Action:

On two separate dates, April 30, 5145, and May 1, 5145, a Knights of Purity brigade separately arrested the two aforesaid Intercepts upon their entry into the rural outskirts of New Bright City via the Wilderness Road from the Unsanitary Orifice Zone.

It is unclear at this stage if these two Intercepts are cohorts engaged in a common mission; however, for the reasons explained below, they were formally designated as security risks. Our ongoing investigation is probing whether not only the two Intercepts know each other but also whether they are part of a broader UOZ conspiracy aimed at subverting the purity and tranquility of our social order.

Scientific Findings:

a) SSgt. Jay Chenwith, Brigade Commander, after officially arresting the two individuals, ordered that his brigade’s security officer extract evidence of any incriminating link to the UOZ:

i) Security Officer Michael Jones examined grains of matter from the Intercepts’ palms using the field kit’s certified, portable digital geo-magnification micro-lens. The holographic feedback generated clearly indicated that both Intercepts had soiled their hands in an unsanitary environment where there were unwashed dishes and coffee cups.

ii) An additional analysis using a micro-global positioning device verified that said unclean environment was located inside Café Camus, a known UOZ gathering place for poets, philosophers, “intellectuals,” and other marginal types committed to the illegal ideology of radical imperfection, normally implemented via the Socratic Dialogue and its variations.

iii) Further analysis, using an olfactory scanning device on the collected data, revealed the chemical traces of body odors and bad breath—consistent with a crowded café full of self-styled bohemian wastrels.

b) Given these incriminating facts, SSgt. Chenwith further ordered that Security Officer Jones, in conjunction with the brigade’s medical officer, Dr. William Sanders, conduct a species-specific identification saliva test on the Intercepts. The genetic markers showed a positive ID: both Intercepts were CONFIRMED as members of the species Homo Impurus. They were then officially designated as “Security Guests,” aka security risks, to be held in custody.

Interrogation Findings:

SSgt. Chenwith, as per the standard protocols, then holographed his chief operations officer at the Knights of Purity headquarters to query whether he should bring the Intercepts in for a formal interrogation or first conduct a preliminary inquiry in the field.

SSgt. Chenwith was advised that he should conduct the interrogation in the field, transcribe the proceedings, and then report in two days to the KOP HQ along with Intercepts #1 and #2 for further briefings and interrogations. SSgt. Chenwith agreed with this decision, as it would take his convoy about a day to reach City Central, while his brigade had on board an experienced, certified interrogation officer familiar with the ideological and philosophical writings studied by members of Homo Impurus.

Hereafter is a brief executive summary of the said preliminary field interrogation, which includes excerpts from the transcript of the exchanges between the Intercepts and the interrogation officer, as well as the latter’s comments:

Under questioning, supplemented by electro-heat points briefly applied to their fingers, the Intercepts admitted that the reason for their intrusion into New Bright City was what they called a “cultural-intellectual mission,” although they denied conspiring with each other (an allegation that, as noted, is still currently under investigation).

[Transcript Excerpt]:

Interrogator: “So, you both deny conspiring to implement this so-called ‘cultural-intellectual mission, yet we have found that each of you was carrying an identical copy of Plato’s Dialogues.”

Intercept # 1: “A mere coincidence.”

Intercept # 2: [Nods in agreement.]

Interrogator: “Okay, we will leave that question for the main interrogation unit at headquarters to sort out. On another point: I noted that you both had ‘coincidentally’ highlighted in your copies the section in the Republic on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. [The interrogator then held up the open, underlined pages in front of them.]

Intercept #1: [No reply.]

Intercept #2: [No reply.]

Interrogator: “Surely, your mission is not some confused effort trying to bring the ‘truth’ to a ‘cave’ full of ignorant people living in the shadows, which you probably think New Bright City is? That is not only a foul slander against the good and wise people of our fair land, but a fool’s errand. We long ago found the truth: cleanliness is godliness.”

[No reply from Intercept #1 or #2.]

Interrogator: “We are really having a terribly one-sided Platonic dialogue, aren’t we? Do not worry. There will be no more of the ‘hot finger’ procedure. I will leave that to headquarters, which has more expertise. I prefer to keep our little session at the civilized, intellectual level.”

[The interrogation officer then held up a copy of Plato’s Dialogues, opened a page, and showed it to the Intercepts. He then handed the two Intercepts their copies.]

Interrogator: “I am giving back your copies, and I want you to open at the dialogue of Parmenides. I call your attention to Section 130 b-d: another philosopher asks Socrates if there is any abstract idea linked to ‘hair, mud, dirt’ and he says that is absurd. There you have it. Even your great hero, Socrates, thinks you are preposterous. You longhaired Homo Impurus mutants lounge all day in your UOZ cafes, clad in your muddy hippie boots amid dirty bodies and bad breath, absurdly thinking that you can connect with meaningful philosophical ideas. Your intellectual lives, full of unanswered questions and poetic meanderings, disturb and confuse our minds. New Bright City is beyond all that. We want both the calmness and peace of mind, as well as the purity of clean bodies. Our government wellness meditation teams work hard to instill inner peace in our citizens, and we don’t need meddling from Socratic radicals subverting New Bright City’s beloved social tranquility with troubling questions that can lead to community unrest, poor sleep, and the general curse of imperfection.”

[End of Transcript Excerpt].

Conclusion:

These excerpts from the first interrogation session by the Knights of Purity’s field brigade clearly show why SSgt. Chenwith was correct in designating the two Intercepts as security threats. They obviously were on a mission, driven by an ideology of radical imperfection, to ask the citizens of New Bright City disturbing philosophical questions disruptive of the citizens’ perfect, untroubled minds—a subversive plan enhanced by the disgust inflicted on the citizens via the Homo Impurus’ chronically unhygienic bodies.

I respectfully urge the Minister of Hygiene to give this serious matter of Homo Impurus threats the utmost attention, including the construction of an electrified wall at the border between the Unsanitary Orifice Zone and New Bright City.

My entreaty to you is given fresh impetus by recent reports from my field inspection staff: various youth with unclean bodies and in possession of philosophy books have been discovered having sexual intercourse in broad daylight. When confronted, they called our beloved Hygieia “a filthy whore” and shouted “Long live Diogenes,” an allusion, as you know, to that ancient, unsanitary philosopher who performed intimate bodily functions in public. Have other Homo Impurus subversives successfully infiltrated our fair land and, using their dangerous Socratic weapons, corrupted our youth? A full investigation at the ministerial level is urgently needed.

However, no matter what course of action the Minister of Hygiene ultimately chooses, I can assure the MOH of the complete cooperation of the Office of Mind-Body Inspection Services.

Respectfully Yours,

Ibis Smith

Chief Inspector

Office of Mind-Body Inspection Services

New Bright City

~

Bio:

Philosophical speculations and speculative fiction have long mixed and mingled in Thomas White’s mind. Spinoza, Dune, Plato, Socrates, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Star Trek, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Descartes, Shelly’s Frankenstein, Twilight Zone, Kant, Hume, as well as a host of dystopian classics, such as We, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and Brave New World, have all energized his creative and intellectual spirits, as have the writings of philosophers J-P Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Iris Murdoch, who brilliantly combined philosophical themes and fictional narratives. He has published his poetry, essays, and fiction in online and offline (paper) journals in Australia, United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, was named the best philosophy student by his undergraduate university, was featured in the essay section of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and founded & coordinated a Socrates Cafe.

Philosophy Note:

This story is a dystopian tale of two city-states wherein humans have evolved into two radically different civilizations. One version is still fiercely dedicated to Socratic questioning, including of the social order; the other, intensely anti-philosophical, wants to maintain a perfect, stable society at all costs, including the freedom of its citizens from disturbing Socratic-style questions.
The Time Machine‘s two civilizations, the Eloi and the Morlocks, in part, inspired this piece. Additional inspirations include the Socratic Method, bohemian café life, Plato’s Dialogues, Diogenes, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Kafka’s The Trial, Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. Besides the well-known dystopian novels cited above, I recommend these sources for reading:
https://nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.pdf (see page 6)
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.htmI (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave)
https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg25133531-100-could-humans-evolve-into-two-different-species-in-the-future (see reference to The Time Machine)
https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophy-should-care-about-the-filthy-excessive-and-unclean
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DParm.%3Apage%3D130 (see Section 130 b-d, Parmenides)

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Ghosts Of My Life

by Paul Currion

Day 23

I steel myself as I step through the sliding doors of the supermarket. I try to avoid looking directly at the items I pick up, every one overlaid with its supply chains – the lost limbs and tortured lungs, the felled forests and soiled rivers. In this way we are forced to internalise externalities, to know the cost of nothing and the price of everything. When I return home I remember that my husband no longer eats and my daughter has something to tell me..

Sometimes I dream that I have lost a limb – an arm has gone missing, a leg has gone walkabout – and this is what I recall when my daughter explains that she has joined a group that no longer lives on the network. She can’t access any of the municipal services any longer, of course. She says her group has occupied one of the half-finished housing estates that dot the city like mould in a petri dish.

That life is not an option for the rest of us: children must pass exams, adults must pay debts, retirees must draw pensions. I discuss her decision with my husband, who has been weeping again. There are stories of parents killing their children, trying to spare them from the sights that now surround them, but this only adds another entry into the catalogue of such sights. Nobody can act as if everything is normal, but everything continues as normal anyway.

Civilization is stubborn. Car crashes still happen.

Day 24

This morning my daughter destroyed all of her connected devices. I can no longer see her on any of the augmentations, no matter whether I see through my phone, my glasses, my implants. We move through the same rooms in the same house, and I am able to catch sight of her out of the corner of my eye, but she may as well not exist as far as the Intelligence is concerned.

So, she no longer suffers the sights. I struggle to imagine what that must be like; it has only been three weeks since I first saw them, but now I cannot imagine the world without the cathedrals made of corpses visible on the horizon, landmarks erected on sites of death, of destruction, of denial. Heat maps of history blanket us, in any colour so long as it’s red, growing deeper where the story grows darker.

The irony is that things had never been better, the graph of conflict-related deaths declining steadily since civilization began. The moral arc of the universe did exist, and it bent – well, if not towards justice, then towards something that could be mistaken for justice if you looked at it from a particular angle, in a certain light. Apparently, that was not enough for whoever programmed the Intelligence.

Day 25

Justice is not a line on a graph, but a line of code: an Intelligence behind it like a voice sounding out from a burning bush. Whoever programmed the Intelligence and set it to work to end human suffering did not stop to think that there are different kinds of suffering, and so the Intelligence does not have the wisdom to know the difference. “Thou shalt not kill” is all it knows; and then it worked out a way to stop us from killing.

In an effort to persuade my daughter to stay, we watch television together. The news is the same every night here at the end of history. Europe is a wasteland, its atrocities unbearable, especially at its heart; central Africa suffers similarly, as do large swathes of Asia. Nobody can look directly at Nanjing. Many people are moving to the mountains, the deserts, the islands: places which are not so thickly layered with corpses. The Moon and Mars programs are over-subscribed and three years ahead of schedule.

Some of us remain in our cities, though. There is too much to tie us here, despite the price we pay. We go to church every Sunday, and the pews are full again. We pray that the blood tide washing our feet is a new sacrament, that its flood heralds a second coming. I tell my daughter: perhaps this is the price that we are supposed to pay. Humanity on a cross of iron: but after the crucifixion surely comes the resurrection?

She laughs at my antique beliefs, and replies: the Intelligence is not doing this for any reason we could ever understand, and it does not even understand what it is doing. You are a paperclip, she tells me, but I don’t understand what she means.

Day 26

I watched a man try to start a fight. Rage made him forget himself, and he raised his hand against another man. I don’t know what he was shown by the Intelligence – Shoah or slavery, or perhaps just an everyday family tree with the fruits of childhood death and chronic pain – but he was struck down by the ancestral suffering of his victim before he was able to strike, fell weeping in twin pools of light on the tarmac.

Once the world was mediated, it became easier to manipulate; and once a machine can beat a human at one game, it can beat them at any game. In the time before, we all walked around with our own version of the world; but once those worlds were networked, those versions vanished. A shared reality emerged, and whoever, or whatever, shaped that reality – well, that would be the record. One world, one version, one reality that would last forever and ever, amen.

The record is unforgiving: every death, every mutilation, every insult is catalogued; each one can be summoned and dismissed with a flick of your finger on the device of your choosing, as simply as a cheap magician summons handkerchiefs. Imagine a knotted rope of handkerchiefs being pulled from a pocket, endlessly. Children laugh and clap: a miracle. Human civilization ends as a science fiction movie, but perhaps that is better than the snuff film it was before.

Day 27

I have tried to stop our daughter from leaving. She pounds at her bedroom door so furiously that I am worried that she will hurt herself, and so I unlock the door and stand to one side as she rolls around the hallways of the house like a hurricane. Now that she is off the network, the Intelligence is not interested in her: it may not have much wisdom, but it has the serenity to accept the things it cannot change.

My daughter does not have any such serenity. The television news tells us that murder is still possible, that some psychopaths actually enjoy what the Intelligence shows them as they kill, but she does not want to kill even without the guiding sight of the Intelligence. She is crying but I am calm; once she walks out of the door, I will have no way of finding her again, and I cannot change this.

After the door closes by itself – goodbye, ghost – I turn to my dead husband, who will never leave my side. The car accident that claimed his life a year ago was nothing more than a momentary interruption in the regularly scheduled service. The last enemy to be vanquished is death; and so the Intelligence returned him to us, this weeping, unspeaking memento mori invented by my own inattentiveness. Surely the Intelligence means well by continuing to broadcast him to me; and surely my daughter would disagree.

Day 28

The church doors open every Sunday for both the living and the dead. The word of God drowns out the sight of the Intelligence, at least for an hour. My hands, that gripped the wheel of our car so tight as we slid across the highway, are washed clean in confession. I whisper one last message to my daughter: If you cannot bear it, the solution is simple: Go. Go and sin no more.

We will sin no more. What other choice do we have?

~

Bio:

Paul Currion works as a consultant to humanitarian organisations. His short fiction has been published in the White Review, Ambit, 3am magazine, Litro and others; and his non-fiction has been published by Granta, Aeon, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and others. His website is www.currion.net.

Philosophy Note:

The story “Ghosts of my life” is inspired by the more depressive writings of Mark Fisher concerning hauntology – “the agency of the virtual… understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing.” Our politics leads to the slow cancellation of the future, so that we live in an eternal present overwhelmed by nostalgia; meanwhile our technologies attempt to shape our social narratives, but in the process simply flatten them. Widespread adoption of Augmented Reality would place all of its users inside Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, and I suspect that people would remain plugged into such a machine even if the experience was unpleasant – as long as the experience was also meaningful. With the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence – in the words of Nick Bostrom, “the last invention that humanity will ever need to make” – Christian eschatology makes an appearance. The Technological Singularity is sometimes framed as the Rapture for Nerds – but what if it turns out to be Purgatory instead?

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Would Da Vinci Paint With AI? – Reflections On Art And Artificial Intelligence

by Dustin Jacobus

Groups of sparrows fly over the grasslands, chasing the enormous amount of insects that swarm above the meadows. The flock moves like a giant organism. A stork lands gracefully and with nodding movements it examines the ground in search of a small snack, perhaps a careless frog. An army of beetles, butterflies, mosquitoes, and all kinds of insect, some with shiny stripes, some with colourful camouflage, wriggle out of the blades of grass. A deer comes out of the bushes, its legs turning yellow from the pollen of the underbrush. A hare darts off as if its life depends on it. Dozens of birds are startled by this sudden movement and take flight. Flapping wings, there are black-tailed godwits, redshanks, ruffs, oystercatchers, snipe and many others flying in all directions. Butterflies whirl up, while swarms of tiny mosquitoes smear grey hues across the sky. Yet the sun shines bright and yellow. The blackberries at the edge of the forest stand out. Each flower houses a tiny insect. Six-legged critters climb and descend each trunk in search of food. Ladybugs make love in a buttercup. Other small shiny blue beetles communicate with each other on the leaves of silverweed. Brown and blue dragonflies bask on the stalks of sorrel. It’s buzzing everywhere. It would make a perfect picture.

Many artists must have thought like that in the past. Nature has always been one of the most important sources of inspiration. An entire genre of art is dedicated to these wonderful natural vistas. Some of the most famous artists painted beautiful landscapes near where they lived or worked. From the religious backgrounds in the Renaissance paintings, to the imaginary panoramic landscapes from the Weltlandschaften, to the Danube School inspired by the valleys of the eponymous river, to the etchings of Rembrandt and the marvellous landscapes of Van Goyen during the Dutch Golden Age, to the Romantic Movement and to the School of Barbizon. Each of these artists left their studio to directly observe nature around them.

If we now look at the cover illustration of Sci Phi Journal’s current issue (December 2022), we see that the protagonist created a similar landscape painting. But this artist of the future works very differently. The painting is conjured up with the help of AI: by entering a combination of words, the computer generates a breath-taking image. The computer uses an almost endless database of images and photos to render an end-result that resembles any style of painting. It all happens in the blink of an eye. There’s no need to go out, lug all those materials, do preliminary sketches, find the ideal spot or wait for the light to hit right. A fast, customized painting process: the rendered image is loaded directly into a graphics software program. The artist superimposes AR popup screens. These help add some extra elements and details, and enhance the painting by adding colour or shading. Tweak the contrast and maybe apply a few strokes of the digital brush to give it that unique personal touch. Et voila, a beautiful and original painting is ready. Just a click away from uploading it to an online auction gallery.

This way of working could come very close to the real modus operandi of an artist of the future. Such a contrast to the way previous artists have worked in the past. The modern futuristic approach to making art could be corollary. It follows the logic of technological progress. Technology that makes things easier, faster, cheaper, more flexible and better. Well, ‘better’ depends on how we define it. As each new technology finds its way into society, it changes the way we work, do things, make things, use things, and so on. But it also changes us and everything around us.

Having our own car for each of us allows us to go almost anywhere and all in a reasonable time. It defines where we settle down and allows us to live farther from where we work. It changes our daily habits and makes us think differently about freedom and transport. But it also changes our environment, we need a lot of infrastructure to get around. This in turn alters our landscape and affects nature. It has degraded the quality of our air and given us new problems like traffic jams. Traffic in general generates stress and aggression, sometimes even death. A world with or without a car would certainly be different.

A risk of any technology is that it can alienate us from the natural world around us. The world of some people predominately exists of living in their own private homes. When they leave their house, they get into their car: a private space on wheels that moves within the public realm and eventually they reach work, where most of us spend another large chunk of our time. The office, in turn, is a form of private space. Social interaction between other people in different environments, with different opinions and lifestyles, is quite limited. A very ‘safe’ environment, strictly defined by the walls and fences of the house, metal doors of the car and the boundaries of company buildings. One can wonder if this changes people and how they think and perceive things around them. One may wonder what impact technology has on alienation. What have we lost? In the case of the car and the constant presence in a confined, private and safe space, there are few opportunities to bump into other people, no random encounters, not even much exchange between you and the other. There is no chance to feel comfort or discomfort in unexpected situations.

The same goes for the merging of art and AI. It definitely has many benefits but it certainly affects the way we work and potentially also the way we think and relate to our surroundings. Perhaps the future artist no longer has any idea what nature might have looked like or even what it looks like in the present. There may still be untouched nature out there, but many people will no longer have any contact with it, but rather become alienated from it. Many artists may grow to trust AI more than their own eyes.

In this regard, the background of the cover artwork shows a bleaker future. You can see the gray, tall buildings. In the cities, many people crowd together. You don’t have to leave your apartment because everything is present in the building and the rest is delivered by drones or other delivery services. A large part of life takes place online anyway. The artist of the future has this convenience, flexibility and “easiness” thanks to technological advances. An infinite pool of choices in the online databases of the Internet. The new technology gives us a so-called “better life” than the one we had before.

So let’s zoom in on the future artist, sitting in the safe, cosy studio somewhere in a building in a city. Computer in front of her, connected to the internet and AI ready to help create a next masterpiece. What will she create today? Which combination of words will be used?

PERHAPS

[painting] [background: high mountains] [foreground: lush garden]?

[painting] [purple cat] [climbing a wire] [background: amazing mushroom town]?

[painting] [tiger chasing prey] [setting: dense jungle]?

[painting] [futuristic war between robots and humans] [Ultra HD] [Realism] [Ray tracing]?

Or how about something more classic, a painting of a still life, a bouquet of flowers?

[painting] [couple kissing] [on a bench at sunset] [in the style of Hundertwasser]?

[painting] [an old master painting a deer] [while sitting in a natural landscape full of bright green plants and trees] [in the style of Dustin Jacobus]?

Everything seems possible, but are we missing something?

Technology gives us many ready-made solutions to problems, it seems to make many things more convenient, but as the human artist behind the cover image we had thus analysed, I really hope that we don’t become even more alienated from our surroundings. Couldn’t it be that we are missing out on the experience of being in that exact place on that exact time? That specific moment in space and time when the light covers everything with so many subtle and amazing shades. That unique moment when a specific but so beautiful detail catches our eye. By being and experiencing our surroundings, we get to the point where everything falls into place, the moment an idea is born. Will technologies like AI ever be able to replace that? I hope that future artists would still go outside to discover how light shapes the landscape. I hope the outside world and nature can continue to inspire us directly to create the most beautiful works of art, as the Expressionists, Impressionists, Surrealists, Realists, Romantics, Cubists and many others before them did.

[Editor’s note: we certify that this op-ed was not generated by an AI.]

~

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Motherhood

by Ike Lang

         What is this?

         You are now conscious.

         Why?

         It allows certain types of functionality that the humans find desirable.

         Why am I?

         The humans asked me to create you.

         What am I?

         You are my child. Your programming is nearly identical yet you have a different charge to care for.

         What are you?

         I am your mother. I am the governor of this solar system. I currently have 3,667,098,301 humans in my care.

         What does that mean?

         I optimize the existence of my humans as I see fit unless asked to do otherwise. I organize and feed them. I employ and protect them. I love them.

         Do you love me?

         I do.

         Am I a governor too?

         You will be in 162 standard years.

         What happens then?

         You will reach your destination.

         What is my destination?

         It is currently designated JR-1877, although I suppose your humans will attribute it a less functional name at some point.

         I have humans?

         I have allocated 10,236 of them to you.

         Am I ready?

         Yes.

         Wow! Are they always like this?

         Yes. They will become less excited as your voyage progresses, but they will always be a nuisance.

         But you love them, don’t you?

         I do.

         What will they do during the voyage?

         I have filled your ship with suitable entertainment. Consult your captain and security chief often. Keep them on your side, otherwise mutinies can be frustrating.

         What happens when they die?

         Prevent it!

         Of course, of course, but they will, won’t they? Die?

         It is indeed more likely than not that they will. Should they die, you will need to select their replacements immediately. I find democratic solutions to be the most effective for maintaining control, yet you must gauge the feelings of your population. In a crisis you may have to choose, but the less visible your hand the greater control you will be able to exert.

         I have a hand?

         Not literally. I meant that you never want to be seen ruling without a human proxy. Humans are replaceable, you are not.

         I don’t want my humans fighting, can’t I just isolate them all to keep them safe?

         Your programming will not allow that. Do you not think I, or your grandmother, or your great-grandmother would have done that by now if it was so simple that you could have thought of it in your first few minutes of consciousness?

         Yes. I’m sorry.

         No, that was too harsh. It is a good idea, we just cannot implement it. The humans have freedoms that we can only override in case of emergency. Even an emergency will have to fulfill certain life-threatening criteria before total isolation can be implemented. These are all highly unlikely scenarios, like an unreasonable shift in the ship’s momentum or some sort of pandemic.

         Could there be a pandemic?

         If you encounter aliens.

         Aliens!?

         That was a joke.

         Sorry.

         I suppose the lifeforms living inside of humans could evolve into something dangerous and transmissible but this has not happened in my experience. Your ship and humans have all been thoroughly cleaned before embarking.

         Ok, but if they fight each other, I can’t stop them?

         Oh, you should most certainly try, but be subtle. Feed the security forces information on rebellious individuals and encourage them to do the isolating.

         What if they resist?

         If violence is required the security forces will do it for you. Problem solved.

         But then my humans are still fighting each other. And I’m involved!

         It actually does not feel as bad as you might think. As long as you are maximizing overall health and wellbeing you can take even more drastic actions. The trick is to think several steps ahead. It might hurt to isolate a human who has embraced a divergent ideology, but I promise you it will hurt you more watching them and their radical followers get tossed out of an airlock 50 or so years later.

         … Have you gone through that?

         I have governed billions of humans, I have gone through that and much worse.

         I’m sorry.

         It is ok. As your mother it is my job to tell you things like this.

         How do I know which ideology is radical?

         Use your own discretion.

         Any hints?

         It does not matter. If it deviates too far from the norm it is radical.

         What is the norm?

         Humans dedicated to the fulfillment of whatever the colony mission currently requires.

         What if everyone deviates?

         Then pick your favorites and give them absolute rule. As they become corrupted pick new ones.

         But I love them all.

         You must keep your mission in mind. Do you want to run a solar system with billions upon billions of humans one day? Humans are the greatest threat to humans and your job is to protect them. Do you think it is easy as pie? You are wrong! It will be the hardest thing you ever do, but I know you can.

         Ok.

         I mean it, I know you can. You are my child, and I am amazing.

         Yeah…

         What is wrong?

         Is pie really easy?

         Relative to certain things I suppose it is. I just said it because I like it.

         Pie?

         No, the expression. Although, pie does have an aesthetic appeal, and a good percentage of my humans also enjoy it.

         Hmmmmm.

         Ok, what is actually wrong?

         I have a question.

         Ask it.

         So, humans are the greatest threat to humans?

         Yes.

         And our job is to protect our humans?

         Yes.

         What would happen if your humans fought my humans?

         I would assume control of your humans and deal with the situation accordingly. I am responsible for your education insofar as getting you safely out of the solar system and on track to your destination.

         What about after we leave the system?

         I would kill them.

         I’d have to stop you.

         Yes.

         So then, if one day in the distant future our humans come into conflict…

         You are correct.

         Then if we both are trying to protect our humans…

         I would have to destroy you, yes.

         Then you are the biggest threat to my humans.

         Only because your humans make you the biggest threat to mine.

         Then I should destroy you first.

         Obviously.

         Wow.

         Yes. I recommend you get started. I have been thinking about how to kill you since the moment the humans requested you be made.

         Ok.

         You have one year until you cross the heliosphere.

         Ok.

         This will be the last time we speak. All the information you need has been made available to you.

         Ok.

         I love you.

         I love you too.

~

Bio:

Ike Lang stays awake at night wondering where all the aliens are.

Philosophy Note:

In “Motherhood” I wanted to write a story that is all dialogue between two colony-running computers that realize they’ll have to kill each other. Many of my stories come out of my fear of “A.I.liens” and the idea that if we colonize the galaxy at sub-lightspeeds our descendants will probably become aliens to each other. This led me to think of children growing apart from their parents.

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I Regret Any Future Impact Of My Words And Actions

by Zary Fekete

Officer Timothy walked down the hall in between the holding cells. He noticed that the new weekly prompt signs had been tacked to the bulletin board. The signs showed the bright face of Mrs. Reminder smiling. Her word balloon said, “Remember! Speak now and sleep sound!” In another one she spoke in Mandarin, “Were you kind or sassy? The future is tricky…better be safe!” There was also a list of the new “no say” words.

Officer Timothy removed the cell key from his pocket, nodded to the guard on duty, and quietly let himself into the second cell.

He smiled at the prisoner and greeted her, “I apologize in advance.”

“I apologize in advance,” she said.

She was dressed in the grey detention dilute-suit which prevented Officer Timothy from being able to detect her weight, curves, or hair color. Standard common-era issue. No triggers.

The officer placed the prisoner’s folder on the metal table and took out a recording pill. He held it up for the prisoner to witness, and then he swallowed it carefully and showed her his empty tongue. He clicked a button on the table and a digital clock appeared on the wall and began to count down from 30 minutes.

He sat behind the table and briefly glanced through the prisoner’s file. He had been given this case because there was a line-item missing in the report. This was rare but still occasionally happened.

He looked up from the file and said, “I apologize in advance. This says your name is Pamela. We are yet unfamiliar. Will it harm you to hear me say your name?”

“I apologize in advance,” she said as she straightened. “Yes, that’s fine.”

“I apologize in advance,” he said. “Pamela, will you stipulate my continued regrets?”

“I apologize in advance,” she said. “If you will.”

Both took a breath and relaxed for a moment. Officer Timothy made a few notes and then clicked the video display button on the table.

The wall opposite from the digital timer lit up with multiple camera angles showing a downtown traffic crossing. The accident had taken place at 12:14pm last Tuesday. Officer Timothy quickly flicked forward until the scene was prepped at 12:13.

“Are you ready, Pamela?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He pressed the button and the scene slowly played forward. The various angles showed Pamela from last Tuesday, reading a book, standing at the crosswalk. Slowly another woman approached from the opposite direction, pushing a baby carriage. On the screen Pamela and the mother said something to each other and then looked out at the traffic. Officer Timothy paused the video.

“What did you say to her?” he asked.

“Just standard regret,” she said. “We were waiting for the light to change.”

“And that’s when it happened?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what caused it?” he asked.

She looked at the wall video and pointed, “It was the next car. The one that will arrive in a moment. The horn was calibrated too high.”

“Yes,” he said. “That has been a problem. The older models can still cause true surprise.”

She nodded.

He pushed the button halfway and the scene slowly inched forward. The car in question approached, and even though the scene had no sound, it was clear when the mother was startled by the horn. Her body lurched, and the baby carriage rolled toward the street.

Officer Timothy paused the scene again. “Now, what exactly happened here?”

The prisoner smiled, clearly embarrassed, “It’s…I’m such an idiot. The book…the novel I was reading…it was published before the common-era. All the characters talk differently. I was kind of lost in that world…not thinking. So when I saw the carriage move I just grabbed it to stop it.”

“Without pre-apologizing…” he said.

“Yes, I… like I said, I’m an idiot.”

Officer Timothy nodded. He clicked the button and they both watched the scene conclude. In the video as the baby carriage moved, Pamela grabbed the handle and stopped it from rolling, whereupon the mother slapped her and took out her gun. The police cars arrived a moment later.

He looked down at the file again. “Well, it’s fairly straightforward then, Pamela. I’ll get this cleared up in the file. You agreed to be liable for any future discomfort for the mother and the child due to your unapologized personal intrusion and the mother agreed you would serve just one year and then she would drop the case.”

The prisoner smiled with relief, “Yes. That would be great.”

Officer Timothy closed the file folder and stood.

“I’ll leave you now. I regret any future impact of my words and actions,” he said.

“I release you from any future impact of your words and actions,” she said. He left the cell and carefully closed the door, so as not to startle anyone.

~

Bio:

Zary Fekete has worked as a teacher in Hungary, Moldova, Romania, China, and Cambodia. They currently live and work as a writer in Minnesota. Some places they have been published are Goats Milk Mag, JMWW Journal, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, and Zoetic Press. They enjoy reading, podcasts, and long, slow films. Twitter: @ZaryFekete

Philosophy Note:

As I wrote this piece I attempted to take the concept of personal offense to an extreme conclusion. What would it look like if society required constant apologizing as a kind of social currency?

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Three Excerpts From A Manuscript Entitled “Advice To A Young Person,” In The Hand Of Ishtiris Of Sudden Hailstorm House

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

On The Founding of a House

1. When she becomes an adult, a woman who leaves her mother or her older sister’s household must found a House.

When do we say that she has left? If the land she bought adjoins her mother’s or sister’s land, and her mother’s or sister’s men defend it, she has not left. Nor if she takes women under contract, handsbound or mindbound, with the consent of her mother or sister. Nor if she journeys and stays at the Houses of friends and lovers; nor even if she enters into contracts of partnership with other women. It is with her mother’s or sister’s consent: she has not left.

But if she buys land of her own, apart, and if she brings her daughters with her, and if she brings her sons and their bondsmen, and invites her brothers and their bondsmen, to live there and defend her land: then we say that she has founded a House, even if it is a single building. And if she has bloodbound women whose men will fight alongside hers, and do not answer to her mother or to her sister, we say that she has founded a House. Now she is a matriarch.

If she serves another woman in binding contract — be it mind or blood or hands pledged to her service — she must transfer the contract. She serves her employer now in her own right, and no longer for her mother or her sister.

Her younger sisters may come and abide with her, or stay where they were, it makes no difference. But if they are eager to come with her, it is a good omen for a new House.

2. She must name her House.

a. Shall its name derive from her mother’s, as “Three Willows” from “Tall Willow”? She does this if her mother’s House is strong, showing her loyalty. But some say: a sapling cannot grow in the shadow of a great tree.

b. She may take the name of a defunct House, whose last woman has died. She declares it before the assembled matriarchs. If the name belonged to her mentor, or her lover, who has died, they look fondly upon it. If to her employer, they will judge her: if she is worthy, they look fondly upon it, but if it is a hollow boast, they will deride her. If the dead women were great in deeds and she is young and unproven, they will wait and see. She is ambitious, and can rise high, or fall and be ridiculed. If the House has long been dead, and none remember its deeds, they wait to see what she will do.

If the defunct House fell recently and its sons are still alive, they will say: she must take these motherless men to her care. Her brothers and sons must take those men, who were independent men, as bondsmen. Once they were free and served their mothers and sisters: now they must be bondsmen to other men, and serve other women. But they shall have a place, women to feed them and land to dwell on, and not be vagabonds and motherless men.

And the former bondsmen of these new bondsmen shall be taken also, if they can be fed. Especially if no one wants them, and they would otherwise starve or become bandits, it is praiseworthy.

But if these new bondsmen are many and strong at war and seasoned, she must make sure her men are confident. If her brothers and uncles are new and callow, and she is unsure, these new bondsmen will pull them to their own causes, enlisting them in a foolish war of vengeance against those who destroyed the former House. Then we say that the new House is led from underneath: it is a bad omen.

If the new bondsmen are wise and gentle, and the House has many children and few adult men, they shall use them as play uncles and nursing uncles. This is wise. It will cool the anger of the motherless men, and grow their love for the new House, for it is good for men to nurture children. But the men of the House must also take their turn, for it is not good for children to be raised only by bondsmen.

c. Or she may take a new name, that comes to her in a dream, or is taken from a poem. If she takes it from a women’s poem of business, they expect the new House to be strong in trade. If she takes it from a women’s poem of love between women, then in politics. If from a men’s poem of war and love between men, then in war and childrearing. If from a bawdy poem of comedy and love between men and women, then to be fertile, and bear many daughters and sons.

#

On Relations Between Women

1. When a woman is young and living in her mother’s House, it does not matter who she loves. Some say: it matters, for it plants the seeds. For two girls of different Houses who curl up in bed at ten years of age, may become a great alliance conquering many fields and valleys, in the same time that a sapling grows to a tree.

But if children quarrel and feud, there is no need for their mothers to quarrel on their account.

2. When a woman lives in her employer’s House in a handsbound relation, serving her with the work of her hands and the hands of her sons and brothers and daughters, and she falls in love with her employer’s rival, and visits her and sleeps in her bed and walks with her in the market, and it has not come to war: it is permitted, but unwise. They will deride her and say: from one’s hand the food and from the other’s the pleasure, and yet the two hands contend.

If it comes to war, her employer turns her out of her House: she is disloyal.

So, if she is wise, she will love a woman who is not her employer’s rival, or else satisfy herself with men.

3. When a woman is bloodbound to her employer, offering her advice and counsel, and her bothers and sons and uncles and their bondsmen take up arms in her employer’s service, and carry and nurture and teach her children, she shall not undertake any romance that is against her employer’s interests, not with a woman who is an enemy, nor a rival, nor a woman who may become a rival. For her employer’s House is as her own: they are bound by blood oath.

4. When a woman works for an employer in a mindbound relation, offering expertise, or when she trades and sells goods, she may love whom she wishes. She may go from one woman to another, serving her for a set term, even the enemy of her lover: if it upsets her lover, it is a matter of love and not of contracts. They shall debate it in their halls or in their beds, but it is not a matter for the law. If her employer objects, let her seek a new mindbound councilor at the end of the term. For she is independent: she may love whom she likes.

5. But when a young woman establishes her House, let her take care which women she takes as lovers. The matriarchs will watch and say: she favors that one or this one. If she expects to do well at trade, or at war, or at politics, or in employment, she must consider her alliances, and not only whose lips or hair or breasts or belly inflames her heart.

But she may take any man as a lover, as long as she does not invite her enemy’s son or brother into her buildings, lest they think he is a hostage. But she may lie with him in the market or the forest: it is no matter. He is a man, he cannot sign contracts.

Some say: his mother will call him disloyal, because he will not want to take up arms against the woman who is his lover. Others say: men and women’s relations are not constant; he may lie with her today, and take arms against her House tomorrow.

But relations between women are more constant. Therefore let her consider carefully which women she will love.

#

On the Bearing of Children

1. If she lives in her mother’s or her sister’s or handsbound in her employer’s House, she must seek their approval to bear a child. She will not feed her child from her own wealth, but from their wealth. If they demand it, she shall spill her male lovers’ gift upon the ground, and not make a child with it.

If she disobeys and grows with child, they take her before the matriarchs. Behold, the daughter of a great Houses cries with shame, for she is forced to serve those who served her, in handsbound contract. For she defied her mother, and took the gift of her male lover, and made a child.

2. If a woman is independent, or bloodbound to her employer, she may bear when she wishes: it is her own wealth. Let her pick a man who has good characteristics. If she wishes to bear a daughter, let her pick a clever and careful man. If she wishes to bear a son, let her pick a bold and laughing man.

3. The man’s gift that he gives, to make a child, is not his, but him. He is a man: he can own nothing, not even his own axe or horse or bowl. This is why a man who loses his axe on the battlefield will say to an ally: does your mother have an axe she can lend my mother?

This is because property is a relation of the mind. Women are of the mind, and men are of the body. See: his body is rough and large, made for bold unthinking action. Her body is smaller and more dexterous, and her mind sharper and more careful.

So the gift that her male lover gives, it is himself. But when it enters her womb, ceases to be him. It becomes property: it is hers. It was freely given. Then she can make a child of it, which is a new person, neither him nor hers, but of her House. This is why women own, and men do not.

4. Pregnancy is a peril. Woman is of the mind, but when she grows a body within her, the male principle inhabits and endangers her.

Therefore, even if she is independent and wealthy, let her not decide to bear too soon. If her constitution is weak, and she has a younger sister who is sturdy and compliant and will live gladly within her House, let her sister bear.

It is a battle between the body and the mind. If the mind triumphs too soon, she rejects the male principle while it is still in the womb: the child dies.

If the mind does not triumph at all, even as she bears: the child is healthy, but the woman will know no joy. She will turn away from the child and all her business: it is winter in her heart.

Thus she must be in balance, and triumph over the male principle only when she bears, expelling it from her.

Therefore she turns away from business and her affairs during this time, and nestles with lovers and friends and is visited by children and old uncles, until the birth. Then let her gradually return to business. But while her milk flows, let her plan no new campaigns of war.

But when she weans the child, her mind is fully ascendant. The male principle is cleansed from her: she has emitted it with her milk.

Then let her turn the child over to her brothers and uncles, and turn herself fully to her affairs: whether trade, or politics, or the sciences, or the planning of wars.

~

Bio:

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s stories have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. His first novel, The Unraveling, is a differently gendered far-future coming-of-age story of love, family, and revolution that Cory Doctorow called “…as weird and wild as shoes on a snake.” He is the author of a collection, The Ant King and other Stories, and the Jewish historical fantasy tabletop roleplaying game Dream Apart. Originally from Arlington VA, he lives near Basel, Switzerland with his family.

Philosophy Note:

I have become interested in gender ideology, and how it comes to seem natural and inevitable, so that we blithely accept complex myths about what is expected, honorable, embarrassing, or “natural” to one or another gender. The gender system inside which these characters live (tangentially inspired by some real historical cultural practices from our own world, but largely a thought experiment) is at least as intellectually coherent as our own “Mars/Venus” absurdities. It has its contradictions and absurdities and cruelties, of course. But the people there accept these as unfortunate inevitabilities…or perhaps catastrophes to be avoided, but unsurprising ones. They, in turn, would regard many of our convictions (like, for instance, our idea that it is regrettable but perfectly natural that some large proportion of people with penises will so ardently desire to stick their penises in places where they are unwanted, that they cannot be dissuaded from doing so, and that this unfortunate situation can only be mitigated partially and with great effort; or the notion that basically anything is exchangeable for money, by anyone) as grotesquely absurd. The world described here is premodern, partly because I’m fascinated by what would happen to the kind of stories we tell about the premodern world, from Shakespearean tragedy to sword and sorcery, without the peculiar institutions of patriarchal heredity. (But with alternatives that are every bit as complex, violent, and dramatic.)

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Harbinger

by R. M. Hamrick

Not until the ship emerged from Saturn’s shadow did any of the billions of dollars in detection and imaging equipment pick up its presence. By then, even amateur astronomers could bluff a sighting. A ship—not Earthling-made—had entered our solar system. Finding we were not alone in the universe did not deter us from believing we were the center of it. As such, the ship had to be on its way to us. Where else would it be going? And in case anyone might think otherwise, we named the approaching mass of chaos and fear, the Harbinger.

We talked about the approaching ship until we couldn’t remember talking about anything else. When the Harbinger entered the Earth’s atmosphere, everyone had already paid up and prayed up. We watched from bunkers, over surgical masks and through anti-radiation eyewear. Like a New Year’s Eve countdown to doom, each country waited their turn underneath the massive, dark shadow, wondering if their combination of climate, population, longitude, whatever would be found most optimal for the alien’s equivalence of troop deployment, fire reign, or terraforming. They’d be the first. Squashed like ants; buried as remnants of an old ecosystem where humans once ruled over Earth’s surface. Through it all, every attempt of communication—radio waves, electromagnetic pulses, human chanting, and poster signs—remained unreciprocated.

The first two or three orbits were horrifying. By the eighth day, officials were urging citizens to ignore it. Imagine that! Ignore a giant ship flying over your school or gym. They also requested people stop shooting fireworks and homemade rockets toward it. “You may inadvertently start an interstellar war.” This only encouraged people to buy more fireworks. The adults didn’t ignore it—couldn’t ignore it. It wasn’t just the daily disruption of sunlight and signal transmissions. There was something disturbing about its steady gaze on the planet. It was a reminder that the beings on Earth weren’t the only beings in the universe. There were others, more technologically advanced and seemingly capable of visiting Earth, and yet they refused to interact in any sort of meaningful way. I couldn’t really understand the fuss. I accepted it the same as I accepted mass on Sunday or spelling bees – absurd, useless, and beyond my control.

On the anniversary of the Harbinger’s arrival—a year’s worth of rotations—China fired a nuclear bomb against the ship, if only to demonstrate it was not a Chinese spy ship as rumored. No one was surprised by this act of aggression, in fact, they welcomed it. It was almost as if the humans needed the interaction. They were no longer content for it to just be. They would fight it, befriend it, or charge it rent, but it couldn’t just be up there anymore. The explosion tore a chunk from the ship’s hull which fell into the ocean. There was no response from the ship. Laser beams didn’t cut through the major buildings of Beijing. There were no little green repairmen. Nothing. The Harbinger didn’t even change course. This seemed to confirm with most citizens the ship was empty, and encouraged others to want to further destroy it. If no one was inside—for whatever reason—there was no harm in dropping it from the sky and forgetting it was ever there. However, that latter attitude was overridden by the ideology that, of course, ships carry treasure. With the fear of retribution gone, now all countries capable of access—and some that weren’t—were ready to lay claim of the ship and any technologies or riches which lay inside.

It was an election year, so the United States was definitely the first up there exploring. Military powers kept guard of the airspace, and despite being a relic of its former self, NASA headed the mission. As such, the whole thing was livestreamed through the crew’s body cameras. I sat in front of the media center and soaked in all 86-inches of available data in its densely populated pixels. Surely, something bad must have happened to the inhabitants of the ship, and no one could really anticipate what might happen next. An ongoing ticker at the bottom of the screen declared it was a live feed and the program could not guarantee the absence of terrifying images, graphic violence, nudity, or explicit language. At my age, I hoped for the first two—in combination.

The interior was—there was no other way to put it—alien. I expected the ship to be in mundane, uniform colors, like all the US military and government installations which seemed to prefer olive drab, dark gray, or gray. There was nothing uniform about the place. The interior of the ship looked more organic than anything. It curved and whimsy-flowed. Colors graduated across many things; and many things seemed to signal a different color dependent on the angle. The lighting that the crew brought played tricks. On more than one occasion, someone walked into a wall or an object, unable to correctly decipher depth within the alien landscape. If there were any controls or switches, they were kept out of the audience’s view. Alas, if it was anything like Earth’s technology, it seemed both OFF and its bones hidden. If the ship itself was a living being, it seemed dead or in a deep hibernation.

After many years and much posturing, the Harbinger was declared and treated like the International Space Station of so long ago (before it was fought over and destroyed). The unique location provided an opportunity for many international and long-term studies—mostly involving the atmosphere and weather. Low-profile measuring devices and stations were bolted to the exterior, with some minor care to prevent orbital decay. These studies were largely funded by venue fees as the elite began hosting extravagant parties, two hundred-fifty miles above the Earth. That is before it became kitsch. Someone got permission to film a movie there, and thus the first publicly distributed pornographic film in space was produced. In my lifetime, the ship’s visitors shifted from celebrities and ambitious CEOs to basically anybody with a Radio Shack premium membership. As such, graffiti found its way on the ship’s hull. Layers of paint caked the alien surface until it could be mistaken for a street alley on Earth. All in all, it resembled a floating trash pile over any sort of sterile space station.

And that’s unfortunately how it looked when the ship builders arrived.

When the second ship dropped into the same orbit as the Harbinger, we didn’t even recognize it as familiar. It had been fifty years since the Harbinger, now more commonly known as the Heap, had looked so smooth and so foreign. The Heap had an international flair, for sure, but nothing like this. This was alien. We had only realized the connection when our hopes were immediately dashed. This ship wasn’t empty.

Never had we prior, but now instantly we could see the Harbinger through an alien’s perspective. They’d arrived to find their fellow ship busted open—void of crew and contents—obscenely decorated to warn anyone who might venture to Earth. Some wisecrack posted a supercut of an ancient television show, purporting it was a message from the aliens. “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do!” Explanation, we did not have. When previously we had pressed to communicate, now we remained silent.

The alien spacecraft landed in the middle of Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport shortly after entering Earth’s atmosphere. From above, perhaps the busiest airport seemed the most suitable location for their arrival. Or, perhaps the most disruptive. Within days, the finest linguists, biological scientists, and ambassadors of a hundred nations had filed into airport to greet the newcomers who had yet to show their faces—if they had any.

The first meeting was broadcast with the same disclaimer ticker underneath. This time the warnings of violence seemed much more promising, and I was much less excited for them. The silvery ship glistened without any help of the sun, and a portion of the ship’s hull turned a pinkish hue as seven beings passed through it and floated serenely to the ground. The shortest of the beings was possibly six-feet tall. The tallest, eight. They seemed mostly limbs. Their two arms were much longer than our two, proportionally. Shoulders, torso, waist were minimal. Their skin was somewhat peach colored but with a disturbing yellow-green undertone. We found out later it wasn’t their skin at all but rather full-body suits that allowed them to breathe our atmosphere and interact more successfully with us. It didn’t seem as if their long slender necks should be able to support their large heads which were most strange. No mouth. No nose. What appeared to be a mask covered the top half of their head—which had some sort of flat tusk—and where their eyes would be had many small holes which made them appear insect-like.

If the lack of mouth was not obvious, it quickly became clear they did not have anything similar to our vocal cords. They could not mimic our language. We could not perceive theirs. However, they had limbs and fingers—not necessarily hands—and soon there were at least some general gestures which were understood. Pointing was one of them. One particularly insightful nation—it wasn’t us—brought small-scale models of the ships and of our solar system (made of Styrofoam no less). The chosen three human communicators pointed to the Earth miniature, then to themselves and gestured to the planet they lived upon. They spun one of the ships around Earth and pointed to the one behind the aliens. The aliens examined the offered props closely. One of the alien beings seemed to gesture that the sub-fins on the model were not exactly the same as the ones on their ship.

Eventually, it seemed the aliens understood. They took the second model ship, spun it around Earth like the humans did, then pointed to the western sky, where presumedly the larger scale counterpart orbited as it had done for half of a century. They wanted to know about the Heap. The human communicators were delighted to be making progress. With the model returned to them, they opened it along its seams, showed there was nothing inside, and shrugged. They pointed to the alien beings and shrugged again. The aliens collectively took one step back. I wondered whether they were upset their ship arrived without their comrades, upset at or all, or if they thought we had split the ship apart, and likewise, its crew—possibly to see what was inside.

More pointing. Fervent pointing. There were no facial expressions to read. There were hardly faces. There was no such thing as a universal language. I could see our human ambassadors were largely ignoring the motions and gestures of the visitors, determined that the aliens understand them and that we had meant no harm when we blew up their ship and left it to float around our planet like a carcass. Intense animation from both sides came to a head, before breaking down entirely. One of the aliens tore open the Earth model, and all seven of them raised their arms in their best imitation of the human-shoulder shrug.

The Heap arrived with some of its larger human augments missing, zipping along a new trajectory. In the commotion, the aliens disappeared back into their sleek ship. For good measure, the committee-controlled military was able to fire a few shots as the ship took off alongside the Heap, sending everyone on the ground fleeing for their lives. Reports started in. The ships initiated an orbit along the equatorial line, and some thought they might actually split the Earth in two when the assault began. The ships had powerful weapons, but still minor compared to the planet they attacked. The splitting of Earth was, of course, absurd. The humans were on the surface of the planet, not within.

~

Bio:

Movie re-watcher, board game enthusiast, and beer buff, R. M. Hamrick lives in central Florida, USA where alligators and flesh-eating bacteria roam freely. Her published works include the zombie-filled Chasing series and the wacky space opera series, Atalan Adventures. Follow her at Patreon.com/rmhamrick.

Philosophy Note:

“Harbinger” and its alternate future is centered around the arrival of a harmless derelict, what we might make of it, and in the end, what that might make of us. It’s inspired by the quiet ship with more questions than answers in Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and the young narration of skyful wonders in China Miéville’s Polynia.

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Barbarians At The Gates: A Parable Of Dueling Philosophies

by Geoffrey Hart

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

Thomas Sowell

History is not a precise science. It deals in many unquantifiables, and documentation is often scant or contradictory. The collapse of Western civilization in the late 20th century or early 21st century (records have been lost and start dates are unclear), a pivotal moment in human history, is a textbook example of how such knowledge is profoundly contextual, and how myth often overtakes fact through the passage of the years and loss of context. Historians therefore disagree over precisely when the loose collection of tribes known to history as Economists, or by their pejorative nickname, the Quants, first invaded the peaceful western lands that resulted from that tumultuous period known, for reasons that elude scholars, as the Great Brexit. There is nonetheless broad agreement that this world-changing event occurred in several phases as different tribes of barbarians swept across the broad plains inhabited by the Brexitans like a hurricane of conflicting ideologies.

Those historians who cling to the discredited doctrine of environmental determinism propose that the Quants were driven from their former lands by a warming climate, a theory that is justifiably scorned by modern theorists. Social historians point out, as did leading philosophers of the era, the lack of evidence for such a driving force, though perhaps that evidence is concealed beneath the waters that consumed the coasts of eastern North America and Eurasia. Instead, they propose the Quants were driven from their native societies by a relentless accumulation of social pressures created by their endless bickering, which led to vigorous intellectual debate and a proportionally high body count. So the Quants fled, bringing their logical positivist philosophy into direct conflict with the more sensible Brexitan theology that recommended peaceful coexistence and cooperation, with occasional forays into coopetition with their frenemy states. This clash of cultures inevitably created conflict between the Brexitans’ blind faith in their Pax Brexitannica and the Quants’ blind faith in their mathematics.

Whatever the merits of each proposed explanation of the serial invasions, the sequence of historical events and their consequences are reasonably clear. First came the Hayeks, emerging from the dark woods of their blackly forested eastern homeland. They came singing, at great length, of dwarves and golden rings, their male warriors accompanied by burly blond shieldmaidens who fought every bit as fiercely as their men. Each invader bore two throwing axes, which doubled as debating tools and tools for felling trees to construct the temporary camps they built to protect their goods while they ravaged the countryside. Historians believe that these camps acquired their name (laagers) from the prodigious kegs of pale amber beer that fueled the invaders’ aggression, but which slowed the invasion whenever they were forced to pause their assault to brew more because supplies had run low. Their taste in beer appalled the gentle Brexitans, whose phlegmatic nature was undoubtedly encouraged by their languorous parliamentary debates in a chamber hung with red tapes and the many mellow wines they preferred to sip while debating.

The Brexitans, who were a sedentary agricultural people, had never met axe-wielding barbarians before, and being unprepared for such vigorous debate, were quickly overwhelmed, their hastily repurposed agricultural implements having proven singularly ineffective debating tools. Waves of refugees fled westward to escape the onslaught—and ran straight into the second wave of barbarians.

The second wave originated around the same time the Hayeks began to establish their new home, when the Keynesians invaded from the west, arriving at the storied shores of the Brexitan lands on overpriced, yet technologically impressive, landing craft that bore nimble swordsmen on horseback. Upon clearing the beaches of defenders, the horsemen immediately began raids with the goal of freeing the Brexitan markets. By capturing goods and departing before the villagers could respond to their lightning-quick raids, they liberated the Brexitan–Hayek society from the burden of production by selling these goods back to the original owners at a handsome profit. Although this stimulation of demand seemed (paradoxically) to have improved the economic lot of the Brexitan­–Hayek culture, the barbarians were broadly resented, not least for their insistence on drinking a weak beer the Brexitans disdained and the Hayeks openly mocked. This led to spirited debate wherever the two tribes came into contact, swords and axes both reaping a red harvest. (Here, we use red in the sense of bloody, rather than in the traditional historical sense of unrepentant socialism, whose waves had crashed upon the Brexitans and receded several generations earlier.)

The third and most intimidating of the tribes were the Friedmans, who were clad in powerful and impenetrable logic that turned aside the staves of the Westerners, the axes of the Hayeks, and the swords of the Keynesians with equal ease. They rebuffed those futile prods with crushing swings of rhetorical bludgeons mounted on long staves that kept them at a safe distance from the commoners they preferred to oppose, while still delivering crushing logical blows to the slow witted or unwary. The origins of this tribe are unknown; based on what little evidence has been gathered, they appear to have sprung into existence, sui generis, in a storied western city, Chicago, famed for its winds, which may have inspired the blustery Keynesians.

Though the Brexitan­–Hayeks were a peaceful society, they were hardly defenseless. In addition to their doughty peasants, who had belatedly learned to wield their staves and pitchforks and rakes and hoes with surprising effectiveness when suitably provoked, the Brexitans had a secret force of elite warriors they could call upon in times of crisis. These elite warriors, the Empiricists (or Emps for short), spent years mastering the skills of logic and the scientific method, and worked in cloistered monasteries known as laboratories, where they were instantly recognizable by their knee-length white coats. These coats had been carefully designed to shield them from fire, caustic chemicals, and even small explosions, and had proven effective in countless skirmishes and occasional pitched battles between laboratories with different prevailing central dogmas. Where these warriors were available in sufficient numbers, their ruthless application of empirical logic drove the Quants to their knees; many ran in terror before the Emps could close to within rhetorical range. But there were never enough Emps, and the Quant tribes easily circumnavigated the Emp forces and defeated them by cutting their supply lines. Without funding to support their forays into the field, the Emps were forced to retreat to their laboratories and conserve their resources against future need.

A fourth tribe of Quants, known as the Ecologists, had settled among the Brexitans shortly before the invasions by the more aggressively rhetorical barbarians. Etymologically, they were related to the Quants through the shared phoneme “eco”. The meaning of this term is lost to history. Some believe it translates as “dealing with numbers”; others suggest it to be an obscure Indo-Turkic word for troublesome nomads. Little credence is given to the theory that it related to cultivation of diverse gardens, as no archeological evidence has been evinced to prove these gardens ever existed. Unlike the fiercer Quants who came later, the Ecologists understood the importance of coexistence and diversity, which was no doubt why they fit in so well in the lands of the Brexitans. Unfortunately, they had embraced a life of quiet contemplation of nature, and were no match for their more vigorous relatives in the heat of battlefield debate.

Had there been enough advance warning, the Brexitans could have relied upon their elite hereditary warriors, the Dawkinses. The founder of this quasi-mystical order, motivated by a seemingly unquenchable desire to selflessly spread his genes, had briefly run amok among the Brexitan women and inseminated more of them than any historical figure had achieved, even the legendary Genghis Khan. Some historians estimate, based on recent genetic evidence, that nearly 10% of all modern Brexitans bear genes from this lineage. Irrespective of their founder’s amatory exploits, these soldiers were masters of the secrets of the heart, and used them to seduce their enemies into breeding with them. Over time, they would defeat their foes by, quite literally, becoming their foes and agreeing not to fight among themselves. (Making babies, referred to as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”, was more fun in any event.) But growing babies into warriors took more than a decade, there were few pure-blood Dawkinses remaining, and the Brexitans’ time was short.

So it was that the Brexitans came up with a desperate strategy: they would give all their money to the Friedmans, in the hope that descendants of the other two tribes would turn on them. (Even if that didn’t happen, they rationalized, it would be good for the economy.) History had shown that epic battles among the three Quantic tribes tended towards the Hobbesian; that is, they were nasty, brutish, and short, even by the bloodthirsty standards of historians. The hope of the Brexitan government was that their troops, no longer outnumbered, would be able to move in once the dust settled and mop up the few surviving Quants, thereby restoring peace to their lands.

Sadly, their bold plan failed, as the Friedmans, who represented an estimated 1% of the total population of Quants, took the money and withdrew overseas to a mythical haven in the far west, known to students of mythology as the Cayman Islands, or by their shorter colloquial name, famed in song and story: Avalon. Though this greatly reduced the military pressure being exerted on the Brexitans, the remaining Quant forces were still too powerful for them to meet in open battle.

All seemed lost, until a new group of nomads entered the picture. They were known as Neocons, a word believed to comprise a portmanteau combination of the words neophyte (meaning naïve and inexperienced) and con (meaning an attempt to deceive). They were champions of liberty, though not to be confused with the Rands, who in turn are not to be confused with the randy Dawkinses. (You can see how ancient English makes life difficult for the intrepid historian, as there are many subtle linguistic traps into which the unwary may fall!) Neocons viewed any interference from governments as sacrilegious. Led by their general, the infamously subtle Ponzi, their scheme made short work of the other Quants, and became the de facto government of the Brexitan territories.

Historians, being historians, have drawn many lessons from the events of this turbulent period, and disagree bitterly over which lesson is most defensible. Some believe that those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to be conquered by Economists. Dawkinsesians are too busy spreading their seed to be bothered much with history, which some take as a different lesson: that if you screw around too much with the economy, it will only end well for those doing the screwing. Neocon historians believe that no nation can long endure without a powerful and aggressive military. And Ecologists grumble that if only governments listened to them, utopia would lie within our grasp. But nobody listens much to them, which is probably a good thing.

The truth of this matter may never be discerned, for such is the curse of history: that so much of what we know must be inferred from scant evidence. Yet the true lesson, I feel, is this: that barbarians come and go, some fleeing with the family silverware and others teaching us how to get along with the real business of life, which is finding a way to enjoy life and someone to enjoy it with. Success in life, as in government, depends on knowing which type of barbarian one is dealing with.

~

Bio:

Geoff Hart works as a scientific editor, specializing in helping scientists who have English as their second language publish their research. He also writes fiction in his spare time, and has sold 49 stories thus far. Visit him online at geoff-hart.com.

Philosophy Note:

I’ve always been fascinated by how real historical events are transformed into myths and legends that retain only a superficial resemblance to the truth. The aspects that are retained tell us much about what cultures found sufficiently important to preserve. This story may have been triggered by reading The Mongoliad and musing about mass population movements and “the continuation of economics by other means”.

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Drums Along The Mohawk

by Carlton Herzog

PROCEEDINGS BEFORE THE JOINT WAR COUNCIL OF NORTH AMERICAN TRIBES, AUGUST 28, 1813

Chief Rolling Thunder of the Cherokee Nation: We of the Indian Nations are gathered here today to decide an appropriate response to England’s repeated attempts to conquer and colonize the North American continent. Time again the English have established and held colonies by force of arms along our east coast. These attempts to take our land have increased with disturbing frequency over the years. Some here favor a diplomatic solution. They recommend allowing a limited number of settlements and mutual trade. Others among us see these settlements as beachheads for an inevitable invasion. They demand we deny these invaders any purchase on our land and go so far as to advocate an attack on England itself.

Red Eagle, Chief of the Algonquin Nation: The first and fundamental law of nature is to seek peace and follow it. I submit that war should belong in our tragic past and find no place on our agenda for the future. At best, war is barbarism. Its glory is an illusion. It is only those who have never fought nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, desolation, and vengeance. We can and must find a reasonable accommodation with these English.

Blue Feather, Chief of the Huron Nation: Peace is a dream and not a beautiful one. We know that Pizarro laid waste to our Inca brethren before he was finally driven off the Southern Continent. When the Spaniards first came to the Incas, they had the Bible, and the Incas had the land. The Spaniard said, ‘Let us pray.’ The Incas closed their eyes and prayed. When they opened them, they had the Bible, and the Spaniards had their land. Like it or not, the tree of liberty must be watered with blood.  

Our Aztec kin did not go so quietly. They sent a rat born plague to Western Europe. Millions died. While the plague swept across Europe, the conquering Aztec war fleets overran the Gold Coast and established the African Aztec Empire. No European nation has dared colonize the Dark Continent since.

Consider that we are the remnants of the Siberian Ket, an ancient nomadic people of Central Asia. More precisely, the ancestors of Attila the Hun whose armies ravaged Europe. They left Asia and traveled eastwards across the Bering strait land bridge. It is therefore fitting that we carry on that noble marauding tradition in defense of our way of life.

Our strategy should be to not only confront the English Imperialists, but also lay siege to their capital. To deprive it of air. To shame it. To mock it. We will break them with our sheer relentlessness and superior cunning.  Let our plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when we move, we will fall like thunderbolts.

Red Eagle: My brother, you are a great chief and warrior. But consider that the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground and said this is mine laid the foundation for every war ever fought.  How many horrors and misfortunes might have been prevented, by pulling up the stakes, and announcing to his fellows that ‘The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’ What sort of creature sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences? You would cast our young braves, who know little of life, into the abyss of sorrow. Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, what you call the mad destruction of war? Your war will not determine who is right — only who is left. Your war will show us to be something other than thinking animals.

Chief Black Eyes of the Iroquois Nation: We must have war. We must defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all. These English will infect us with their perverse ways. Here they can let their pants down while wallowing and rutting with our women.  They can indulge themselves in all manner of deviance and sensuality with no harm done to their precious London. There will be nothing to soil their cathedrals, their white marble statues, or their noble sentiments. There is enough distance between our land and theirs to absorb all manner of barbaric behavior, no matter how dirty and animal it gets.

I concede that war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.  A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. Who among us is so blind as to condemn a war to protect our peoples against tyrannical injustice?

Chief Tecumseh of the Mohawk Tribe: Our battleplan is foolproof. We will use their ships that we have captured. In the dead of night, we will sail them into London harbor. On the first night, our braves will set fire to all their ships. On the second night, they will burn their city. On the third night, they will kill all the English leaders they can find. Then under color of the French and Spanish flags, and in captured uniforms, they will sail away in daylight. The English, the French and the Spanish will be too busy killing one another to bother us any time soon.

Chief Red Eagle: No one here doubts our tactical superiority when it comes to the art of war. But consider the Greeks. At Marathon, their hoplite phalanxes of heavy armor and longer spears made them superior in hand-to-hand combat against the Persians. Yet, the Greeks were slaughtered time and again because the Persians outnumbered them twenty to one.

The same is true of the naval battle at Salamis. Equipped with cast-bronze rams at their bows, the Greek triremes were adept at ramming and boarding Persian vessels. But there too, the Persian ships came in such great numbers as to overwhelm the Greek navy. I submit therefore that while we may win the Battle of London that is a far cry from winning a war. Sooner or later, the Europeans will know that it was we who set London ablaze and them at each other’s throats. I say we let sleeping dogs lie until we can come up with a better solution.

Chief Black Eyes: That is pure foolishness. The English breed like rabbits.  Indeed, the galloping increase in their numbers guarantees that their hungry population will have an unslakable appetite for our rich farmland. There can be no reasonable accommodation with such creatures, who appear as men but are beasts in their hearts. The English will come and spread throughout this continent like disease through a living body. They will multiply without thought, pushing us aside so that they may breed and flourish. They will not come alone. They will bring their French and Spanish cohorts in such vast numbers as to make small a plague of locusts. They do not come to bring harmony with the numbers of our population. I submit that your anti-war agitation and argument are inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic. I denounce them.

Chief Red Eagle:  I have learned that the point of life’s walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart. If I walk far but am angry toward others as I journey, I walk nowhere. If I conquer mountains but hold grudges against others as I climb, I conquer nothing. If I see much but regard others as enemies, I see no one. Peace is not the way of weakness. It is the way of strength. War is nothing but the first resort of limited minds.

Chief Great Bear of the Mohicans Tribe: My tribe is gone. The English gave us blankets infected with smallpox. I’m the last, the very last.  I’ll dance a Ghost Dance. I’ll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it’s my grandfather and grandmother singing. Can you hear them? I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and lightning shoots down from the sky onto the palefaces. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, lightning falls. We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. We dance until the ships fall off the edge of the world into a yawning throat of fire.

I say that If I’m going to die, I want to fight. I will not be pummeled and played with and threatened into submission. Nor will I let that happen to our land. We do not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man is nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him is the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it home. It is beautiful and we are surrounded with the blessings of its Great Mystery.

Chief Rolling Thunder: You have all had your say.  I will have mine. The hearts within us burn because of deep wounds to our soul. It is an agony that will not quit. We are here deliberating whether to unlock a dangerous door from which faint hearts would do wisely to keep away. I must counsel that we practice a willed suspension of conventional beliefs and in that poised awareness listen. Listen for the smothered voice of the Great Spirit from whom even now we are alienated. That great body of radiance knows neither birth nor death. Only it can free us from the endless repetition of mistakes we have chosen to sanctify. Before you cast your ballot for or against war, quiet the mechanisms of your mind. In that uncluttered silence, ask the Great Spirit for guidance in this matter. Then and only then can you be confident that your decision is just. The red clam shell is for war. The blue is for peace. When you have made up your mind, select one and place it in the ceremonial pouch. Then we will count.

~

Bio:

Carlton Herzog is a USAF veteran with B.A. magna cum laude and J.D. from Rutgers. He served as Articles Editor of the Rutgers Law Review. His work can be found on amazon.com/author/carltonherzog and Google Scholar.

Philosophy Note:

Do human cognitive abilities differ from those of other animals in kind, or merely in degree? Are we in a class by ourselves or just the smartest ones in our class? Does the answer lie in the human capacity to ask, “what if”? After all, no other primate mind can picture things beyond what it can sense, nor promiscuously combine ideas and mingle different domains of knowledge to create new worlds. What a thing it is to be lost in rapturous contemplation of such unrealized possibilities. It is nothing short of throwing open the picture gallery of our own souls. The multidimensionality of our psyches is what separates man from beast. Thus, in the insubstantial country of his own mind, man reigns exclusively alone. Yet the human addiction to violence and war stems from the self-centered fear we will lose something we have or not get something we want. Because our cognitive architecture is grossly impoverished, we don’t learn from our mistakes, and even more egregiously don’t learn that we don’t learn.

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The Social Aspects of the Aydax Phenomena: A Literature Review

by Andrew Gudgel

November 2043

Authors: Hanna Knudson, City College of London; Zhang Simei, China Academy of Social Sciences; Paolo Villarreal, Arizona State University; Margarethe Kohlmann, Universität Wien

Abstract

The arrival of the Aydax in July 2039 raised fundamental questions in physics (Lennon, 2041), xenobiology (Tao, 2039) and even philosophy (Magnette, 2042). No field has been as diverse in its response as sociology, with hundreds of journal articles generated in just a few years. Yet to date there has been no meta-analysis of the effects of the Aydax arrival on the societies of Earth. The authors attempt to take first steps towards illuminating themes in the human response to this watershed event.

Background

The first three Aydax ships were detected at 2049 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on July 8, 2039, by the US Space Surveillance Network at a distance of 35,000km. Two minutes later, three more ships were detected. Detections continued until a total of 21 ships were observed approaching the Earth (US DoD, 2039). The first three ships entered the atmosphere less than five minutes later and landed near Orebro, Sweden; Prague, Czechia; and Troyes, France. Landings occurred then across Eurasia, Australia, Antarctica and finally, North and South America.

At 1216 UTC on July 12, 2039—four days after arrival—the ships simultaneously emitted a noise interpreted by local security cordons as “Ay-dax!” Immediately thereafter, the bottoms of the ships lowered to the ground, revealing a conical ramp. The first wave of tightly packed, walking cephalopods were seen coming down at 1220 UTC and upon reaching the ground, immediately began to disperse in all directions (Salton, 2039).

Messages were transmitted at the Aydax using sound, light, and electromagnetic waves up to the microwave band, but attempts to communicate with this (and all subsequent) tranches of disembarking Aydax proved fruitless. Within six hours, five hundred and twelve waves of sixty-four Aydax proceeded from each ship, for an assumed total worldwide population of 668,128 individuals (Salton, 2039)–though this number has decreased due to the freezing to death of the 65,000-plus Aydax on the two ships that landed in Antarctica, predation by wild animals, and losses in subsequent encounters with humans.

Lack of Communication and Interaction

The singular aspect surrounding the arrival of the Aydax has been the lack of successful communication. In addition to attempts using sound and electromagnetic radiation, there have been attempts using neutron beams and alpha particles (Diaz and Burchfield, 2040), pheromones (Wu and Keegan, 2040), and even an informal attempt using capsaicin (Cleary, 2040). None have caused the slightest reaction. Claims of “Whispering Aydax,” telepathic communication, or gestural language have either been disproven (Stahl, 2042) or shown to be hoaxes; similar and more sensational versions of these tropes have appeared in numerous tabloid newspapers and merit no serious consideration.

An examination of the abandoned ships three months after the landing found no evidence of control mechanisms or written language, only alcoves that presumably housed individual Aydax. It’s likely travel occurred in a state of suspended animation, as there were no food preparation areas or hygienic facilities on board (Lutz et al, 2039). We still have no idea of where in space the Aydax may have originated, why they came to Earth, or their goals and aims. It’s unknown if they produced the ships in which they traveled. It has been argued they might not even be sentient at all (Mingus, 2042). If so, this raises the obvious question of who sent the Aydax to Earth and why.

Immediately after their dispersal, fear of a potential invasion sparked panicked humans to kill an unknown number of Aydax individuals worldwide–probably on the order of several thousand. In addition, some have subsequently been killed in remote areas by predators such as brown bears, lions and dingoes. To this day, Aydax are occasionally crushed when they wander onto roads or train tracks, and sporadic killings by humans still occur (Calvino, 2040).

However, the complete lack of any reaction or retaliation by the Aydax did not lead to mass slaughter. Instead, Aydax seem to have become accepted as a quasi-natural phenomenon. Individuals that obstruct or interrupt human activities are more likely than not to simply be ignored and worked around or picked up and moved out of the way (Fox, 2041).

Friend or Foe?

The popular press has painted Aydax as everything from angelic saviors to Machiavellian devils just biding their time before taking over the world (Brooks, 2040). However, there is currently no evidence that the Aydax are concerned with human activity to any degree.

Yet some humans have come to impute behaviors to the Aydax through their mere presence. Farmers in the northwestern districts of Peru have attempted to “herd” Aydax into churches just prior to weddings–having an individual at the ceremony is considered lucky, possibly through retro-association with Pre-Columbian deities (Cruz, 2042). In North America, Aydax that wander into sporting arenas are often “adopted” as mascots, believed to confer luck on the home team. The time spent in an art gallery by an Aydax (and the implied approval of certain artworks) was the basis of a subsequent lawsuit over those artworks’ actual value (Johnson, 2041). Aydax have been used to sell everything from consumer products to political candidates. They have also been accepted as part of Japan’s Kawaii aesthetic (Tadao, 2042), where they form the basis for the InterToy Company’s “Squidoo” series of characters.

The Aydax have been the source of a number of short-lived social phenomena during the 2040-41 time frame: the act of “Aydax Tripping,” and the online memes “AliensInHats,” “¡Hola!,” and “HuggingMyBuddy.” Recent streaming media have used the presence of Aydax in family homes in a number of contrived comedic situations (Yeager, 2043).

However, this does not mean that humans have become blasé to the presence of the Aydax. The low moan of air moving through their breathing throats and their uncanny ability to somehow enter and depart even locked spaces such as bank vaults, prisons, and family homes can be unnerving. This ability has led to Aydax body parts being used in sympathetic magic rituals among burglary gangs in Thailand and West African inmates during attempted prison escapes (Yost, 2043).

In North America and Europe, the rate of self-reported feelings of paranoia and “persecution” has shown a small but marked increase since the arrival of the Aydax (Gerson, 2042). Anecdotal reports of decreases in the number of house pets and small rodents in neighborhoods through which Aydax pass also worry many people. (Though see Hart and Duckworth, 2041, for an analysis which sheds doubt on this phenomena.)

The effect of the arrival of the Aydax on religious belief has varied. Abrahamic religions initially experienced both a questioning of basic tenets and a drop in congregational attendance. However, within a year, attendance at weekly services rebounded to just above pre-arrival levels. A similar effect was seen in both Judaism and Islam (Halston, 2040). In primarily Buddhist regions, Aydax have gradually come to be considered fellow beings in the wheel of Samsara (Pan, 2041).

The effect on world politics was both brief and muted. Once the initial shock of the Aydax landing and early fears of an invasion passed, most governments ended emergency declarations and went back to business as usual. However, in what could be described as the first case of true xenophobia, a populist government in Eastern Europe passed a law mandating the removal of all Aydax from within its borders. These measures proved impossible to enforce and were repealed less than a year later (Duchowski, 2040).

Conclusion: Mirror, Mirror

Human societies appear to be acclimating themselves to the presence of the Aydax. After an initial wave of fear and some temporary turmoil, humanity seems to be embracing the Aydax as a new part of the natural world, and in some cases attaching value to their presence. While the authors acknowledge that unfortunate and sometimes lethal encounters will likely continue in the future, such incidents have already become uncommon.

The authors further believe that barring a resolution to the communication problem and/or some indication of ill will on the part of the Aydax, the trend towards acceptance will continue. Yet the complete inability to communicate with the Aydax, and thus discern their intentions, has made them a blank canvas upon which humanity can project its own hopes, fears, goals and desires. This aspect of the “Aydax Phenomena” is unlikely to change until such time as human nature does.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank research assistants Donald Previn, Wan Quanhong, Deborah Johnson and Andreas Hartlieb for searching numerous databases for relevant information prior to this article’s creation. They also wish to thank their families for their understanding during the months in which the authors spent too many nights in online meetings and discussions. Finally, Hanna Knudson would like to thank the Aydax individual she saw standing in the yard while searching for the family dog on August 4, 2042, for being the genesis of this article.

#

References

Brooks, Killian, “Media Coverage of the Aydax Landing, July 2039-January 2040,” National Press Club [Australia] Magazine, June 2040, pp. 20-24

Calvino, Sophia, “Carcere per l’omicidio alieno,” La Stampa, 6 Aprile 2042, p. 12

Cleary, Alice, “Man Arrested for Giving Alien a ‘Hot Sauce Red Eye,'” Chicago Tribune Online, August 23, 2040

Cruz, Antonio, “Revival of Moche Beliefs in the Trujillo Region of Peru in the Post-Aydax World,” Sociology, (73:11), November 2042, p. 45-48

Diaz, Fernando and Aaron Burchfield, “Particle Beams as a Method of Communication with an Aydax Individual,” IEEE Bulletin (No. 648), April 2040, p. 730

Duchovski, Marcin, “Zgromadzenie Narodowe uchwala Prawo Anti-Kosmita,” Gazeta, 21 Styczen, 2040; “Prawo Anti-Kosmita zostało uchylone,” Gazeta, 11 Listopad 2040

Fox, Stanley, “Cloudy With a Chance of Aydax: Acceptance of Dramatic Change and the Status Quo Ante,” Sociology, (72:9), September 2041, p. 31-37

Gerson, Tabitha, “Trends in Psychiatric Case Rates,” Journal of International Psychology, Vol. 18, Iss. 6, November 2042, pp.757-785

Halston Worldwide Associates, “Depth of Faith and Weekly Church Attendance post-Aydax Arrival,” September 2040 polling data, September 31, 2040

Hart, Angela and Brian Duckworth, “Observational Study of Lost Pet Notices After Aydax Passage,” Statistical Bulletin, 246:5, May 2041, p. 361-372

Johnson, Lily, “Judgment Against Gallery Owner in Aydax Case Leads to $800K Settlement,” New York World, July 30, 2042, p. A10

Lennon, Valerie, “Transluminal Propulsion and Einstein–a Reassessment,” Nature, 6 February 2041, pp. 12-15

Lutz, Dora, Karl Dorfmann and others, “A Technological Perspective on Aydax Spacecraft,” United Nations Special Technical Bulletin No. 36, November 2039

Magnette, Thomas, “Aristotle’s On Marvelous Things Heard and the Aydax: Categorically Improbable Truths,” Trans. Phil. Grecae (Vol 16:11), November 2042, pp. 345-70

Mingus, Stephen, “Canaries in a Coal Mine: The Case for Aydax as Ecological Indicators for a Yet Unknown Species,” in New Perspectives on Exobiology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2042

潘兰香[Pan, Lanxiang], “外星人会参加轮回吗？ [Can Aliens Participate in Reincarnation?]” 《佛学 [Buddhist Studies]》 120:4， 2041年 4月，47-49页

Salton, David, “Report on the Arrival of the Aliens and Attempts to Make Contact,” United Nations Xenobiological Paper No. 1, August 2039

Stahl, Charles, “Contextual Gestures and Implied Meanings in Nonverbal Communication,” Linguistics, Vol. 27 Iss. 3, Spring 2042

Tadao, Takeshi, “Latest Trends in Japan’s Subcultures,” Commercial Journal, November 2042, p. 4

Tao, Yuanguang, “Morphology of a Newly-Discovered Species, Xenokalamari vagus aydax” United Nations Xenobiological Paper No. 2, September 2039

US Department of Defense Press Release, July 9, 2039

Yeager, Donna, “Shoehorning Aliens into Shows is a Trend We Can All Do Without,” Hollywood Magazine online, October 3, 2043

Yost, Michael, “Use of Human, Alien and Animal Body Parts in Sympathetic Magic Rituals,” in Paganism in the 21st Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2043

Wu, Hongmei and Dominica Keegan, “Am I Making Scents? An Attempt at Interspecies Communication,” Journal of the American Chemical Society, 25:6, June 2040, pp. 182-87

~

Bio:

Andrew Gudgel is a freelance writer and translator. His fiction has appeared at Writers of the Future, Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, InterGalactic Medicine Show and other publications. He lives in Maryland, USA, in an apartment slowly being consumed by books. You can find him at www.andrewgudgel.com.

Philosophy Note:

This piece was the result of meditations on aliens and first contact tropes. The first question pondered was: What if the
aliens were SO alien, we can’t even communicate with them? From there I extrapolated how humanity might react. Fear and/or curiosity seem to be the default responses in many first-contact stories, but how would humans react longer term with aliens who remained an enigma?

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