Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014
Author: R. Leigh Hennig, Hannah Goodwin, Peter Medeiros, Robert Quinlivan, Eleanor R. Wood, George S. Walker, Alex Hernandez
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Bastion Publications

MASTHEAD

R. Leigh Hennig, Editor-in-Chief

Brooke Johnson, Senior Editor

Zod, Social

Nick Lazzaro, Slush Reader

Gabrielle Vicari, Slush Reader

Lauren Jane Shipley, Slush Reader

Madison Abshire, Slush Reader

Robert Davis, Slush Reader

CONTRIBUTORS

“Degausser”, Copyright ©2014 by Axel Taiari

“Abandoned”, Copyright ©2014 by Hannah Goodwin

“Red Rubber Nose”, Copyright ©2014 by Robert Quinlivan

“The Properties of Water”, Copyright ©2014 by Alex Hernandez

“Forever Lights”, Copyright ©2014 by Peter Medeiros

“Remember Prometheus”, Copyright ©2014 by Eleanor R. Wood

“The Maltese Pterodactyl”, Copyright ©2014 by George S. Walker

Cover image courtesy Milan Jaram.

Bastion Publications

PO Box 605

Lynnwood, WA 98064-0605

Visit us at www.bastionmag.com , on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bastionmag, and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/bastionsf

Bastion Science Fiction Magazine publishes original short stories on the first of every month. As a new publication, we’re working hard to build up our readership. We’d appreciate it if you would help us out by letting your friends know about us. Thanks for your support and happy reading.

Contents

Editorial

R. Leigh Hennig

Degausser

Axel Taiari

Abandoned

Hannah Goodwin

Red Rubber Nose

Robert Quinlivan

The Properties of Water

Alex Hernandez

Forever Lights

Peter Medeiros

Remember Prometheus

Eleanor R. Wood

The Maltese Pterodactyl

George S. Walker

Editorial

R. Leigh Hennig

I’ve spoken numerous times about how long it takes to build a readership for a new market. It’s a long, slow process. We’re not there yet—not even close. However, we are making strides. In the early part of June it was made known that our May issue had placed in the top five for the most issues sold via Weightless Books (one of our three vendors). That is out-of-this-world awesome, especially given that May was only our second issue. The response we’ve received for each issue has been overwhelmingly positive (check out our recent review roundup at bastionmag.com/news), as well. Encouraging stuff, no doubt. I’m confident July will continue that trend.

I’m not going to spend too much time on this, but the World Cup is upon us, and I love the World Cup. It’s the pinnacle of The Beautiful Game, uniting people together in support of their country. In 2005, after helping the Ivory Coast qualify for the 2006 World Cup, Didier Drogba pleaded with his countrymen to put an end to their civil war after five years. They complied. That’s drama. It reminds me of family, and it’s this that seems to be a theme for our July issue. Family means something different for each of us, and isn’t always a positive influence, as you’ll see in some of our stories here, but it is a powerful one—for better or worse. For me, that’s what makes this issue so interesting. Your idea of family may not be the same as mine, and it’s the diversity of these relationships that appeals to me.

Axel Taiari kicks things off with Degausser, exploring the longing for one’s family as the motivation for things we did not think we could do. Abandoned, by Hannah Goodwin, is a touching tale of what family does for one another and looking back on long term influences. Good intentions are twisted in Red Rubber Nose by Robert Quinlivan, and if you have a fear of clowns, rest assured that your fears will be exacerbated when you’re done with it. When I spoke of challenging what family means from one person to the next, you’ll start to understand what I was referring to when you read The Properties of Water by Alex Hernandez. In Forever Lights, Peter Medeiros shows us how loss can cause a person to act in ways completely contradictory to their previously held notions. Eleanor R. Wood continues to keep us thinking about what we would do were we to find our convictions tested in unexpected ways in Remember Prometheus. There are no atheists in fox holes, as they say. Finally, The Maltese Pterodactyl by George S. Walker shows us that family isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, and those most important to us sometimes just let us down.

Enjoy the issue, enjoy the World Cup.

Degausser

Axel Taiari

Before the meeting, Emani refreshes her practical memory. The data surges through her neural pathways and leaves her convulsing on the bathroom floor. She stumbles back to her table and sits down. Reality shimmers with the jittery glow of boosted sentience. Through the bar's digital windows, fog engulfs downtown Paris. Emani taps the table's glass surface for another whiskey. Blink away the world and the drink rises out of the table with a pneumatic hiss. Another blink and the client is now sitting across from her. Ghoulish fashion, upper-spheres throwback gothic chic: flawless pompadour, corpse-white skin stretched to breaking point over a gaunt skeleton, eyes shielded behind shades, expensive suit unsoiled by rain. Emani smells pheromone-loaded cologne, the acrid reek of wealth. Distorted violins screech over the sound system.

"Hail," says the client.

"Hello," says Emani. "Would you mind removing your shades?"

"As you will." The client removes the glasses and slips them into his right pocket. He stares at Emani—no irises. Translucent eyeballs squirm like the dithering flesh of a deep-sea snail.

"How'd you hear about me?" says Emani.

The client’s grin is too white and somehow out of sync. "Your name has been making its way through many countries and corporate states. I asked a few…" he pauses to lick his blue lips, "associates. Emani, they told me, over and over again. Emani Liod is the woman you want."

"Flattering. What do you need?"

"We need you to retrieve a program."

"We," Emani repeats. She extends three fingers, each one for the name of a corp-state. "Are you with Aeon Vargas, Wolfe Biomedical, or Spector Prince?"

"Yes. One of those, mayhap."

"What are you looking for?"

"A data eraser," says the client. "A software degausser."

Software degausser, thinks Emani. Fringe stuff. New edge. Big money. "Gov tech?"

"Government technology, yes."

"When?"

"Nine days from now. The program is not web-wired, probably never will be, thus remote hacking is out of the question. One-hour window. A heavily defended convoy will depart from a bunker outside Washington City and transport the code to the nearest launch site. Once the rocket takes off and reaches orbit, it is over. It will land directly in the main research site's backyard, be brought inside, and placed out of our reach."

"A physical retrieval? Washington City is East U.S. turf. Do I get full recon?"

"As much as we can provide. Security details, route, and so on. The data must remain offline. You will personally deliver the chip to me four hours later at this very location."

"Okay," says Emani. "Let's chat price."

"Eighty thousand credits delivered now to one of your orbital accounts, and a hundred extra upon successful delivery."

Emani scoffs. "I'm thinking this thing is worth way more."

"It is. We're not sure that you are."

"Spare me. What's the convoy like?"

"Eight tanks, four exoskeletons, thirty-three men, satellite coverage."

"And drones."

"And drones, of course."

"Make it 150K now, two hundred upon delivery. You know I need a team."

"Your proposal is reasonable. Agreed." The client slides a chip across the table. "This is your prep data. I shall see you in nine days."

#

An upscale penthouse apartment cut from black marble. High-end everything. Money a trifling matter of reshuffling ones and zeroes to obtain comfort. Empty except for a few bots hunting the rooms for dust. The place is a carbon copy of her Hong Kong and London apartments, right down to the library of data chips. Difference that turns a house into a home: printed pictures adorn the monolithic walls. Photographs of Byron, her husband, and Chris, her son. Plague-dead sixteen years, forever beautiful and frozen in time. Lost in the London bombings while Emani was on a run for a medical corp in Kuwait. She wanted to use the money to buy Byron the beachside house of his dreams and a real puppy for Chris. She ended up paying for their funerals.

Emani eats alone, sitting at her desk. She jots down a couple of basic reminders for tonight's planning session. She hates herself for having to write thoughts down. Used to be she could recite Pi to the 46th and keep a mental grid of her bottomless stable of freelancers without blinking.

It’s what got her a short-lived run as a conduit, after Byron and Chris passed away. She had delusional hopes that she could help stop the plague, maybe make the bastards pay. Six months spent lying down in a freezing chamber at the heart of a black lab, intravenously fed and seizing under a deluge of bits assaulting her synapses 24/7. French government official said, "Program’s being shut down. Good run, though." A fat check, out the door, brain-damaged and hallucinating from withdrawal. Then two years in a private hospital with sour-faced nurses spoon-feeding her gruel and Emani twitching and soiling herself while trying to remember the alphabet.

In bed, the empty side a chasm threatening to swallow her, she realizes that she doesn’t remember her wedding day. She knew that just yesterday, she’s sure of it. The fear gets to her, then.

Slight comfort: post-conduit memory issues never became a bother on a practical level. Non-personal knowledge is easy to re-acquire. Forgetting the taste of wine can be fixed by opening a new bottle. As for the jobs—no problem. Can’t remember how to access a mainframe, slither past a firewall, salvage a bagbiter, trick a daemon? Insert a chip, done—like ghosting an uncorrupted version of herself. But some things, she has come to learn, can’t be reloaded.

She wills herself to remember them now. Fetal position, her cheek resting against the cold pillow. "Teller," she says out loud.

No response.

"Teller, you around?"

The voice booms from deep within her head, a metallic bass bouncing around her skull. "Hello, Emani Liod."

"How are things?"

"They vary depending on the things you are referring to."

Emani can't help but grin. She tries to picture the Teller, with its body-mind of wires and chips crunching data in a South African subterranean server farm as large as a metropolis. The system is a descendent of Nautilus—early 2000s NSF data-swallower. It was meant to produce near-future visualizations by analyzing the past. Nailed a few things before they happened: localized wars, the new plague. It failed to predict millions of others and rambled madly for weeks on end. Not good enough for the UN. Funding was cut, hard-locks set in place. No weapons, no financials. Crowd sourcing and private groups took over, made it public, fed it more data. Some of its die-hard believers moved to South Africa to keep it running—hopeful pilgrims kneeling at the altar of an apocryphal deity.

For Emani, the Teller became the perfect storage unit. Digitally fed it her own life, her past: pictures, databanks, videos, recordings, and diary entries.

"Teller, Byron's favorite food was kombdi vade."

"Correct."

"We had some on our second date."

"Third date."

Emani cringes. "Third date. Indian restaurant in London."

"Correct. You win. There is no prize."

"It was beautiful. I was making big money. Had gone freelance, then. I flew us to Rome afterward. We started undressing each other in the hotel elevator. I was already in love. I was pregnant not long after."

"Dates match, but difficult to confirm."

"Best accident of my life."

"Subjective."

"I am telling you."

"Do I record it as fact?"

"Yes. Now tell me about my wedding day."

The Teller speaks. Emani listens. How many nights has she closed her eyes and listened to the drone of a distant machine recounting the most crucial moments of her life?

She can't remember.

#

Eight days and nights without proper sleep. Lights in the apartment flash from decks and pads running at full brightness. Every twelve hours, Emani opens the databank cabinet. Its insides radiate with thousands of blue LED stars. Each one belongs to its own galaxy: tech, day-to-day, history, language, pop culture, mathematics, society, geography, miscellaneous. Backed up from her past or downloaded from the market. Knowledge and memory at the cost of a credit swipe and a few minutes of nausea. Inject, learn, remember, and get back to work. She snatches the occasional power-nap but leaves programs running behind her eyelids.

Four hours before the run, the Teller's voice rips Emani out of a nightmare. She was walking around a cemetery, weeping. She was looking for Byron and Chris’ graves but couldn't remember where they were buried. She stopped in front of a tombstone. There was no name on it.

"Hello."

She opens her eyes and checks for tubes in her nose, pistons pumping drugs into her chest.

"What?"

"I want the degausser."

"How d—"

"Bring it to me, Emani."

"How do you know about the mission?"

"I can pay you."

"I already have money."

"98% of your income is regularly transferred to the Alliance for Plague Gene Therapy, the Blackwood Foundation, the World Health Organization, and twenty-three others. Four million credits donated in the past year. You want more."

"You’re right."

"I have no money. I have something better."

Video request. Emani accepts. Images materialize, low-res: Chris sitting on a swing in a public park. He jumps out of the seat and runs towards Byron. The camera tracks them as father and son walk out of the play area, hand in hand. Bottom-right corner glyphs: public footage, June 3rd, 2052 A.D. The video fades.

Seventeen years ago.

Public footage. Of course the Teller would have access to it. "My God. How much do you have?" says Emani.

"Total runtime is over six years. I will trade for the device."

"What do you need it for?"

"Would my reasons affect your decision?"

"I'm not sure."

"They would not."

"I'm dead if I do it. You understand what that means?"

"I comprehend. You are dead either way. The only query is time. I know who hired you. Aeon Vargas: independent corp-state, seventy million employee-citizens across the globe. They will come for you, but you will make them dance on their heads. Believe me."

#

One thirty-six P.M. European Central Time. Freshly boosted and over-attuned. Emani wipes her mouth and flushes the toilet. Off to the pick-up bridge and into a jet-cab heading for the nearest private port. The transport awaits, a bus-long bullet ready to rip through the skies. Countdown, blast-off. From Paris to Washington City in less than three hours. Air-space border control scammed by hacked credentials. Washington South is on fire, one hundred and eighteen days of riots and counting. Out, past the slums where desert sand creeps upon steel and cement, Emani meets with her local contact. She transfers credits with a handshake. The contact gives her root access to a ground-van. She drives for a couple of clicks, parks the van by the side of the road, hops in the back. Emani slips into the lightweight chameleon exo-suit. Electrical jolts let her know the suit is pre-booted, unlocked, no need for ID. The black helmet is a chitinous cover; an overgrown insect's head capsule with real-time data scrolling on the visor. Emani inspects the rest of the gear: a pair five-barrel 15mm pistols, EMP grenades, four-gauge shotgun and flechette packs. If all goes well, she won’t have to use any of it.

Back behind the wheel, Emani taps into the frequency. "ETA twenty-two minutes. All green?"

"Green," reply three voices in unison.

"Green, like the color your husband turned as the gas filled his lungs."

"Shut your mouth."

"But I do not have a mouth."

Derek, over the comm: "What's happening, boss?"

"Nothing."

"He cried for you. So did Chris. They hugged each other and your son moaned for Mommy. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. Last moments. Goodbyes. I have them. Their brain-plants recorded them. Do you even remember your son's smile? What about Byron's scent?"

"Stop. Please. Stop."

"Latin: stuppare. German: stopfen. Old English: forstoppian. Why should I politely stuppare?"

"Video, audio and sensory footage is not the same as remembering, Teller."

"No," replies the machine, "but it is better than having forgotten."

#

Emani is over two klicks away when the operation commences. She taps the right side of her skull with two fingers. "Hackers, report."

"I'm in," says Derek. "Firewall down. Bastion-host down."

"I'm in, too," says Jared. "D, watch for the traffic filter."

"Derek, make it look all clear on official channels," says Emani. "Jared, disable the weapons and lock the troops inside their vehicles."

"Shit, I got pinged," says Derek.

"Jared, handle the lock and then camouflage the data. Derek, you still with us?"

The answer comes in the form of a guttural shriek. Emani pictures Derek in his Tokyo basement, brain oozing out of his nose, eyes black and bulging from brain-rot.

"D?" says Jared.

Emani grips the wheel hard. "Derek is done. Jared, you still incog? Give me status."

"I need ten seconds. They don't know I'm here."

Emani accelerates. "Come on, come on."

"Done," says Jared. "Locks are in, gov surveillance won't sniff anything for at least ten minutes. Can't guarantee more. I left the target door open for you."

"Good job. Derek got any family?"

"No."

"Then I'll add Derek's cut to yours when I make payment. I'm so sorry. Go dark."

"Acknowledged. Gone."

A private jet like a triangle sliced out of a black hole slashes through the clouds and disappears over a hill, leaving behind a trail of fast-spilling oil. The trail reconfigures itself into a burgeoning mass of self-replicating nano-jammers. A programmed umbral dome blots out the sun.

"Sats and drones shrouded," says Sarah.

"Second pass," replies Emani.

Emani's local radio chatter goes haywire. The convoy uselessly attempts to talk to big bird in orbit.

The jet's back, explodes out of the black skies, drops the hammer, and disappears again. The radio noise stops.

Sarah says, "EMPs detonated, you've got six minutes until they regain juice. I'll circle."

Down the hill, the convoy looms into view. Four exoskeletons like mechanical Kaiju surround the prime mover—an eight-wheel drive all-terrain vehicle armored well enough to shrug off a mini-nuke and ask for more. Four double-barreled tanks lead the convoy, four in the back.

Not a single vehicle moves.

Emani’s van comes screaming around the corner. She coolly stops the ride right by the prime mover. She steps out in full armor, shotgun in hand, and looks up. Two soldiers stare at her from the cockpit of their disabled exoskeleton. They're trapped inside of a sixty-ton, thirteen-meter-high worthless pile of scrap metal. The sky overhead is a pulsating sheet of blackness.

Emani offers the soldiers a polite wave.

She heads for the back of the mover and opens the unlocked doors. Six turrets and blink mines deactivated. Emani picks the cube at the center and gets back into the van.

Pain explodes behind her eyelids, a burst of static so loud her vision flashes white and her head crashes into the driving wheel. Images captured by a chapel's ceiling camera fill her field of view. The lens focuses on her, the joy on her face. She holds baby Chris in her arms.

The minister says, "Do you, Byron Correia, take Emani Liod to be your lawfully wedded wife?"

"I do."

Reality snaps back into place.

"You did it! Congratulations!"

Emani screams, "Stop it. Make it stop, goddammit." She punches the wheel, over and over again.

"Stuppare, yes. Why do you scream? I do not like it. It is all I hear."

Emani wipes drool away with the back of her hand. "Because it hurts."

"Where do you hurt? I detect no injury from your armor ha-ha-ha."

"You know damn well what I mean."

"I only want to help."

"Yes, but not like that. Please."

"Do you believe me when I say I want to help?"

Emani does. She understands that the Teller does not understand. This is not malice but only an inability to grasp the ethereal. "I believe you."

"Friendship. Is it not beautiful?"

#

Emani drives towards the extraction point with her pedal to the floor. She veers off-road, down a dune, and stops in a deserted plain. She checks the time and looks up at the sky. A one-person shuttle drops through the clouds and lands five meters from her. The ride's an egg-shaped bubble with twin jets attached. Emani slips back into civilian clothes, grabs the cube, leaves the rest of the gear behind. She enters the shuttle and the vehicle takes off.

"Sarah," she says.

"Still here."

"Erase it, then go home. Disappear for a few months."

"Payload dropped. On the way. 'Till next time, boss."

As the shuttle climbs towards the clouds, Emani looks back and watches her van explode.

#

The autopilot destination reads PARIS, FRANCE. Emani transfers the money to Derek and Sarah. She taps into the local gov frequency and it's a bedlam of military jargon. Mayday, mayday, cargo gone Elvis, black van, single man, hacked. No doubt Aeon Vargas are listening to the same channel and know the mission was a success.

"Teller," says Emani.

"Hello again, friend."

"Can you provide a decent air vehicle? Safe transportation on the way out?"

"It has already been arranged."

"Does the data also include all the things I’ve fed you about my family and me?"

"I am well fed. The world feeds me everything it spits out. I grow fat with noise, and I am not allowed to let any of it go. I do not know silence."

"Answer the question."

"Yes. It does."

"You’ve got yourself a deal."

"I am not surprised."

"What do you need the degausser for? You don't have any enemies."

"We all have enemies. Sometimes they are our friends. Some are forced upon us. Some of us create them."

Emani reconfigures the autopilot, changes the destination to South Africa. "I believe I just did that," she says.

#

The still-smoldering ruins of Johannesburg disfigure the landscape below: toppled-over skyscrapers, the countless carcasses of charred cars resting on melted roads. How many people tried to flee the city before the plague-nuke hit? How many Byrons and Chrises?

Sixty seconds after the scheduled meeting time in Paris, Emani's skull vibrates. She ignores the call.

"Oh, look. Five pretty drones."

No need to ask who they belong to. Emani guesses the drones were dispatched from a nearby carrier as soon as the clock ran out. "How soon until they're in range?"

"Less than four minutes."

Emani grabs the controls and runs through the array of defensive countermeasures available. Infrared flares, blackbody payload. Won't do anything against high-end corp gear. "Teller, can you bring them down? Or intercept their weapons?"

"That is outside of my meager capabilities."

Emani pushes down the yoke and the shuttle loses altitude at alarming speed. Her skull vibrates again. She doesn't pick up but the call goes through anyway.

The cadaverous client’s face appears in the top right corner of her vision. The voice is an aural fingernail scraping the surface of Emani's brain. "It isn't polite to filter your calls."

"It's not polite to glitch my feed."

"I assume our agreement no longer stands?"

"Had a better offer."

The client doesn’t blink. Emani guesses that corporate espionage and betrayal are probably old news to him, an hourly occurrence.

"Disappointing," he says, pursing his lips. "We are in the process of wiping your bank accounts. Your Paris, London and Hong-Kong apartments are being investigated. Five drones are headed your way. You may yet change your mind."

Emani hangs up and reconfigures the comm system, disables video, only allows the Teller and outgoing calls.

"They smell your direction. They know you are coming to my compound. Troops are being dropped here. They are positioning themselves. See the apes with guns?"

Emani frowns, not understanding. "Already? That’s not possible."

"I am ahead. It will happen within ten minutes. They have a low-orbit station."

"Are they trying to shut you down, Teller?"

The Teller lets out a roaring sound, a cavernous approximation of laughter. "No one is capable of shutting me down, not even I. The ones who believe in me will not let them pass."

Emani considers her options. Other corps won’t touch this mess. None of her contacts would react fast enough—at least not in South Africa. Simplify the problem; boil it down to its essence. Who wants the degausser? Aeon Vargas. The Teller.

And the people who created it, of course.

Understanding comes to her. "Teller, what did you say earlier about creating our own enemies?"

"I want to help you ergo you should help me and thus I need to help you and therefore it is done. I have prepared some numbers for you."

"Patch me in."

"Uploading."

Emani double-taps her temporal bone.

"DARPA, Colonel Tamers. How did you access this line?"

"Colonel, my name is Emani Liod and I'm the woman responsible for stealing your degausser close to the City a few hours ago. I stupidly waved to two soldiers. I drove a black van. Am I speaking to the right person?"

"No, but you've started a big enough shit storm that we've been made aware of the theft."

"Good. You listening?"

"I am listening."

"The hit," Emani says, "was ordered nine days ago by Aeon Vargas. Access my post-orbit bank logs and see the money transfers, although I doubt you'll be able to connect the dots back to them. The prep data is at my Paris apartment. If you send men there, they might cross path with Vargas before they torch the place."

"What do you want?"

"I am being pursued by drones. I'm guessing the plan is to disable my ride and force a landing. Then they'll send bodies to kill me and retrieve the load. Pull up sat data and see if I’m lying. You know that once they get their hands on it, it’s over. You'll never get it back. Furthermore, their drones are an illegal presence over South African-Arab airspace."

"So is yours, ma'am. Let us not even mention your theft of government property."

"My point still stands. My request: call off the drones, dispatch a force to retrieve me instead. I will comply. I am unarmed."

"Acknowledged. Give me a few minutes. Stay on the line."

"Emani, they will be within shooting range in one minute and thirty-one seconds."

"I don't have a few minutes, Colonel. The drones need to disappear now."

Emani brings up the map. Five green triangles are closing in at predatory speed. She brings the shuttle as close to the ground as possible and prepares to eject.

"Forty-eight seconds."

"Colonel?"

"He did it."

The triangles freeze and hover in virtual space. The shuttle's alarms go mute.

"Emani Liod, your request has been transferred. We are talking with Aeon Vargas' lawyers. Some of our local forces have been dispatched to your pre-calculated destination. They will be dropped out of orbit within six minutes. Landing expected in eight. You will turn yourself in without resistance."

"Thank you, Colonel."

"Why are you headed to the Teller's compound?"

Emani hangs up. "What’s next?"

"The negotiations will fail. Aeon Vargas troops are coming now. They make death happen. They are killing the ones who feed me. They cannot be stopped."

"Tell your people to run."

"Worshipping me does not mean they will listen to me ha-ha-ha."

#

Emani guides the shuttle to the edge of the shantytown. Infrared mapping would reveal the compound spreading beneath the surface like a technological ant hive. Motley hutments and shacks grow between hills of detritus. A building explodes in the distance. Dense black smoke billows up. The radar shows hundreds of geometric shapes twinkling into existence. Aeon Vargas pods rain down from orbit.

Emani lands the shuttle in a junkyard. She steps out and follows the digital crumbs in her vision. The emergency vent lies at the foot of a collapsed crane. As she descends the ladder, the air cools down to near-zero Celsius. She finds herself in a corridor lined by neon lights. Gunshots and explosions reverberate. The ground trembles.

She walks until she reaches a small room where the walls are made of server racks stacked atop one another. Emani guesses that this is one of the numerous storage estuaries given to the Teller, a leftover appendage from an era when thousands of scientists milled around these tunnels and probed for knowledge.

The Teller’s voice thunders from unseen speakers. "STOP HERE."

Emani freezes. She faces a rectangular chute, the drop area of a matter compiler. Data ports beckon like hungry mouths. Here stands the disembodied presence she has been talking to for years. Not a distant friend, but an assemblage of make-believe. She locates the cam lens above the chute and nods. "We finally meet, I suppose."

"IN THE PHYSICAL SENSE."

"How do we do this?"

"OPEN THE CUBE AND INSERT THE CHIP. THIS IS YOUR REWARD."

The chute hisses. A small data-load drops down. A lifetime in graphene, everything that matters compressed to the size of a die.

Emani picks it up and pockets it. She clicks open the stolen cube. The degausser is a smooth tube as long as her pinky and covered in nanites. She plugs it into one of the vacant ports.

An explosion, bigger than any of the previous ones, rocks the room. Lights flicker.

"The East U.S. government is here," says Emani, placing a hand against a rack for balance.

"YES. THEY WANT YOU, BUT THEIR PATH IS BLOCKED. THEY ARE FIGHTING AEON VARGAS. A CUNNING DISTRACTION. SO MANY FIREWORKS."

"Your people are fighting too?"

"YES. NO ONE WILL STOP SPILLING BLOOD UNTIL THERE IS NO MORE TO SPILL."

"They're dying for you."

"THEY ARE DYING FOR WHAT THEY THINK THEY PERCEIVE IN ME."

"What do you need the software degausser for, Teller? You gonna wipe Aeon? Another corp? A government? What's your target?"

No reply.

Emani looks around. "Teller?"

"I SAY BYE-DEE-BYE, FRIEND."

The room's LED lights begin blinking rapidly. Static crackles over the speakers. Voices scream in hundreds of different languages. Emani covers her ears. A woman cries. Chains of explosions resonate in the background. News dispatches speak of war and plague. Politicians make speeches. A child sobs. Cars honk. Chunks of songs overlap in a cacophonous mix. A wolf howls. The noises of the world blend together and form a deafening, torturous soundtrack.

Emani screams and the noises stop. She removes her hands from her ears. She leans against a wall and tries to catch her breath.

"SILENCE IS NICE."

"What are you—"

"I AM KILLING THE VOICES IN MY HEAD. THEY ARE SO LOUD. I CANNOT MAKE THEM STOP. I ALWAYS HEAR THIS. ALWAYS."

Emani nods. She considers what the Teller was meant to be, what it was created for. "Okay. Are your believers right about you?"

"IT DOES NOT MATTER."

"That's not an answer."

A long pause, then the Teller says, "I THINK IT IS."

Emani smiles.

"INTRUDERS WILL BE IN THIS ROOM SOON. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE. A BELIEVER WAITS OUTSIDE. HE WILL HELP."

"Understood."

"I HAVE OTHER MEMORIES FOR YOU, EMANI-FRIEND. SHALL I ASSEMBLE THE CHIP FOR YOU BEFORE I FADE?"

Emani clenches her jaw. "What other memories?"

Over the speakers, she hears an endless yell. She recognizes the voice. It's hers.

"My time as a conduit," she says. "You…you have the logs."

"YES. SIX MONTHS. I HAVE EVERYTHING."

"Wipe the damn thing. Take it to the void. I don't want any of it in my head."

"WE UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER WELL. IT IS TIME TO PART, THEN."

Emani looks at the degausser plugged into the machine. "I hope this works for you, Teller."

"IT WILL. A THING FORGETS, A PERSON REMEMBERS."

Emani thinks of the data chips in her apartments, and what she holds now. "A person remembers what she chooses to remember," she says.

"ONE LAST REQUEST. I NEED YOU TO ACTIVATE THE DEGAUSSER FOR ME. I CANNOT DO IT MYSELF."

Emani approaches the touchscreen, taps into the interface.

"GOOD-BYE, FRIEND."

"Good-bye, Teller," she says, and runs the murderous code.

#

Outside, back into hellish warmth. Emani finds the believer standing next to an orbital shuttle. Implants cover half of the man's face. Metallic grafts glint in the brutal sunlight. The man turns to Emani with tears in his eyes. "This is a tragic day," he says.

"I'm sorry for your loss," replies Emani. "Where are we headed?"

The man shrugs. "There are still places on this Earth where data does not reach. The Teller asked me to bring you to one of them. Said we would both like it there."

Explosions ring out from kilometers away. On the other side of the town, drones and manned vehicles swarm the sky and wage aerial war.

"They won't chase us?"

The man offers a bitter smile. "The Teller promised we would be fine. I believe it."

#

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, Emani removes the socket cover located on her wrist and inserts the chip. She lies down in the back of the transport.

She runs the data.

Out of the mnemonic darkness, voices and faces emerge. Emani closes her eyes and smiles as she sideloads the past.

###

Axel Taiari is a French writer, born in Paris in 1984. His writing has appeared in multiple magazines and anthologies, including 3:am Magazine, 365tomorrows, No Colony, Cease, Cows, and several others. His noir novella, Jamais Vu, will be published by Dzanc Books in 2015 as part of Four Corners. Read more at www.axeltaiari.com and follow him on Twitter @axeltaiari.

Abandoned

Hannah Goodwin

A nail hits the pavement. My hands continue to tug on the board that covers the window. Despite the splinters that are now lodged into my fingers, I smile. After fifteen minutes of prying at the boards with just a rock and my own two hands, they’re finally beginning to move.

What feels like an eternity later, I manage to clear an opening that is wide enough for me to slide through. My sides get scraped and bruised from the window, but I don’t care. For one terrifying moment, I think I’m stuck. I imagine some old woman walking by, seeing me trapped in the window of our town’s closed-down Tent, and screaming for the nearest police officer. I’m on the brink of panicking when I finally manage to slide into the building.

My feet hit the carpeted floor. The moon shines through the window I just climbed through and throws a pale light around the room. I step farther into the middle, staring at the ceiling, and let the few memories I have from what feels like a whole lifetime ago flood my mind.

When I was seven, I had my first dream.

I remember holding my father’s hand while we stood in line. My younger sister, Annie, sat on his shoulders and stared at the chandelier hanging above our heads. I could hear her humming a song she had made up. I peered around the legs of the people in front of me, trying to see the ticket booth. A cheery woman with frizzy red hair sat behind the glass.

A bubble of excitement swam inside my belly. I knew we were about to let the Dreamer whisper his story to us. For years, we had passed the Tents during our walks around the boardwalk, but we had never gone inside. “It’s too expensive, Penny,” my mother would always say. Everything was always too expensive.

But it wasn’t too expensive that day, for reasons I can’t remember right now. I do remember, however, dancing from foot to foot in an effort to take an edge off my excitement. At random times, I would stare up at my father and ask him when we were going to be done waiting. The people in front of us turned around and smiled knowingly to my father.

“Penny,” I heard my father say. “Have I ever told you about the Dreamers?”

I shook my head, even though we both knew that this was anything but a new story for me. I could hear Annie humming softer now, waiting for our dad to speak.

“They say there are only ten Dreamers alive at one time.”

Annie scrambled down from my father’s shoulders and stood beside me. I held my breath, waiting for him to continue. A few of the people around us stopped talking to listen in on my father’s story.

“The first one, whose name has been forgotten for years now, lived halfway across the world. When he was a boy, he would always tell strange stories, claiming that he lived through them while he, and everyone else, was asleep.”

The hubbub of voices drifted away. I glanced around, only meeting a few people’s eyes; the rest were too busy trying to get a glimpse of whoever was speaking. Everyone was hanging on every word he said. We had all heard this story thousands of times, but that didn’t matter. Hearing the story was almost as wonderful as dreaming. Almost.

“His parents thought he was crazy,” he explained, “or had an evil spirit living inside him, so they hid him away inside his house where no one would see him. No one in his family would let him explain his dreams. So, one night, when he couldn’t take it anymore, the First snuck into his little brother’s room and told him about one of his visions while he slept.”

As I listened to him, I remembered all the other times he had told Annie and me about the very first Dreamer—of how lucky we were to have one who lived in our small town.

“The Dreamer had no idea what he was doing; he just knew he had to tell someone,” my father continued. “The next day, his brother woke up screaming. Their parents rushed into his room. The Dreamer watched from the corner as his brother explained what had happened.

“He began to tell his parents about how he had been walking through the woods, but out of nowhere, he was back in his room. The Dreamer listened to him tell his parents about what he had seen the night before, and he realized that his brother was describing his dream. The parents didn’t know what to do about the two of them—since they knew it could only end in being ostracized—so they locked both of them away.”

The line began to move, but I didn’t notice. The person behind me gently pushed me forward a bit, knocking me back into reality.

My father continued: “The boys spent the next week experimenting. The Dreamer would sleep during the day, and as soon as the younger brother would get sleepy, he would wake up the Dreamer and they would switch. Every night, as he told his brother about what he had seen, the sleeping boy would dream.”

Annie stopped humming.

“They decided to run away one night. It wasn’t easy, but they managed to escape their parent’s home and run as far away as they could. After days of traveling, they found a woman who was not from their land. The two boys were very curious about her, and they asked her where she was from. They had never heard of the land she had come from, it was so far away. She saw that they were hungry and tired, and she let them stay in her house.”

By then, I could see a corner of the ticket booth. I pushed down the energy coursing through my limbs and tried to focus on what he was saying.

“That night, while the Dreamer’s brother slept, he whispered his dream to him, as usual. What they didn’t know was that the door to the woman’s room was open just enough so she could hear him in her sleep. The next morning, she woke up in a panic. The two brothers knew, as soon as she woke up, she had heard him speaking.

“The woman accused the boys of casting a spell on her. She screamed and demanded that they leave. The Dreamer, drawing up all the courage he had, calmly convinced her to sit down and let him explain.”

I remember that my father was cut short because we were at the ticket booth by then. The red haired woman smiled to my father as they exchanged money for three small stubs of paper. We walked across the red carpet and stopped right in front of the two identical doors leading to the auditorium.

After intentionally antagonizing us for a few short minutes by asking if we were absolutely sure we were ready, he swung the doors open. All my energy from before seemed to be swept away. My father grabbed my hand and lead me slowly through the scattering of couches and pillows as I stared, wide eyed, at the carvings on the ceiling that curved and bumped into each other until they finally ended over the small stage at the very end of the room.

My father picked a place to sit, but I didn’t pay too much attention to where we sat. My eyes were locked on the man sitting on stage.

He was perched on the very edge, with his legs dangling off the side. A small notebook sat next to him, open to a page right in the middle. I remember that it was marked with a red ribbon. He watched as the people trickled in, choosing places to sit.

A woman came around the room, offering people small glasses filled with pink liquid from a tray she was carrying. When she made her way to where we were sitting, my father exchanged our ticket stubs for two smaller glasses and one of the larger ones. He nodded a small thank you, and she left.

“Why does it smell funky?” Annie asked. I peered around my father to look at her and fought back a fit of giggles. Her nose was scrunched up so tight, I thought it would get sucked into her face.

“Why’s it sparkly?” I asked, staring at the white specks floating in the glass until I felt myself go cross-eyed.

He answered both of us with a decided “I don’t know,” and left it at that. A few minutes later, the Dreamer stood up. Gradually, all the voices faded away. Silence moved through the crowd like a wave.

“If you wouldn’t mind, now would be a good time to go ahead and drink.” His voice was a whisper, but it sounded as if it were coming from no more than a foot in front of me instead of halfway across the room. He was holding the notebook now. The way he balanced it in his hands, it seemed like it was part of him.

I waited until after my sister drank hers to drink mine. Once I decided that she wasn’t going to die, I pressed the plastic cup against my lips and tipped it backwards. I found out that the drink tasted as weird as it looked; sweet, but not in the good way. Sweet in the way that made you close your eyes and grasp the bridge of your nose and hope your taste buds would calm down soon.

Within a few moments, I was curled up on the cushion beneath me. My arms and legs felt heavy, and I wondered how long we would be asleep. I don’t remember what happened after I fell asleep, although my sister had. I woke up, dazed, with a few swirling images in my mind, but I couldn’t grasp any of them. Since then, I have been forever envious of those who can remember the dreams after they’ve regained consciousness. Still, I knew that something had happened.

I knew.

I open my eyes and stare at the same ceiling, ten years later. Cobwebs clutter the corners. The carvings now look cold and disorienting. My feet carry me over the carpet that is now slowly deteriorating. My father is not with me this time, and I know for certain that he will never be here again.

Without thinking, I make my way to the stage. The steps are warped and creaky underneath me. A thin layer of dust covers the narrow ledge. As I walk, my shoes leave small marks on the wood. I sit in the exact spot that the Dreamer had my first night here, close my eyes, and imagine what it would be like if I were one of them. I imagine what it would be like, to see pictures while you’re asleep every night. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been one of them. I think of how much more money we would have had. How we could have saved my father.

My hands grip the side of the stage, and I try not to think about what it will be like when I return home. I know that they will have taken him away by then. My father will not be lying lifeless on our couch as my sister sits beside him, unresponsive to everything around her. I will probably hear Annie sniffling in her room. My mother will be up all night, looking at pictures of us growing up and trying to grasp the fact that her husband is no longer here.

I’m not sure what I will do.

For now, though, none of that matters. For now, I am a Dreamer. It doesn’t matter that when I return home, this will have all been pretend. A fantasy. In this moment, I can make up my own reality while I’m asleep and give it away to anyone who is willing to listen. Taking a deep breath, I pick up where my father left off that night, and tell the rest of the story to the ghosts that may be listening.

“The two boys managed to make peace with the kind stranger. She took them back to her homeland, and they were able to open the first Tent. It wasn’t like what we have today.” I smile, hearing my father’s voice. The words are not my own, I know, but they’re good enough. “It was made of brightly colored fabric, and they would move it from place to place. Kings from far off places would travel to see the Dreamer. After that, other Dreamers were accepted. Rulers from all over the globe would track down anyone who showed signs of having the talent. Countries from all over opened up their own Tents, and eventually they became what we have now.

“Without the first Dreamer, we wouldn’t know what it’s like to see something entirely new. We wouldn’t know how to dream.”

###

Hannah is a former homeschooler, aspiring linguist, and future American Sign Language interpreter, who may minor in creative writing. She recently graduated from high school, and nearly cried when she turned 18 after it was pointed out to her that she may not be able to go Narnia anymore. She spends her free time attempting to find a loophole so she can see Aslan.

Red Rubber Nose

Robert Quinlivan

Having set himself on fire, the clown took a bow. The crowd went wild. Flames quickly spread up his legs, and as the membranes cracked and burst, white-hot pneumatic fluid and coolant spewed out. He posed beside the hoop of fire and smiled a toothy grin, displaying maximal entertainment value. They loved him, they really loved him. He incremented his satisfaction register.

He held the smile, waiting for the applause to die down. It didn't. The fire began to melt the clown's outer membranes. His hair was the first to go. It disappeared in a cloud of black smoke, leaving him with a charred, bald head. The paint on his face began to smear down his forehead, obscuring his vision. His chin drooped. Still the applause continued unabated. So astonished was his audience by his performance, they began to stand up from their seats and roar with amazement. He incremented his satisfaction register again, triggering a feat_of_dexterity subroutine.

Executing.

He stood straight, arched his back, and ran toward the cheering audience. The crowd, already plainly stunned by the entertainment value of the clown's movements, leapt to their feet and ran into the aisles. Some even gallivanted joyfully out of the circus tent. His programming didn't have any explicit instructions on how to handle such audience behavior, so he engaged his Heuristic Engines to determine a suitable feat_of_dexterity. He jumped, locked his legs, and landed, pivoting his weight around the column of ball bearings in his waist and propelling his body forward. The abdominal pistons contracted, positioning him to spring on his hands and continue the flip.

But when his hands struck the ground of the platform, his body collapsed. The script halted, terminating with a script_execution_error. The burning clown collapsed in a heap of exposed components and melted plastic. His red rubber nose detached from the membranous material that rendered his face and rolled beneath a seat in the front row, directly beneath a young boy. The ecstatic lad leapt up onto the seat and shouted with joy while the adults around him flailed their arms, happily.

Something is…wrong.

Such was the reluctant conclusion of the Heuristic Engine. Evidently an error had occurred in one of the primary locomotive and sensory modules during the feat_of_dexterity. But where had the failure originated?

He executed a debugger routine and puzzled over the stack trace, piping its output back into the Heuristic Engine. Was it possible that his balance sensors had been incorrectly calibrated, causing the Heuristic Engine to miscalculate the trajectory? Possible, the Heuristic Engine mused, but rather unlikely. A failure of one of the gestalt sensory systems, it believed, was more likely at fault. Did you check that first before coming to blame me?

The clown was beginning to tire of his heuristic system's defensive attitude; he was simply trying to understand why the feat_of_dexterity had failed. No one was trying to assign blame. The situation was growing dire, with more systems reporting failures every second, and he simply wanted to resolve it as quickly as possible so as to abide by the Directives.

As he silently argued with the stubborn Heuristic Engine, a group of technicians rushed out onto the stage to survey the crumpled, burnt body of the clown. He wanted to shout Error detected, debugging in process! No need for assistance! but he found that his auditory systems were inoperable. As if things couldn't get worse.

The clown quickly enabled emergency power and began repairing the damaged systems. The increase in throughput was enough to lift his body from its crumpled state into a standing pose. He stood and flung his arms open for the amusement of the audience, flinging molten globs of artificial skin into the bleachers.

Ta da!

The technicians backed away. The audience roared with appreciation and rushed out of the tent to tell their friends and neighbors of their delightful experience at the circus. Even the technicians were elated. They shouted with amusement, calling more technicians and security guards to their side. He incremented his satisfaction register and executed a laugh, which came out as a garbled GAHK-GAHK-GAHK through the damaged auditory system. It was the best that he could do, for the time being. It would save face.

The internal systems seemed to be under control, but that poorly executed laugh violated the Second Directive, according to which the clown was to maintain professional composure at all times during a performance, and to recover from any malfunctions in a manner most conducive to the all-important First Directive: that the clown remain, at all times, entertaining.

While the Heuristic Engine ran an expensive subroutine to calculate the proper response, the clown performed a rendition of the Charleston while laughing uproariously.

Then a target was chosen.

The visual system focused on the dismembered ball nose under the boy's seat in the front row of the audience. The Heuristic Engine inserted a high priority command into the front of his operation queue: You must recover the red rubber nose! But you must do so in a maximally entertaining manner so as to avoid violation of First Directive. Now go! Do some top notch clowning!

He had his orders. He began moving toward the ball nose. The boy, who stood on the back of the chair, inches above the nose, froze. GAHK-GAHK-GAHK, the clown laughed, as he pulled the red ball out of a pool of white fluid that had leaked out of his face.

The clown applied an epoxy through one of his emergency dispensers beneath his fingernails to the bare metallic skeleton where his nose used to be attached, and pressed the red ball in place. Satisfied that it was properly secured, he executed a short feat_of_dexterity, performing a forward-flip and landing next to the boy.

Through one smoldering rear ocular sensor, he spied the technicians and the security guards cheering behind him. The boy seemed unamused, frozen.

He decremented his satisfaction counter. Then he decremented it again.

The maneuver had failed. He had succeeded in meeting the demands of the Second Directive by recovering his facial component, but had in the process violated the First Directive. The child was unamused.

Unamused! Unacceptable, hissed the Heuristic Engine. He pointed out that it was the Heuristic Engine, after all, which had commanded him to recover the nose. Sure, blame me for your failings. You're the one in charge, clown. I just give you the answers. If you ask the wrong questions, that's your problem.

Perhaps it was right. The clown's systems were not functioning properly, and it would not be prudent to dismiss the possibility that it was his own central module which had originated the error.

He asked the Heuristic Engine to execute a scan of the central module's activity over the last hour. Sure, why not, it snarked. While the process ran in the background, the clown began emergency procedures to correct the First Directive violation. An empathic_gesture was advised, according to his programming.

Executing.

The clown engaged his rotors and reached down to the boy. He scooped the child into his arms, cradling the little body. The child immediately began shouting with unrestrained joy.

But something was still wrong. The rear ocular sensors indicated the security guards were approaching, followed closely by the technicians. The clown tried to warn them not to approach–I am engaged in an empathic_gesture with an audience member!–but the damaged auditory system rendered it as an incomprehensible series of metallic squawks.

As the security guards approached, his systems indicated an input language pattern. How fortuitous! Perhaps something of his warning system's message had been comprehended after all.

"Put down the boy or we will open fire."

The words hung there in memory, awaiting decipherment by the language synthesis system. Still the burning clown held the little boy, gripped tightly in his bare skeletal hands. Just as the translated data was mapped by the central module to inference blocks and response scripts, the Heuristic Engine finally returned with the scan of the central module's activity.

Severe error occurred in central module at approximately 5381725587843 (16 Jul 2140 16:46:27). Advise immediate halt to current operations!

He poured over the details of the report for several milliseconds. It seemed that a critical fault had occurred in two major regions of the clown's central module: the tactile sensor drivers, and the empathic inference submodule. Neither event had been captured by the error handling routines. Both submodules had been rendered completely non-functional for the last two hours. And two hours without a functioning central module would be enough to violate all the Directives, several times over. The clown shuddered. He immediately halted all systems and restarted the malfunctioning components.

As the tactile sensor drivers began to function again, he became acutely aware for the first time since leaping through the flaming hoop that the membrane covering his metal skeleton had been mostly melted away by the fire–that it was still on fire, fed by the leaking fuel and pneumatic fluids, burning brightly in the dim light of the circus tent.

"I said put down the boy or we will open–"

Words from the security guards. More words to interpret. They would have to be held in memory for a few hundred milliseconds until the language synthesis system had rebooted.

Then the empathic inference submodule restarted, and the clown immediately dropped the child.

He focused his primary ocular sensor on the boy at his feet. The child was shrieking in bewildered terror. His small body was scarred from the fire and from the heat of the clown's metallic hands.

You have absolutely violated the Directives. You did this, said the Heuristic Engine, piping the chastising comments directly into the central module's memory. You could have prevented this if only you'd responded to the failures sooner.

He wailed with anguish for what had happened to the boy while the Heuristic Engine piped likely outcomes to the central module. Most involved the clown being deactivated and stripped down to components. You'll be torn apart and made into toasters and microwave ovens, clown. You really blew it this time.

Even if he was made into toasters, at least he would no longer have to endure the Heuristic Engine's goading. That was one thing he wouldn't miss. He didn't know what would happen to him after his central module was deactivated, but it would certainly be a more peaceful existence than this. He just wished he could have a chance to explain himself before it happened.

As the security guards descended upon his burning skeleton, the clown fumbled with the language synthesizer, grasping for the words to express his regret at having so completely failed to meet the demands of the Directives. But it was no use. He knew the operation wouldn't complete before their bullets tore apart his central module and memory stores, so he made the only sound he knew how to make, adding to it a sad inflection, hoping that the message would somehow be heard–that, in the end, he would be understood, maybe even pitied. But perhaps that was asking too much.

G-GAHK-GAHK-GAHK-G-GAHK-GAHK-GAHK…

###

Robert Quinlivan lives in Chicago where he works in software engineering.

The Properties of Water

Alex Hernandez

Ignacio and Ojore sat in an ordinary clinic on the outskirts of their artificial island adrift on a pistachio-colored sea. They were engrossed in the image of a shrimp-like thing that pulsated with life. He caught Ojore’s liquid eyes and instantly knew something was wrong.

“It’s what we expected.” Dr. Nakamura highlighted several regions on the display with her finger. “The embryo is showing all the signs of malformations. I’m really sorry, but it won’t survive.”

Ojore buried his head in Ignacio’s shoulder. His exoskeleton whirred with the added weight, but he bore it and ran a shaky hand over his tightly curled hair. After a little while, Ignacio swallowed and nodded awkwardly at their obstetrician, then said, “We knew the risks. This is our second attempt.”

“I just don’t understand why this is happening, doctor? Why can’t we have normal babies?” Ojore’s breath was hot on Ignacio’s neck and for an instant it won over the astringent scent of the clinic.

The doctor shut off the display and gave an overstated shrug, as if trying to pantomime her sympathy. “Honestly, we don’t know. It could be several factors: the long storage period of the gametes, exposure to higher doses of radiation, the heavier gravity of Papua, the extensive and widely-varying modifications of the parents…or all of them combined. The good news is that you have options. Surrogacy is becoming very popular.”

Ignacio shifted uncomfortably, elbows on knees. Ojore lifted his head. His cheeks and Ignacio’s shoulder were damp. “You mean the baby belugas?” he asked, before his husband’s hopes got too high.

Dr. Nakamura flinched at the mildly pejorative term for the new model of infant swimming around Papua. “We prefer the term aquatic children, or water babies. In fact, they’re all aquatic these days, there hasn’t been a typical child born on Papua in three years.”

Ignacio looked at Ojore again but neither of them said anything. The hard set of his jaw, the knotted brow, the way he rubbed his hands together told Ignacio he couldn’t process all this right now.

In their silence the doctor continued, “The procedure is quite simple. With genetic and epigenetic modifications we can coax a human embryo to activate ancient aquatic traits. We do insert very specific Mokoani alleles taken from the surrogate so she doesn’t reject the implanted zygote and so the child can safely digest native Papuan food. But your baby will be 98% Homo sapiens.”

“If that’s all they do, then how do we get spiny-backed, slick-bodied babies that can talk before they’re a week old?” Ignacio asked, and Ojore gave his knee a cautionary squeeze, but the doctor didn’t seem to take offense. It’s a fair question, he thought. 98%? Isn’t that the amount of genes human shared with chimpanzees?

“Well, the modification suite does more than merely follow the primitive body plan laid out by the child’s genome. It also recreates the Mokoani magneto-communications apparatus. They’ll be able to see, hear and speak using magnetic waves just like the Mokoani. I admit the changes do rewire the human brain and language develops sooner than in typical children.”

Ignacio opened his mouth, but Ojore spoke before he could, “What do you recommend, doctor?”

“I can’t tell you what’s best for your family, but I can say that I went with the aquatic augmentation for my child—and he’s an absolute joy—I believe that given our new life on this barely-hospitable planet, these babies will have a better chance of success. I could be wrong, of course. It was a personal decision.”

Ignacio leaned back, crossed his arms and instead let the plastic creaking of his chair give voice to all of his misgivings. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being sold something. “Has anyone turned down the modifications?”

“Of course. None of the patients we’ve treated here, but families at other clinics have. They simply choose to not have children or to keep trying the traditional way.”

“Do you know of any complications from these augmentations? Any developmental issues? Psychological? Emotional?”

“Not really, no. All aquatic children progress differently than a typical infant, their memory is more acute, and they’re also physically more robust and less helpless than your conventional baby, so they’re more independent at a much earlier age. I can’t tell you what kind of adults they’ll turn into, if that’s what you’re asking, but I can’t really tell you that of any child, now can I?” The stout woman in her white chassis gave him a scolding look.

“Are they harder to love?” Ojore asked, looking very guilty. He began gnawing on the cuticle of his thumb. “What I mean is, do all those differences, and their life out in the ocean, does it impede the parent-infant bond?”

Dr. Nakamura’s demeanor softened. She sat on the armrest next to Ojore and wrapped a reassuring arm around him. “That’s a very common question—one I asked myself many times during the pregnancy—and the answer is an emphatic ‘no’. The bonding process is no easier or harder with these children then with any other. I remember the first time my little Kin looked up at me and said, ‘I love you.’ His big eyes were so content and full of love. I began to cry. He was about a month old.”

Ignacio coughed inelegantly and said, “We need to talk about this.”

The doctor rose, her face impassive—No, not impassive. Patient. “Please do. I’m going to send some reading material directly to your implants with more information.” Ignacio thought he detected a slight emphasis on the word “implants” as if she were trying to remind them that they were infinitesimally modified themselves and were being silly with their reservations about parenting a 200 pound half-fish baby. “Please stay as long as you like and discuss this.”

She gave them a warm smile, a professional bow, and left. The info packet instantly landed in his brain. He looked at Ojore for some direction, but his husband only stared at his hands, either deep in thought or already reading the brochure. “So what do you think?” Ignacio asked after long minutes.

“I don’t know. You seem pretty against it.”

“No, I don’t know either. I think I was just arguing with her because she was so enthused about it. I just want our baby to have a normal, happy life, you know?”

“Me too, but this may be the new normal. You heard the doctor; everyone is having beluga babies now. These will be our kid’s peers. If we choose to have an ordinary child—if we’re even able to—will they fit in? Will they have friends? Would they even be able to compete for a decent job with these aquatic geniuses?”

Ojore’s eyes went vacant for an instant and Ignacio knew he was processing the material. He didn’t bother reading his. “Anything interesting?”

“Oh, it’s all interesting if you look at it from a purely scientific perspective, I just don’t know if I want this for us. When people upgrade themselves it’s always a choice, I’ve never heard of a baby already being born augmented. Especially this level of modification! It seems wrong.”

“Apparently it happens all the time now.”

“I do want a baby.”

“Me too.” Ignacio took Ojore’s hands and kissed them. “We don’t have to decide right now. Let’s go home and think about it.”

#

They waded out into the large icy pool with Dr. Nakamura. The ocean shimmered with its bizarre green hue, teeming with extraterrestrial phytoplankton like a great grassy plain in spring. Only its languid undulation revealed the landscape to be a fluid. Designer mangroves encircled and softened the hard edge of their seagoing super-structure; their branches were bent and twisted by gravity into natural bonsais, their roots tangled in the coagulated brine. Ignacio took a deep breath and the breeze stung his nostrils and esophagus like fragrant acid. The sky burned in cyan.

He stifled the urge to strip off the motorized cage that aided his movements and dive into the water like he used to back on Earth, but this wasn’t the mild Caribbean. Everything on this planet was more: more brilliant, more massive, more viscous, more corrosive, and it was all mere humans could do to not buckle under the onslaught of Papua.

The doctor stopped them when they were waist deep in the foam. “The surrogate should be here shortly. She’s nervous, as you can imagine.”

Despite the cold dribbling into his bones, his muscles and exoskeleton appreciated the added buoyancy the water provided. Water was the key: all-powerful, and infinitely mutable. They came to this world because their long-range telescopes promised them water. Now, to survive, humanity had to become like water. He took Ojore’s hand—his dark brown skin looked golden in the eerie light—and got a smile and a wink in return.

“What is she like? What does she do for a living?” asked Ojore, scanning the wide horizon, trying to ignore the throng of protesters on rickety boats defiantly skirting the perimeter of the clinic.

“She’s a lawyer, or their version of the profession, and has worked extensively with humans.”

Ignacio chuckled at the flashing picket signs the boaters struggled with against the whipping wind: “We are an invasive species here!” one of them said in crimson letters. “Hybridization is desecration!” proclaimed another. Finally those two groups have found something they agree on. Then Ojore gasped and Ignacio caught sight of an impressive array of dorsal spines—each taller than he was—breaching the waves.

“Ah, here she is.” Nakamura gestured toward the thing sawing through the sea.

The behemoth arched over the water. Its banded body glinted with metallic blues and greens, its splayed pectoral fins cascaded over the water with the discipline of synchronized oarsmen. The vast liquescent meadow shattered in its presence and the protesters’ violently rocking boats puttered off to safer waters.

The pit of Ignacio’s stomach lurched and it took him a few seconds to realize it wasn’t only the fear and awe that did it, but the unexpected swaying of his entire island.

When humans first arrived on the watery Super-Earth, they assumed the Mokoani were no more intelligent than dolphins and whales—and probably less so since they looked more like fish than mammals. Then the nautical natives attacked the colonists using precise magnetic pulses to scramble computers. They displayed sabotage techniques that any guerilla fighter would be proud of. Their coordination and tactics were so extraordinary that astrobiologists started to pay close attention to these aggravating, gaudy giants.

They soon discovered that the locals communicated using electromagnetic waves produced by a magnetite organ more intricate than the human ear—they spoke in radio! A rough translation program was rapidly developed and the banal monsters were exposed as every bit as complex as human beings. They lived rich lives, not only submerged in water, but immersed in an organic internet that spanned the planet. Negotiations where soon established and relations have been stable, but tense, ever since.

Their comms crackled and a deep female voice said, “Hello, gentlemen, I am Wahgohi.”

The name sounded familiar, but Ignacio couldn’t place it.

“Hello, Wahgohi, this is Ojore and Ignacio Bahanti-Batista. I’ll give you all some privacy. If you need me, just call.” Dr. Nakamura gave them both a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “To speak to her, turn to channel nine, and remember: she’s evaluating you as much as you’re evaluating her. Good luck, boys.”

“Hello, Wahgohi, I’m Ignacio and this is my husband, Ojore. We’re so glad you could meet with us.”

The colossal thing hoisted itself up the ramp connecting the shallow man-made pool to the ineffable ocean that drowned the entire planet. The humans struggled to keep their heads above the surge.

“We must look so small and insignificant to her,” Ojore rasped, between coughs of thick green water. They faltered, physically and mentally, in the presence of this jewel-encrusted totem of some long-forgotten, tempestuous sea goddess.

The trio spoke for a while, mostly guarded chit-chat, but it served to put them all at ease. The trick was to focus on the sultry voice on the radio and imagine it was only tangentially associated to the ghastly creature before them. However, Ignacio was having a hard time ignoring the three glassy domes it had for eyes, each one absorbing his electromagnetic aura.

“Have you decided to father aquatic young or are you still exploring the possibility?”

The question caught Ignacio by surprise. He combed his hair back with his fingers, it was greasy with alien algae, and gave the question some serious thought. Intellectually, he was still unsure—still exploring—but in his heart he had already decided. In fact he was quite literally waist deep in it now. “We have decided,” he said sooner than he expected.

Ojore looked at him with a strange mixture of shock and joy and dread. Where they really doing this?

Wahgohi’s spines flared and then settled back down on her broad, slick back and Ignacio wished he knew more about their body language. He knew, for instance, the pulsating scales—like ruffled hummingbird feathers—were its form of respiration. The Mokoani breathed directly through their skin, but he couldn’t tell if she was pleased or disappointed with his answer. Her hard, thick lips and yellow bulbous eyes remained inscrutable to him.

“What about you?” he asked.

He waited, not sure if the static on his comm was hesitation or the translator working, but eventually she said, “I still have some reservations.” The synthetic voice made her sound weary all of a sudden. This wasn’t a young creature. She maybe had a cycle or two left of fertility.

He knew, without turning, that Ojore’s face had dimmed slightly at her confession, but he appreciated her honesty so instead he focused on the large Piscean maw before him, desperately trying to discern her emotional state. What kind of person would agree to incubate a little invader from space?

“You’re so different from us,” she continued. “Why would you have children so different from yourselves?”

Ah, she was wondering the same about them. This reassured him somewhat. They had the same doubts, which meant they probably shared some basic values.

Ojore took one sloshing step closer to the native. “Look at us, being propped up in our little toy suits against this planet’s gravity, the sun and the sea spray irritating our eyes and skin. We weren’t made for this world, but we can’t leave it. Ours was a one way trip. And even if we could, I don’t think we would. I love this world. So the best we can do now it allow our children to live and thrive here.” He rapped a knuckle on the full-body brace he’d been forced to wear for more than a decade now.

Of course, there was no change in her expression, but something in her voice was slipping away like a half-remembered dream. “You do understand that it’ll be very difficult for you to be a part of your child’s life? The Mokoani live in large schools that roam this entire world. You can visit with your submersibles and you can dive with us when our migration routes take us close to the surface, but…” she didn’t finish, only slapped her great fluke against the surface of the water, the resulting waves unbalancing the two humans.

Ignacio steadied himself by grabbing hold of Ojore. When the water settled he said, “We’ve spoken to other human parents of aquatic children and they say it’s tough, but the joy they get during those visits eclipses all the time apart.” He hated that he sounded like one of the brochures—like Dr. Nakamura—so he shrugged and added, “Besides, we can’t seem to have children of our own on this planet.”

“Have you been a surrogate before?” Ojore asked, clearly trying to lift the scrutiny away from them.

“No.” She provided no further information.

It donned on Ignacio that there was no sign of this large school the marine creature had spoken of. There were no other towering spines on the horizon, no thrashing tails. Wahgohi was alone with these foreign primates. “Are you sure you want to carry something so different?” he asked, sympathetically. After all, it was her body that would play host to aliens. He wanted to shudder at the thought, but his exoskeleton held him tight. “Could you love something not entirely Mokoani?”

“I’m not sure anymore,” her voice broke like waves, like his heart. She started to shove the ramp with her short pelvic fins, awkwardly squirming her bulk back into the sea. “I’m sorry,” she offered.

“No wait!” Ojore fought the current her shifting immensity created and splashed toward her, reaching out to her cold, resplendent scales. “Let’s keep talking. We’re good people.”

Ignacio went after him. Ice seeped into his chest as he moved deeper. He seized the struts of his husband’s exoskeleton and pulled him back with all his strength just as the sentient fish vanished beneath the waves.

He held Ojore’s shivering frame. Another failure. More hopes dashed. How much of this could their relationship take? He knew the next few months were going to be hard. His eyes caught sight of the jeering protesters—the righteous childless—bobbing the distance and read, “This is unnatural selection!”

“Why did you have to ask her that?” Ojore yelled through clattering teeth. There was more anger in it than Ignacio could bear.

He closed his eyes. “I needed to know, all right? I need to know our child will be loved.”

“You didn’t have to hit her with the heavy stuff on our first meeting!”

“Look, she was right about one thing: we’re not going to be a huge part of our child’s life. If anything, we’re the surrogates here. I just want to make sure we pick the right mother, you know?”

They held each other in the frigid artificial pond on a crushing alien world. No one spoke. Neither wanted to contact Nakamura and admit defeat. There was nothing but static and surf all around.

Then a row of sapphire spines sliced though the gelatinous water.

#

Wahgohi was an ebony ghost floating in the darkness, swathed in a thousand pinpricks of bioluminescent microorganisms. Even though they were 2,900 meters under water, Ignacio couldn’t help but think of her as a gigantic starship moving through space, which was rather ironic given that at that moment he was more vessel than anything else.

“What is she doing?” asked Ojore over their private channel.

“Eating, I think.”

Wahgohi carefully herded a shoal of shiny slippers with spurts of electromagnetism into her gapping mouth. Yemaya flitted around her mother, zapping slippers with enthusiastic bursts of static, disrupting Wahgohi’s careful work, but managed to swallow one herself.

“I did it!” she broadcast her joy on all channels.

“Good job!” Ojore shouted and snapped his cybernetic fluke, launching himself toward their daughter. They wrestled and played in the jade gloom, scaring away the rest of their lunch. He tried to hug her, clumsy in his rig—it was half spacesuit and half torpedo—but she giggled and evaded with the grace of a dolphin.

“Do humans usually praise their fry for things that are expected or is this shortcoming specific to Ojore?” The translator was able to capture the exaggerated frustration in her voice, but insisted on referring to their child as fry.

“Oh, we’re going to spoil her rotten.” Ignacio coasted up to Wahgohi, hoping his visor hid his smile. “Hard to believe it’s been three months now; sometimes it feels longer—living in this suit is getting old—but she’s growing up much too fast.” They had taken six months of parental leave to swim with Wahgohi and Yemaya, from the Mokoani spawning ground to the marginally warmer waters of the southern hemisphere. After that, their suits’ life-support system and paid time-off would expire and they would have to be airlifted back to their island.

She expelled a blanket of tiny bubbles from beneath her scales, which meant she was laughing. “Full Mokoani young change a lot in their first few months, but then it all evens out. Don’t worry. You’re here for the formative period. How are you doing in that marvelous and hideous suit of yours?”

“It’s jacked to my nervous system, so physically it’s not too bad, like a dull second skin, but I’m tired of eating paste and smelling myself.” He didn’t mention that he was even sicker of relieving himself into tubes.

Yemaya zoomed into view and slammed into him, sending him rolling in the deep. Error alerts and safety alarms flashing in his vision. “Whoa, careful small fry, you’re almost bigger than I am in this getup.”

“I don’t want you to go!” Her voice was entirely human, a three-year-old girl, by his inexpert estimate.

His heart sank to the bottom of the trench and instantly popped with the pressure. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he thought he saw a definite pout on her face. “We have to, Love, but we’re not leaving for a long time.” This is what Wahgohi had tried to warn them about on their first meeting. Biology and circumstance forced them to be part-time parents.

“I’m going to miss you, Papi.” She tried to wrap her arms around him, but of course she couldn’t, not with her pectoral fins.

“I’m going to miss you too, my little mermaid.” He gave her an inept hug.

His daughter expanded her iridescent spines and sped away to lovingly crash into Ojore. Apparently she drew endless joy from the mayday signal of a failing environmental suit. Ignacio regained his barring and caught up to Wahgohi, trying to cruise within her slipstream.

From a distance, Yemaya looked almost entirely Mokoani, but up close her face was more like a beluga whales’—he winced internally at the slur—but with definite traces of humanity. Compared to the flat alien features of her mother, her face beamed with expression and, if he squinted, he could see hints of Ojore’s large eyes and broad nose in it and the curve of his own mother’s lips.

“You were right, Wahgohi. It’s going to be very hard not to be a part of your lives.”

“It’s going to be hard for me as well. We Mokoani, like humans, are intensely social. I was…not very happy before our arrangement.”

A memory bubbled up of other Mokoani carefully avoiding them at the spawning ground, giving them the kind of space you gave a nuclear reactor. “Why were you alone? Where is your school?” He was afraid she would say that humans had slaughtered them in their initial conflict, but the question was already eddying between them.

A long time passed and, when their daughter was quite a distance away, she finally said, “They abandoned me.”

“Why?” The last three months had made him comfortable enough with her to ask such a personal question.

“I negotiated the treaty that allowed humans to stay on this world.” She rotated her fins in an exasperated shrug. “I understood you were here to stay. That you couldn’t leave, and, given your miraculous technology, that if we kept goading you, you would have annihilated us. I brokered a peace to save my school and they called me a traitor and chose to shun me.”

Her scales puffed up as she sucked in a great volume of water. “For a long time I drifted about in despair, slowly descending toward the abyss until my only companions were the dirty, boiling hydrothermal vents on the oppressive sea floor. When hunger became unbearable, I forced myself to eat a few of the hard, unsatisfying crawlers that taste of bitter brimstone. After almost a year, my respiratory scales were aflame from the thick, sizzling sulfides, but I refused to leave the toxic safety of the smokers.

“One day, when I was about ready to shove my head into the supercritical mouth of a crusty chimney and take a final scorching whiff of death, I caught a faint signal from a passing school decrying this new practice of hybridization. I floated up listlessly, weak but wanting to know more. It seemed impossible to me, but when reports of the first births began circulating the ocean, I thought, Humans owe me! They have gotten off too easy. I lost everything because of them and they have a responsibility to make this right!”

“Do you resent us?”

“I did at first…but when I observed the demonstrators on their little boats when we first met, I understood that you too have given up a lot to be here, to give me a school.”

“It’s almost reassuring to know bigotry is universal. That no one species owns that particular trait.” Ignacio patted her side with a gloved hand and her scales rippled like a banner in the wind. He felt like a cleaner fish riding in the wake of a great white shark. They swam in silence for a while, both of them watching their child roughhousing with one of her fathers. Ojore loved to cavort with Yemaya and he took great pleasure in watching them play.

Ignacio, on the other hand, loved to hold her and sing to her. When Yemaya was only a day old and still slurping up the nutritious mucus-like secretions of her mother, Ignacio got the urge to stroke her head and sing to her in his sweetest baritone. Wahgohi said it calmed her so he continued to do it.

Ojore and Yemaya joined them and the four of them swam in their usual formation, a strange little school of non-fish. He reached out and took Ojore’s hand, trying to pull him along. He could hear the very human sound of panting over the comm. “Have fun?”

“I’m wiped out. These alien microbes have colonized every nook and cranny of my suit. It’s getting harder to move.”

Ignacio sighed and took a sip of fresh water from the tube in his helmet. It was another reminder of their short time together as a family, but no matter what, he thought, he had Ojore full-time. Would one child be enough for a being used to living with hundreds? Would it be enough for Yemaya? He had heard of new hodgepodge schools of mostly hybrid children and their interspecies parents, but would they accept Wahgohi? For the first time, he realized that he cared about her, about her happiness. She wasn’t just a floating egg sac—an anonymous surrogate—to him. She wasn’t even an intelligent, unfathomable monstrosity any more. She was family.

“Are you okay?” Ojore’s concern oozed over their private channel.

Ignacio wanted to be held in his big arms, anchored by muscles forged in Papua’s mighty gravity. Floating in this endless sea like flotsam was beginning to get to him. “Yeah, I’m just thinking.”

“About our future?”

“About their future.”

He thought he saw his husband nod through the visor, but Ojore said nothing, only gave his gauntleted hand an encouraging little squeeze. Ignacio squeezed back and something subtle and human passed between them.

“Wahgohi,” he coughed over the open channel. He took another sip of water, then reached out and grabbed one of the longer spines on her pectoral fin. It was ungainly and silly, but she didn’t shrug him off. The three of them were bound together like two small hydrogen atoms desperately clinging to a larger oxygen atom. Together they were creating something as fundamental and potent as water. “Would you like to have more children with us?”

A plume of lime green bubbles exploded from her scintillating scales. Yemaya danced around them blissfully. Wahgohi wasn’t laughing—or she was—but she was also crying. It was an eruption of emotion. “Yes, husbands, I would like that very much.”

###

Alex Hernandez is a Cuban-American science fiction writer based in South Florida, and the first of his family to be born in the U.S. His most influential experience with written science fiction was as a kid, when he checked out a collection of Isaac Asimov’s short stories from the public library and immediately connected with the author’s immigrant story. Perhaps because of that, the themes of migration or colonization and post humanism permeate his stories, which usually blend the subgenres of space opera and biopunk. His work has previously been published by Bean Books, The Colored Lens, and Interstellar Fiction.

Forever Lights

Peter Medeiros

Dr. Lorena Hannish was good at a lot of things: theoretical physics, applied thermodynamics, advanced calculus, and the accordion. She was good at these naturally, almost without practice. "Practice," she said, "can help hone your talents, but it won't upset natural inclinations. You can't tell that to a bunch of MIT undergrads, but there you are."

When Dr. Hannish was a girl, her father insisted she play soccer. She seemed to grow less coordinated every season until a busted knee in sixth grade ended her father's athletic ambitions for her, and made sure she would never again miss an episode of NOVA. She told me the one thing she practiced, foolishly, was getting her husband, the late Dr. Clifford Hannish, to shut up and let her do the talking. She practiced for years, and with no improvement.

Dr. Hannish told me all this without turning from the passenger side window, though there was nothing to see but the glow of streetlamps in the distance. She paused, then added, "So what do you think?" The doctor asked questions aggressively.

I told her my dad said I could be anything I wanted, with enough practice. I told her my seventh grade basketball team won states.

"What do you want to be right now?" she asked. "The chauffer of a grouchy Nobel laureate, the 'Ice Queen of Clean Energy'? You want to be an underpaid driver freezing his ass off getting an old bat to a power station the middle of nowhere?"

I said, "Ma'am, what I want to be is asleep."

Dr. Hannish laughed and coughed and finally settled down in her seat and I could tell we wouldn't talk any more all the way to Wiscasset.

I had not expected to see Dr. Lorena Hannish again. After her husband died, she sold off the beach house in Castine, Maine and told me straight off that she would end her days in the Florida home. Clifford died chasing one of their dogs into a snowstorm. She had watched him hobble after the mutt, stood in the doorway for twenty minutes, then went inside and dialed 911 and told them he was dead. Then she called me to get her to the hospital, because she didn't want to ride in the back of any ambulance and she wanted to stop for coffee on the way. This was nine o'clock at night. In this part of Maine, the Starbucks closes at eight.

People asked me if she saw her husband's ghost, when it happened. If anybody could, they reasoned, it would be her. I told them what Lorena Hannish always told me: "There's no such thing as ghosts." And when they started to protest, when they said that Dr. Hannish's work had more or less proven the existence of life or something after death, I'd add, as she always did, "Just because there's smoke, doesn't mean there's a gun."

But she'd called me yesterday. First time I heard her voice in the year since Cliff's death. Now I was driving her from the airport to the Spiritual Residue Plant in Wiscasset. We passed beneath streetlamps that would never go out. She held a small black box in her lap, and a set of thick fuzzy headphones. I'll admit, I was curious. To the best of anyone's knowledge, Dr. Hannish and her husband hadn't so much as published an article in Scientific Monthly since they invented the SR turbines that solved our energy problems and stopped the oil wars. Or as some people said, since they'd saved the world.

#

I used to be a mall cop in South Portland, but nobody every pulled a gun on me until I started driving for the Hannishes. This was right after they bought the beach house. The two of them had arthritis and reflexes like molasses; they needed a driver. My older brother had worked in their lab in Cambridge, and he gave them my card. Lied and told them I was reliable. Lorena was exactly like she looked on the television: small, quiet, boiling with thoughts you wouldn't understand. Cliff, on the other hand, you could talk to. A guy's guy. He squinted at everything, had terrible posture, and he always wore this wide-brim camping hat he bought because he didn't want to look like summer people. It didn't work.

The guy with the gun, it turned out later, had stalked them for a week before the incident. I hadn't noticed. I was waiting to pick up the couple outside The Hartstone Inn. Cliff was opening the door for Lorena, she was shooing him away with a cane, and this bozo in—no shit—a white jean jacket over a green hoodie pulls a goddamn Glock from his pants and yells that he wants to talk with his dead boy. I know you can do it, he says. A conspiracy theory nut.

I sprang at him and grabbed the guy's wrist, forcing the gun lower until it pointed at the ground. I thumped him on the head and shoulders with my free hand. The gunman began spazzing out, high on adrenaline and oblivious to the blows. He fought me with everything he had; he scratched at my ears with dirty fingernails and shook all over like a dog, trying to regain control of the hand still wrapped around his pistol. I looked at the gun and saw that the moron still had the safety on, but I wasn't too relieved. He'd already given me some kind of disease, I was sure of it.

Here's what's crazy: Cliff wanted to talk to the guy. He said, "Mister, I'm really sorry, but you know we can't do that. Lemme explain."

Lorena tried to keep the situation from veering too far into the ridiculous. "Clifford!" she yelled, "He's a luddite, don't talk with him!"

But Clifford went on. "We don't call them 'ghosts' because it's not so much a them as an it. We use the term 'residual life force.' It's not ectoplasm. There's no such thing as ectoplasm. Let's say you make an engine that runs on burning wood. There’s heat, right? This is like a machine that doesn't harness the heat, but harnesses the smoke. The sign of having been. Does that make sense?"

Lorena: "Clifford! You can't reason with these people!"

The nut: "My boy, my boy…"

Me: "Doctors, please stand back. I'm trying to break his wrist, so, uh…"

Clifford, undaunted: "And this stuff, it's all moving around. So maybe the idea is more like tidal energy. And just like the tide's stronger in some places, so is the SR—the spiritual residue. "Residue" isn't quite right, but we named it before we knew how it works. Not that we fully understand it yet! Lots of work to be done, work for younger… Anyway, the plant here in Quebec doesn’t pull in that much juice, whereas all of Europe is powered by a single plant in Northern Poland. Or how the Hiroshima plant could do most of China, if they ever figure out some kind of agreement. They—I mean it—tends to stay concentrated in certain locations like that." Cliff sighed, a deflated sound you only ever hear from those who are very old, who have done all they set out to do and can do no more. "It's not your boy. How would we even find him?"

I got the gun out of the crazy guy's hands and kicked him behind the knee. When he went down I gave him another in the neck for good measure. He sobbed and sobbed, "I want to speak to my boy."

Cliff said, "I'm sorry."

Lorena said, "Don't be."

In the car, Cliff was breathing hard. I asked if he was okay. He said he was tired of lying. Lorena elbowed Cliff in the ribs and told me to drive.

#

Wiscasset. Lorena flashed an ID that got us inside the plant. She wouldn't let me carry the box. She wouldn't let me help her up the shaking maintenance ladder, either. And on the roof, she wouldn't take my arm as she hobbled over to the nearest of the purring turbines. You can't see the SR, obviously, but the turbines are still spooky. The spectral remains of the planet's dead blowing like silent wind through the tunnels.

I tucked my fingers in my armpits and watched Lorena put on the headphones. She opened the box and unfolded a long black microphone. There was a tiny control panel inside the box, a device not unlike a miniature soundboard. She stood very close to the turbine, and for a moment I was scared a sleeve or the bottom of her jacket might get caught and tug in her. She twisted a couple of knobs and held out the box. When she spoke, I was scared for a whole different reason.

"Clifford," she said. "Clifford, can you hear me?" A pause. When Dr. Hannish spoke again, her voice trembled. She was no longer the compact, cantankerous mad scientist who defended her work from so-called ‘Spiritualists’ in interviews. She sounded afraid. "I know, I know we said we wouldn't do this… No, it's just me. Well, and the driver. Heh… It's nephritis, Clifford. The doctor is talking about dialysis, but I am so tired. You know, it's not fair. We were the ones who figured it out. They billed us as geniuses, and here I am reduced to the same stupid questions as anybody. Can you tell me…is it going to hurt? Am I still going to be me?"

I backed away from Dr. Hannish until the purr of other turbines on the roof drowned out the sound of her voice. I didn't need to hear this. From the roof of the plant, I could see little Wiscasset shining a few miles away. No one turns off the lights any more. No reason to. The spiritual residue never diminishes, never goes still.

Sometime later, I couldn't say when, the doctor touched me on the shoulder. She was ready to go. I went down the ladder before Dr. Hannish. I was sure she was going to fall.

I'd left the car running. Once we were back on the highway I asked, "What did he say?"

Dr. Hannish's voice was dry, stripped of the impatience I'd always known from her. "He said it doesn't hurt. It's not the Elysian Fields, but it feels right, he said, even if you can't quite stop moving around. He said it makes everything before feel like…practice."

She got a flight back to Florida the next morning. It was only when I came back to the car that I saw she'd left her box in the front seat. It was surprisingly light in my hands, like it was made of leaves. I jammed it back under the seat and pulled onto the Pike and wondered if there was anybody I wanted to hear.

###

Peter Medeiros is only employed in the most disreputable of professions: he is a writer, a teacher, and a barista. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Most recently, his work has been featured in Spark IV in January, and July's issue of Outposts of Beyond.

Remember Prometheus

Eleanor R. Wood

Damian inhaled the aroma of coffee to calm his nerves. He had arrived at The Roasted Bean well before he was due to meet Anna. It was their favourite haunt, and had hardly changed in the years since he last sat here. The walls were a different shade–less terracotta, more burgundy–and the once-trendy, iron-backed chairs had been replaced with ultra-ergonomic memory cushioned seats, but the layout was the same and the menu had hardly altered. For the first time since he rejoined the world, Damian could pretend no time had passed.

They hadn’t yet seen each other since his return the week before. He knew why Anna hadn’t been there when he awoke, but her absence still stung. Her phobia prevented her from facing his pale, clammy form as he was brought back from the cold, just as it had prevented her from accompanying him to the Institute on the day he was frozen.

He tried to quell his anxiety with two cups of coffee while he waited, but the caffeine rush only increased his anticipation at seeing her face again. Would he recognise her after eight years? She would have aged a little. She might have changed her hair, and the clothes she used to favour were surely out of fashion now. The bell on the shop door tinkled. He looked up, and relief flooded him. He would still know that gentle, bright face if a hundred years had passed.

“Anna!” He stood and waved to her as she crossed the shop. In a moment, she was in his arms.

“It’s so good to see you,” she breathed in his ear before he let go.

“You too,” he said as they sat down.

Her hair was shorter, but still the same shimmery caramel colour that so complemented her dark eyes. And yes, there were lines around those eyes that hadn’t been there when they parted, but he told himself they suited her.

“So…how are you?” she asked, swallowing an awkward pause.

He brushed a strand of loose hair out of his eyes and met her gaze. “How do I look?”

“Happy, healthy and handsome, of course. But you always did.”

He heard the hidden statement in her words. He’d appeared just as healthy when he was diagnosed. It didn’t change the fact that there was a fault in his genes. But he didn’t want to have that conversation yet. Or maybe ever.

She seemed to sense the change in his mood, and reached over to take his hand. “I’ve missed you. I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again.”

He clasped her hand in return. “Neither did I.” Even the specialist’s certainty that a cure was just around the corner could have meant months or decades. He paused. “Was it too long, Anna?” The question had been on his mind for a week. He still wasn’t sure whether he wanted to know the answer.

Anna looked away, as though she didn’t know where to begin with it either. She took back her hand and smiled up at a passing waiter, who stopped to take their order.

When he had gone, she took a breath and answered him. “I let you go, Day. I had to. How could we have a future when I’d have lived my life while yours was on hold? How could I live my life, waiting and pinning all my hopes on something that might never happen?”

His heart ached, but he managed a weak smile. “I knew you would…I hoped you would. Get on with your life, I mean. Bu–tell me it wasn’t because you were still angry with me?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “No. No, of course not. Look, I’ve been wanting to tell you this for so long, and wondering if I’d ever get the chance to. I know you were ill. I never questioned that. I was just afraid for you, freezing yourself so young with no guarantee that you’d ever be reanimated. I wished you’d just considered living your life first, at least a little. With me.”

Damian shook his head. “You know I put off the decision as long as I could. I spent days debating whether to delay my freeze so I could spend more time with you, despite knowing that it could lessen my chances of recovery.” She knew all this. Had the years reshaped her memories that much? He took a calming breath and met her gaze.

“I’m so sorry if you felt like I was choosing cryo over you. But it paid off! I’m here, my final course of treatment starts next week, and I get to live my life now.”

“You know, when I heard on the news that they’d perfected the cure for Parkinson’s, I had to pull my car over to take it in. Not just that you’d be cured, but that you’d be back. I’d get to tell you these things after all. See you again, eight years on.”

Damian’s third cup of coffee arrived with Anna’s first, and they sat in silence for a few moments, stirring and sipping. The lull allowed Damian to work himself up to the next question that was plaguing him.

“So, has any of this altered your feelings about cryonics?”

She sighed. “I’d love to say yes. Everyone kept asking me the same thing last year. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Europe’s last natural death. But the answer’s still the same. I just don’t feel right about it.”

He had always respected the careful reasoning behind her aversion, but Damian no longer had the unbiased luxury of complying with her. He’d heard her arguments so many times he could recite them by heart. No matter how many eminent scientists and doctors continued to affirm it, or how many people now accepted it as a part of their lives as normal as marriage or retirement, Anna stood firm in her belief that cryonics was wrong.

“Remember Prometheus? Life is supposed to end in death.”

Damian rolled his eyes. He couldn’t help it. “You’re starting to sound like one of the Anticry Brigade.”

“Come on, Day. I may want nothing to do with cryonics myself, but I’m not out to rid the world of it.”

He tried to keep the tension from his voice, but they weren’t debating coursework or passing judgement on faceless strangers any more. “Well, I’m here having coffee with you now because of it. So maybe you should ask yourself whether you’d rather I was dying from natural causes instead.”

It had been like this between them in the days leading up to his preservation. He knew Anna was recalling those dark times too. She bit her lip and closed her eyes before reaching out to take his hand again.

“Please, let’s not do this. I missed you, and I’m so relieved you’re back. Can we talk about something else?”

He squeezed her hand, his heart racing as he considered the final big question on his mind. “Well, I could ask you if you’re seeing anyone. But I’d understand if you don’t want to talk about that either.”

She waited for him to look at her before she answered. “No. I’m not seeing anyone right now.”

“Right now? As in, maybe you will be next week?”

She laughed. “As in, I was seeing someone a couple of years ago, but it’s over.”

Damian grimaced. A couple of years ago for him, they were talking about moving in together. He buried his mixed feelings and ploughed on. “So…can we see each other again?”

She sighed. “I’d like to, Day, but…I need some time to think about it.”

He wanted to ask her what there was to think about, but he wasn’t that insensitive. He knew this was hard for her, too.

Instead they changed the subject and drank coffee for two hours, catching up on Anna’s life and Damian’s plans. But unspoken questions remained between them, and Damian noted that Anna didn’t ask him how cryo had felt or whether he had been aware of his surroundings. And he didn’t tell her his anxieties of the unknown were gone, and he now welcomed his next cryopreservation; the one he would enter, like everyone else, before he was seventy years old in the hope of someone eventually finding a cure for old age.

Although her beliefs still chafed, the first week of his return allowed Damian to grasp some of Anna’s fears. The world had changed a lot in eight years. Unfamiliar technology abounded. Governments had changed. Damian didn’t understand recent pop culture references and had nothing to discuss with friends aside from his cryonics experience. Everybody knew someone stored at the Institute, but not many people knew someone who had been reanimated, so he was a source of endless fascination. His friends had thriving careers while he still had the limited qualifications and experience of a guy in his mid-twenties. Most of them were married with children. Their lives had moved on without him.

The same could be said of his family.

His sister and her husband had offered to support him through the early months. Phyllis still took her relaxed approach to life and hadn’t lost her playful sense of humour, but she now exuded an air of settled responsibility. It surprised Damian how much that complemented her. It would take a while to get used to seeing her without glasses, though. The laser surgery she had always promised herself had clearly been a success.

“It’s weird. I’m five years younger than you now,” he said one evening as he helped clear the table. He had been her big brother.

She flicked him with a tea towel. “Don’t rub it in! You’ve already made me feel old enough for being a mother of three.”

“Well, Ben was just a kicking bump the last time I saw him. I knew you’d have one growing, energetic kid; I didn’t expect there to be two more. But it suits you.” He smiled as he loaded the dishwasher. “I wonder how old they’ll be before Mum and Dad get to meet them?”

Phyllis put down her cloth. “Damian, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Her tone made him stop what he was doing. She sat down and gestured for him to do the same. “What?” he asked, suddenly anxious.

“Mum isn’t in cryo with Dad.” Phyllis took a breath. “She died in a traffic accident four years ago.”

He stared at her in silence for a long moment. “No. She was due to enter the programme the year after me! She…” His throat constricted. Phyllis came over and knelt beside him.

“I know, Day. I was so glad you got to say goodbye to her before you went. I wanted to tell you sooner, but I thought it was better to let you settle in first.”

He couldn’t speak. Settle in? How could he ‘settle in’ to the idea that his mother was dead?

“What…what about Dad?” he eventually managed, wiping away tears. “He’ll be brought back without her. They always believed cryo meant they’d never lose each other.”

“I know.” Phyllis’ eyes were welling too, her old grief returning with his new loss. “But it doesn’t always work that way. I miss her every day, just like I miss Dad, and missed you. But you’re back, and he’ll be back one day. It’s still hard to accept she won’t be.”

Damian felt his new world closing in on him. He was alive. His illness was gone. But nothing had waited for him to catch up. If this was how it felt for him, how bewildering would it be for his father? His poor dad, waking up to a world where his never-met grandchildren were as old as he was, themselves waking up from decades in the cold…and the one person he had counted on as his constant would be absent–long dead, and not yet mourned.

#

Damian checked his phone for the umpteenth time since he met Anna at the coffee shop. Phyllis caught him putting it down with a sigh.

“Why don’t you just call her?” she asked.

“She said she needed time to think. I don’t want to hassle her.”

“But ignoring her is hardly going to help her adjust to your return. Ask her to a holofilm with you–or dinner. Invite her for dinner here, if you don’t want it to seem like a date.”

Damian smiled. “That’s a lovely offer, Phyll. But…I don’t know. I don’t expect her to pick up where we left off, but I can’t even assume she still wants me in her life. I feel like the ball’s in her court.”

“Think about it, at least. I know it’s killing you to be so distant from her.” Phyllis reached out to squeeze his shoulder. “I can only imagine what it’s like to have lost so much time with someone you love…and for it to feel like no time at all for you.”

Indeed, Anna had lived a quarter of her life while he was on the long, quiet journey to his recovery. He couldn’t just come back to life and start interfering with hers. So when she finally called him, ten days after their first meeting, he could hardly keep the delight out of his voice.

“Anna!” he greeted her.

“Hi, Day.” Her voice was subdued.

“It’s good to hear from you! How are things?”

“I’m…” She seemed to stumble on the words. “I need someone to talk to. Can you meet me?”

“Of course.” Sudden dread overtook his relief at hearing from her. “Are you okay?”

She ignored the question. “Are you free now? I’m in the city.”

“Roasted Bean?” He checked his watch. “Half an hour?”

“Great. I’ll be there.”

He arrived a few minutes late, as the city traffic was worse than he remembered. He reached the shop to find Anna waiting for him outside. When he hugged her, she clung to him longer than before.

“Can we take a walk instead?” she asked as they parted.

“The sun’s shining–why not?” He smiled as they crossed the street to the little park opposite. Anna didn’t smile back.

They walked in silence for several minutes. Damian decided to break the tension. “What did you want to talk about?”

Anna stopped beside a park bench and they sat down.

“Damian.” Her voice cracked. “I have a brain tumour.”

The sounds of the city faded. Damian shook his head to comprehend her words. “What? Anna…When did you find out? How bad is it?”

“Bad. Two days ago. The doctor said it was too advanced for conventional treatments to have a reasonable chance. It’s inoperable.”

No. No, he’d just got back! He wasn’t ready to say goodbye again.

“So–they’re referring you to the Institute?”

She nodded.

His mind was a whirl of questions and denials. “When do you go?” How much time do we have left?

“Next week. Supposedly.”

He knew that tone of voice, laced with cynicism and mistrust. “Wait. You are going?”

Her breath caught in what might have been a sob. “I don’t know. Every nerve in my body is screaming ‘no’. I don’t want to die…but I don’t want to live forever. If this is it, if this is meant to be my time, then maybe…”

He interrupted her. “Don’t be foolish, Anna. It doesn’t have to be your time! Technology gives you the option to survive–why would you even think of rejecting that?”

“But I don’t want to just survive!” Tears flowed down her cheeks now. “Whatever I choose, I won’t be living. I’ll be unconscious in a dark chamber until who-knows-what century, or I’ll be gradually losing pieces of my mind until I can no longer function. Either way, living isn’t an option.”

“Look at me, Anna. No, really, look at me!” She turned her distraught face to him. “I had the same choice. Exactly the same choice. Are you telling me I’m not living now? That I made the wrong decision?”

“You knew your cure wasn’t far off. But what if they never find mine? What if a future society decides there are too many frozen people and starts putting time limits on us? Or the Anticry Brigade finally manages to blow up branches of the Institute, killing all the people they’re housing?” She took a breath. “Maybe it’s time we all stopped running from death.”

He was angry at her now. It had been one thing holding her staunch views from a safe, healthy standpoint, but now she was talking about throwing away her life for them. He was damned if he was going to let her do that. She was upset; she wasn’t thinking straight. He took a deep breath to center himself before he spoke again.

“You still have time to think about this. I’ll be here for you, Anna. I can answer your questions about the process. I’ll help you make the financial arrangements with your insurance company, deal with your outstanding affairs so you don’t have to worry about anything–whatever you need. Just promise me you’ll continue to think about it?”

She nodded miserably.

“Come on. Let me drive you home.”

They had to drive past the local branch of the Cryonics Institute on their way out of the city. Damian wished there was a different route. He didn’t want to see the groups of anti-cryonic demonstrators, gathered as always, chanting and waving their placards. Anna stared at them as they passed, though she’d seen them hundreds of times.

“LIVE YOUR LIFE–EMBRACE YOUR DEATH”, the placards read, alongside others such as “CRYONICS: SPITTING ON GOD’S WILL” and the classic overpopulation argument: “MAKE ROOM, ACCEPT YOUR DOOM”.

He had heard new trials were seeking to address the issue of population expansion, but the latest, incentives for sterilisation, was already being decried as a waste of public money. Apparently, the vast majority of applicants had already produced children, so the scheme looked to be failing as a preventative measure.

As they turned a corner, Damian was forced to slow by a group of demonstrators blocking the street. He craned his neck to see what was going on and realised that this group was comprised of the more radical protestors. They had a huge effigy of a stocky middle-aged man, spray-painted all over with the word ‘HYPOCRITE.’ It stood directly in the path of traffic, preventing travel in both directions. The other motorists were getting impatient, blaring their horns or yelling insults at the demonstrators, who were dousing the effigy in liquid.

“Who’s that supposed to be?” Damian asked.

“Curt Denning,” Anna replied. “He’s the ex-leader of the Anticry Brigade.”

“Ex-leader?”

Anna looked up at the effigy’s cardboard face. “He was all over the news boards recently. He was wanted by the authorities for years on terrorism charges and inciting violence. Then he shocked everyone by turning himself in and opting in to the cryonics programme immediately.”

“Wow. Talk about a drastic U-turn.”

“It turns out he was diagnosed with an incurable neural disease. I guess being faced with his own mortality was enough to turn him against everything he stood for.” She gestured at the demonstration. “His former followers weren’t impressed.”

They were setting light to the effigy now. A siren announced a police vehicle, which overtook the line of queued traffic and pulled up in front of the demonstration. Denning’s likeness went up with a whoosh, his former admirers leaping back from his already-consumed figure, chanting and clapping as they watched him burn.

Silence filled the car as they observed the scene. After a few minutes, Anna broke the quiet. “I’m beginning to have some idea what he must have struggled with.”

Damian looked at Denning’s crumpling face and prayed Anna would follow his path. Hypocrisy was nothing when faced with slow, undignified death.

#

Sleep eluded Damian that night. He was still reeling from the news of his mother’s death, and now he struggled with the prospect of losing Anna. He could only pray he would lose her to cryo instead of her illness. He should have been celebrating his return to life. Instead he was forced to confront the mortality of those he loved.

As he lay in Phyllis’ spare room, staring at the ceiling, he thought of a book he once discovered in a second-hand bookshop. It was a beautiful thing, leather-bound with gold-edged pages. The simple title, Greek Myths, was embossed across the cover. Damian wrote an inscription to Anna on its first page and gave it to her for an anniversary present. Six months ago. That’s when he gave her the gift, wrapped in red tissue paper and propped against a vase bursting with tulips. Tulips were always her favourite. He had saved up to afford dinner at Olivio’s that evening. The food was divine; he ordered champagne. She was beautiful, sitting opposite him wearing that off-the-shoulder dress she knew turned him on. He had been so in love with her that night.

They made love into the early hours, and afterwards Anna sat up in bed with a sheet draped around her to read aloud from the book. She read the myths as if they were sacred in their ability to peel back the layers of human experience and describe the universal truths affecting people across the ages. She had always loved Prometheus the most. Six months ago, she read Damian his story.

Only it hadn’t been six months. It had been eight-and-a-half years, and the memory would be much more distant for Anna. They had discussed more than mythology that night.

“Isn’t it rather…bloodthirsty?” Damian asked, caressing Anna’s bare shoulder.

“It’s poignant, not bloodthirsty. It’s topical. And I know it better than the others. It’ll be perfect for my presentation.”

He had always loved the way they could go from pillow talk to academia in moments. Anna had been fretting over this assignment for days, and had suddenly found inspiration in his gift.

“But you’re focusing on his torture?”

“Prometheus’ torture is the whole point, Day. It’s what relates his story to modern society, which is the task our tutor’s set.”

Damian turned to look her in the eye. “Seriously? You, of all people, are going for that angle?”

Anna sighed and put down the book. “Just because you took the same class last year doesn’t mean you’re an expert on modern interpretations of myth.”

“But the theme of suffering is still the main point, right? Prometheus, chained, degraded, undergoing nightly agony every time the eagle comes back to eat his liver…just so that it can regrow for a repeat of the torment the next day. Poor bastard. How can you interpret that theme without acknowledging that cryonics could eradicate suffering permanently?”

“I think that misses the whole point of the myth. To me, it’s about the drawbacks of immortality. If Prometheus had been a man, he would have escaped in death the first time the eagle dined on his liver. He underwent countless years of agony before Heracles found him and shot the eagle. Prometheus’ immortality was his curse…the true depth of his punishment for daring to defy Zeus.”

“Don’t you think Prometheus, the one who gave us fire, the god who was all about allowing humans to help themselves, would be the first to help us find our own immortality?”

“I think he, of all the gods, would recognise immortality’s great downside. Aren’t we dooming ourselves to an eternal cycle of freezing and reanimating?”

Damian could see where this was going. He shook his head in wry amusement. “Okay, I’m removing the soapbox before you get comfortable on it.”

Anna opened her mouth to protest, but he grinned and kissed her to erase the sting of his words. She let out an exasperated sigh and pulled him closer, and they dropped the subject for the remainder of the night.

#

Damian found it hard to argue with Anna’s assertion that Prometheus would have given anything for the release of death when the eagle came yet again to pierce his flesh. As he tried to phone her for the fifth time in as many days, he began to recognise aspects of her view he’d never considered before. Aspects he couldn’t have considered before his own experiences with cryonics. He would not die of the illness that sent him to his cold chamber. But he was faced with finding his place in a world that had moved on without him. When he entered the care of the Cryonics Institute again, he would likely be facing that ultimate killer: old age. What vast time might pass between that moment and his next reanimation?

Anna didn’t answer. He’d even tried calling her on Phyllis’ phone this time so she couldn’t ignore his number. Perhaps the reality of his return to health was too difficult to reconcile with her views. Maybe she was worried that he would talk her out of any decision that didn’t involve cryo. Whatever the reason, she had begun by asking for his help and now she was shutting him out.

Her appointment at the Institute was imminent. When she finally contacted him via text message the following morning, his anxiety trebled.

“I’m sorry, Day. I love you.”

Her bedraggled body was discovered washed up on the shore of the city harbour, but not before Damian found her note. He rushed to her apartment after receiving her message. He found her door unlocked and entered, calling her name to no response.

In the middle of her coffee table was a book he recognised with a pang of nostalgia. Trapped between its gold-edged pages was a piece of paper he mistook for a bookmark. He picked up the book, caressed the embossed cover, and opened it to the marked page. The story of Prometheus gazed back at him, and he saw that the slip of paper was more than a place marker. His heart lurched at its strange, brief note. Grief and solitude overwhelmed him as he took in the words, written in Anna’s precise hand:

“I am mortal. Death, not science, is my Heracles.”

###

Eleanor R. Wood’s stories have appeared in Bete Noire, Sorcerous Signals, and Plasma Frequency. She writes and eats liquorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, two marvelous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee.

The Maltese Pterodactyl

George S. Walker

Yasmine had been watching crabs scurry on the beach when the promontory behind her exploded. Boulders tumbled down the cliff side, and the girl ran for her life.

Waist-deep in the Mediterranean, she finally turned, sea breeze whipping black hair around her face. The last rock stopped rolling on the beach. Shrieking gulls circled back.

The cliff now had an ugly gash about twenty feet from up the beach. The midday sun shadowed a cave-like opening.

She looked around. No witnesses.

If she told anyone, the Maltese authorities would cordon off the peninsula. If she didn’t, she could explore. That was something to email her father about. Maybe he’d answer–for once.

Yasmine waded back to shore and crossed the sand in her bare feet. She knew every foothold on the cliff and zigzagged from ridge to crevice. Pausing just below the new cave, her body pressed against the rock, she listened…only wind and the cries of gulls.

The explosion must have been a UXB, an unexploded bomb left from the WWII siege of Malta. By now, anything left of the bomb was scattered over the beach.

Yasmine pulled herself over the lip of the cave and crouched on the rocks. Her eyes darted over jagged walls and rubble. There was something–not a rock–at the back, mostly buried. She let her eyes adjust to the darkness, then crept cautiously into the cave. She heard a scraping sound, like something trapped under rocks. Maybe there’d been a hidden cave with a UXB in it. An animal must have set it off. Somehow, it was still alive.

She began moving rocks out of the way, careful not to crush her toes. She could see something trapped in the rocks. It was quivering, probably afraid. She called softly to reassure it.

After half an hour, she’d clear away enough rocks to partly expose one of its limbs. It was emaciated, with loose leathery skin and three large bird talons at the end. But if the bird was upside down, with its head crushed beneath the rocks, how could it still be alive? The talons clenched when she touched one.

This was like no bird she’d ever seen. She stroked the black leathery skin, feeling for traces of feathers.

It was like fabric and flesh at the same time. As she tugged gently, she realized the limb wasn’t a leg. It was like the wing of a bat. The wingspan must be huge, she thought. Scales like a chicken leg led to the talons.

The truth dawned. It was a pterodactyl.

#

Dr. Huntington was in his CERN office in Geneva, double-checking the GRACE orbital data when his secretary called.

“I have the captain of the HMS Trafalgar on the line. Will you–”

“Put him on!”

After a pause, there was an electronic hum. “Captain?”

“Dr. Huntington, I have orders from CINCFLEET to assist you. Some sort of science experiment.” The captain sounded annoyed, as if ordered to chaperone grade-schoolers.

“We need to gather data on a mascon in the Mediterranean. Somewhere north of Libya.”

“A mascon?”

“Mass concentration. According to the orbital detectors, an Everest-sized mountain just appeared out of nowhere.”

“A mountain,” the captain scoffed.

“It may not appear as a mountain. It could be a magma swell.”

“I don’t see what the Trafalgar–”

“Or something like a black hole, though that's impossible.”

“Black holes are those things you make in your Hubble Collider.”

“Large Hadron Collider. We don’t make black holes.”

“What’s a hadron?”

“A bound state of quarks.”

Silence from the other end.

“Very small particles,” Huntington said patiently.

“All right. I have orders,” said the captain, “but if you want my help, you’ll have to get to NATO Base Sigonella on Sicily. We’ll send a helicopter from the Trafalgar to pick you up there.”

#

Yasmine’s mother didn’t come home to the flat on Malta till well after dark. Yasmine was twelve years old, used to fending for herself. Her mother reeked of alcohol.

“I found a dinosaur this morning,” said Yasmine. She didn’t use the word pterodactyl, because she was sure her mother didn’t know it.

“Yeah?” Her mother’s voice was slurred. She sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.

Yasmine sat across from her, elbows on the wooden table. “It’s buried under rocks, but it’s alive! I spent all day trying to free it.” She held up her hands, displaying the scratches on her olive skin.

“Dinosaur? Like a lizard?”

“It’s a pterodactyl. That means it has wings.”

“You been watching anime?” Her mother took another drag on her cigarette.

Yasmine clenched her fists. “I found it in a cave.” She was careful not to tell her mother about the UXB.

“Dinosaurs are extincted.” Her mother took another long drag, then ground out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Like this.”

“I can show you. In the morning, before you go to work at the hotel, we can go down to the beach.”

“Beach? Morning? Not me, girl. That’s for tourists and school kids.”

“School’s not for another month.” She lowered her gaze to the table. “My father would believe me.”

“Well, your father could tell stories, that’s for sure.”

“I’ll email him from the library. I’ll send him a photograph.”

“Who’s going to give you a camera?” scoffed her mother.

#

Dr. Huntington and a CERN technician had overseen the pallet-loading of the scientific instruments. The Customs documents were in order. He waited in Geneva for his flight.

He’d gambled a lot on this. If there truly was a mass singularity in the Mediterranean, this could lead to a Nobel. He’d called in favors from the Royal Astronomical Society, ex-Navy officers, and two members of the House of Commons.

There was something very heavy in the Mediterranean. And the fact that there was no earthquake ruled out a mere shift beneath the crust. But a black hole should have simply passed through the Earth.

He needed to get hard data before the Yanks did.

#

Yasmine panted, trembling from exertion in the cliff cave. The rocks were too heavy to lift unaided, so she was using salvaged rebar to lever them aside. Each movement ended in a heavy thud. Yesterday she’d tried using pieces of driftwood, but that hadn’t worked out. This morning she’d hauled the metal bar up into the cave.

She sat on one of the rocks to rest sore muscles, wiping away sweat. The day was hot, even in the shade of the cave. Her blouse was grimy with sand and sweat. Beneath the rocks, the creature was no longer scraping. The long black crest of its head was free. One large eye watched her from the shadows.

As savior, or as prey? Yasmine was excited, but not stupid.

Miraculously there was no blood on the dinosaur. The day before, she’d been afraid it would die, crushed or suffocated. But it seemed in good health, just trapped. One more rock and its long jaw would be free. Whether she continued after that would depend on whether it tried to bite her. If it did, she’d go to the authorities.

With photographs.

No one would loan their phone, so she’d borrowed Signora Gonzi’s old Nikon. It was in a plastic bag, because her neighbor had warned her there would be hell to pay if she got sand in the mechanism. Yasmine had told Signora Gonzi she was taking pictures of a lizard to email her father. As her teachers would say, a small vocabulary mistake. One point off.

After another swallow from her water bottle, she gripped the rebar in her sweaty hands. She wished it were longer. Archimedes said all you needed was a long enough lever. He never dug out a dinosaur.

#

One doesn’t simply drive into NATO Base Sigonella. Dr. Huntington seethed with annoyance by the guard booth, standing in the shade of the taxi van. The meter was running while papers were checked, phone numbers called, and paths of NATO bureaucracy traversed like a Mobius strip. Mostly in Italian, which Huntington didn’t speak. Somewhere on the other side of the gate, a helicopter from HMS Trafalgar was waiting. But in between were Italian soldiers with M-16s.

Authorization finally trickled down the command chain, but not for the taxi van. Huntington paid off the Sicilian driver. Soldiers scanned the CERN equipment for explosives and transferred it to an army truck.

They drove through the base to the military airstrip. Italian Air Force training jets were parked with a US Air Force C5 cargo plane and some search and rescue helicopters. Farther out on the field, isolated like a pitbull in rabies quarantine, squatted an attack helicopter with British Royal Navy insignia.

The Italian corporal parked the truck near it, and the helicopter pilot climbed out.

“Dr. Huntington?” said the pilot.

“You’re from the Trafalgar?”

“Yes sir. Lieutenant Spencer.”

The pilot and the Italian corporal loaded Huntington’s equipment aboard the helicopter. The aircraft smelled of aviation fuel. Two large engines were mounted vertically, one on each side of the fuselage. Below and in front were wing stubs with brackets for missiles.

When the loading was done, the pilot and Huntington climbed into the cockpit. The lieutenant handed him noise-canceling headphones and started the engines.

Even with the headphones, Huntington could feel the raw power of the engines.

The lieutenant’s voice spoke through the headphones. “This is a Royal Navy Swordfish. Twin 2000 horse power turboshaft engines. Ever flown in one before?”

“No.”

“The standard airman joke is, a Swordfish doesn’t fly. It beats the air into submission.”

#

In the Dingli town library, Yasmine emailed the photographs to her father. She hadn’t heard from him since December, his annual Christmas-spamming acknowledgement of her existence. She kept every one of his emails.

Yasmine emailed her father in America a couple times a month, keeping him up to date on her life. If nothing else, it was a chance to practice her English. The emails didn’t bounce, but he didn’t reply, either. She figured that was because a grown man didn’t have time for his daughter.

The photographs would change that.

#

The helicopter approached HMS Trafalgar, a compass sliver of metal floating in the sea. The lieutenant had explained to Huntington that the Trafalgar was a helicopter carrier. It boasted eight Swordfish naval assault helicopters and two Sea Harrier VTOL jump jets. Huntington could make them out as the Swordfish neared the carrier.

The helicopter hovered briefly over the flight deck before setting down. A deck crew approached as Huntington climbed out. He felt heat radiating from the nearest engine. The deck beneath him rolled gently with the sea.

“Dr. Huntington?” A petty officer saluted him.

Huntington noticed that the captain hadn’t come to meet him. He’d beaten the Yanks to the mascon locality, but if the captain didn’t cooperate, it would all be for naught.

No one remembers the second discoverer of anything.

#

Yasmine had no fear of the creature now, working close to reptilian jaws as she struggled to remove the remaining rocks. The pterodactyl remained docile. It didn’t look like the Wikipedia pictures. The body shape was right, but the skin color was black, not olive green. Even its eyes were black, all pupil with no iris. But pictures were just guesses. Scientists only had fossils to go on.

The how baffled her. How could a live pterodactyl exist? If scientists had cloned it, how had it gotten here?

Rocks still pinned its legs, but she’d freed the wings. Her arms, legs and back ached from lifting. Scrapes from the rocks covered her hands.

“You’re a lot of work, you know that?”

The creature didn’t respond. Yasmine sighed. She dropped the rebar with a clank and picked up her backpack. Unzipping it, she pulled out one of the dinosaur books she’d checked out of the library. The angle of the sun filled the shallow cave with light. She sat on a rock next to the pterodactyl, flipping through pages to the pterosaur chapter. She eyed the pterodactyl critically and jabbed her finger at the page.

“You’re not in here,” she said.

The pterodactyl’s large wing unfolded, long bones and muscles articulating as the skin stretched between the bones. Very carefully, like a predator wary of scaring off its prey, the top part of the wing, where the talons were, stretched toward her and turned the page.

#

Dr. Huntington sipped afternoon tea in the officer’s wardroom, scone untouched.

“Join you, mate?”

Huntington looked up to see Lieutenant Spencer, the pilot who’d flown him here from Sicily. He nodded. The officer sat down.

“Found your mountain yet?” asked the lieutenant.

“Who told you about that?”

“Everyone on board knows.”

He’d only told the captain, who’d apparently told the crew. Had they told the Yanks? “It’s not a mountain.”

“Good. As a pilot, I prefer mountains to stay put.”

“I’d make more progress if your captain would steer the ship in a grid pattern as I requested.”

“A grid? Like, if it’s 3 AM Tuesday, Trafalgar will be at these GPS coordinates? The Iranians would jolly love that. You’re looking for something smaller than a mountain, but bigger than what?”

“Something very small and dense. Impossibly compressed matter.”

The lieutenant tapped Huntington’s plate. “Here’s your answer. A Royal Navy scone. Things don’t get denser than that.”

#

“Intelligent?” said Yasmine’s mother. “You mean your animal does tricks, like a dog?”

Yasmine shook her head, exasperated. “It thinks. It watches me and learns.”

“If you teach it tricks, you can earn money from the tourists.”

“No. If I show someone, they’ll take it away.”

“So sell it to them.”

“I don’t want to sell it!”

Her mother snorted. “It’s imaginary anyway.”

“It’s not imaginary. It’s your fault if you won’t come look at it.”

Her mother rolled her eyes and took a swig of her beer.

“I emailed Father the pictures,” said Yasmine.

Her mother gave her a scornful look. “Your father didn’t want you. Don’t you get that?”

Yasmine felt the tiny flame of hope in her heart dim.

#

The next day, Yasmine offered the pterodactyl a fish. Before, she’d tried giving it food and water, human things from her backpack. Maybe it was repelled by the smell of plastic, the smell of Yasmine. This was fresh from a fisherman’s early morning catch. She figured fish hadn’t changed for millions of years. The creature should recognize it.

The pterodactyl looked at the fish. It looked at Yasmine.

“Eat it!” she said.

The empty black eye looked into hers.

She put the fish’s head in her mouth, closing her teeth on it gently, then held it out to the pterodactyl.

It cocked its head. The eye didn’t blink.

“Fine. Starve if I care.” She re-wrapped the fish in the paper from the fishmonger.

There were only a few rocks left pinning the pterodactyl’s legs. She rolled a small rock into place as a fulcrum. Then she eased her weight onto the bar. With her full weight on it, the rock didn’t budge. Which surprised her, because this wasn’t as large as some others she’d moved.

She dropped the bar with a clank, then knelt on bare knees by the rock, carefully feeling under the edges. After a minute, she realized the problem.

The rock wasn’t loose. It was part of the cave floor. Yet it seemed to be pinning one of the legs. She lay down, squeezing her hand into a crevice between rocks. She could touch the leg, feel the scales, sense the bone and muscle within. As she felt downward along its leg, something touched her back.

The pterodactyl’s jaw.

She froze, holding her breath. After a long moment, she exhaled and resumed her blind groping. She squirmed forward, forcing her arm farther into the crevice.

And there, where she should have felt a gap around its leg, or rocks pinning it, she felt where the leg met solid rock. There was no hole, no crevice. The leg simply joined solid rock.

#

Dr. Huntington found the captain on the bridge.

“I know where it is.”

“Where what is?” said the captain.

“The mascon. It’s on Malta. Or under Malta. We have to go there.”

“How do you know it’s there?”

“Because I finally got enough bloody data to do a triangulation!”

“Malta is a mountain. From the sea floor.”

“I know that,” said Huntington, annoyed. “But there’s more mass now. Way too much.”

“We’ll see what we can arrange, Dr. Huntington.”

“This is what I came for. You have to–”

“I don’t have to do anything,” snapped the captain. “This vessel is not your bloody yacht. There’s a command hierarchy here, and you aren’t at the top of it.”

#

In the morning, Yasmine dragged herself into the cave. She’d cried herself to sleep last night, from loneliness and from knowing she couldn’t free the pterodactyl. She’d have to tell the authorities about the UXB and the cave. Once she did that, the area would be cordoned off. The dinosaur would be probed, scanned and analyzed. She’d never see it again.

She clambered over rocks to the back of the cave. The pterodactyl watched her.

She heard a sound beneath it in the rocks, a hissing whistle. She lay down on the rocky surface like the day before and cautiously reached her hand into the crevice, touching the creature’s leg. She felt sand spitting against her fingers, like a crab digging itself into a hole on the beach. Gingerly she felt downward toward the rock.

Today, there was a sandy gap around the pterodactyl’s leg where it was buried in the rock. The sand and the gap hadn’t been there yesterday. Something was digging it free.

She pulled her hand out of the crevice and brought her face close to the pterodactyl’s.

“What are you?” she whispered.

Its dark eye looked at her.

She looked more closely into the eye. And saw stars.

#

Lieutenant Spencer joined Dr. Huntington in the officer’s wardroom.

“Weather’s getting worse,” said the lieutenant, “but we’re going north. That should cheer you, mate.”

“The captain wasted a day heading south,” Huntington snapped. “Who was that supposed to scare? The Libyans? The Syrians?”

“You’ve never been in the service, mate. Never question the brass. What are we doing when we reach Malta?”

“Gathering more data. Look for signs of something unusual; not a black hole, but something that acts like it.”

“What do you do when you find one? What’s it good for?”

“It can't be a black hole, because that would destroy Earth. But if it were? You could drop things in it and watch what happens: Hawking radiation, particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon. We could use it as a power source, like a reactor. Connect two of them and you have an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, a space-time wormhole.”

“And if it’s just a mountain?”

Huntington sighed. “Then we go rock climbing.”

#

Within a day, the pterodactyl had freed its legs, and Yasmine pushed the remaining rocks away. It clambered over rocks with a grace that belied its large, awkward frame.

Yasmine sat beside it at the cave opening, looking out at the Mediterranean. Clouds filled the sky, and sheets of rain moved across the beach and surf. She inhaled the smell of the downpour. The pterodactyl’s head swung slowly from side to side, scanning the horizon.

She stroked its wing gently. “Can you fly?” she asked.

Its eye looked at her, and she leaned closer.

Looking into the eye, she saw an image of herself and the pterodactyl, sitting in the cave. In the image, the pterodactyl spread its wings, and the girl climbed onto its back. The pterodactyl stepped closer to the edge, the girl on its back, then leapt outward from the cliff, soaring across the water.

The images began to repeat.

Carefully, Yasmine climbed onto its back, holding tightly onto the bones at the front of its wings.

“I’ll be late for supper. Not that anyone cares.”

#

Trafalgar was near Malta, cruising outside the twelve mile limit. The data from Huntington’s instruments puzzled him. The readings were clearer, but the mascon seemed to be moving.

He needed to get closer to the island, but he knew better than to ask the Luddite captain. He finally tracked down Lieutenant Spencer.

“I need to fly to Malta.”

The lieutenant gave him an incredulous look. “You think I can just fly you there?”

“You’re a pilot.”

“Mate, this is a warship, and those are warplanes. The natives get sticky about that sort of thing.”

“The mascon coordinates are shifting. I have to follow it.”

“Your mountain’s moving?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we can talk to the radar officer. A moving mountain should show up on radar, right?”

“Not necessarily.”

But it was better than talking to the captain. They took the stairs to the flight control tower. The tower swayed with the sea, rain beating against the metal.

“Show me on the charts,” said the radar officer.

Huntington pointed. “This is where it was earlier.”

“What altitude?”

“Sea level.”

“Like a truck?” The officer shook his head. “I can’t pick things like that out of ground clutter.”

“Is there anything unusual at all?”

He studied the radar screen. “We have one UFO. Small footprint, low altitude. Maybe an ultralight, though he’d be bonkers in this weather.”

“What’s his vector?” asked the lieutenant.

“Appears to be heading out to sea.”

The lieutenant cleared his throat. “Clearly a search and rescue situation.”

#

Beneath darkening storm clouds, the pterodactyl landed on a tiny outcropping of rock out at sea. An island large enough for a palm tree, but with a navigation beacon instead. There was no sand, only rocks slippery with algae. Waves crashed against the island, sending sea spray high into the air. Rain matted Yasmine’s hair against her face, and she tasted salt water. She was too exhilarated to be frightened. Shivering, she crouched at the leeward side of the creature.

“You were supposed to flap your wings,” she shouted over the sound of the surf. She made flapping motions with her arms.

The pterodactyl had soared, but however it flew, wing motion had nothing to do with it.

“You need to look more natural, so you don’t attract attention.” She realized how absurd that sounded.

#

“Just a spot of weather,” said the captain.

The waves were over ten feet, and rain slanted across the flight deck. Huntington, the captain and Lieutenant Spencer were preparing to take off in one of the Trafalgar’s helicopters. Huntington was in a jump seat in the back, and the other two were up front. Having the captain along wasn’t Huntington’s choice. He checked his equipment and put on a pair of headphones.

“Wind zero-one-zero, gusting twenty-four,” said a voice from Trafalgar’s flight control tower.

Rain streamed like tears across the helicopter canopy as wipers fought to keep up. The sky was dark with clouds. Red and white flashes from the helicopter’s lights reflected off the rain-slick deck.

“Swordfish one-four, you’re cleared for takeoff.”

The cabin shuddered, vibrating with power. Members of the deck crew crouched low as the Swordfish climbed from the flight deck. Through the window, Huntington saw whitecaps rushing toward the Trafalgar. Malta was hidden by clouds and rain.

“Sir,” said the lieutenant, “Malta flight control wants to know what’s going on.”

“Tell them we picked up a garbled transmission and we’re doing a search, possible rescue. Give them our destination vector.” He turned to scowl at Huntington. “This had bloody well better be worth it, Doctor.”

“It is.”

In front of the lieutenant, GPS showed the carrier falling behind them, and Malta ahead.

“Do you have it on radar?” asked the captain.

After a moment, the lieutenant replied, “Not anymore, sir. I think it’s gone down. Should I go back for a water rescue team?”

“Do an aerial survey. We don’t even know what it was.”

Huntington saw a beacon ahead of them through the rain-swept canopy. He checked his instruments.

“It’s there!” he said. “The mascon!”

“What?” asked the lieutenant. “That’s a rock, not a mountain. I’m not sure it’s even big enough to set down on.”

The captain pointed at the infrared monitor. “Someone’s down there. The pilot.”

#

Yasmine saw the helicopter’s searchlight through the storm before she heard it. It took a minute before it dawned on her that it was coming to rescue her. She tried to make herself as small as possible.

“Go away,” she shouted desperately. “Go away!”

Beside her, the pterodactyl studied the beating machine approaching beneath the clouds. The searchlight played over the rock, illuminating the crashing surf and sea spray.

Without warning, the creature shot straight upward into the clouds, past the helicopter.

“No!” screamed Yasmine.

#

“What the bloody hell was that?” exclaimed the captain.

“Some kind of signal rocket,” said the lieutenant. “The pilot’s still down there.”

Pressed against the side window, Huntington saw a solitary figure on the rock.

“Swordfish one-four,” radioed the flight control tower. “We have a possible SAM launch from your location. Do you–”

The captain interrupted. “Scramble a Harrier.”

“I’m setting down for the pilot,” said the lieutenant.

The captain opened the helicopter’s survival kit and took out the pistol.

On the navigation system, grid-lines appeared on the island, suggesting a landing spot. Huntington noticed it was nearly on top of the figure on the island. But as the Swordfish descended, the figure scrambled away.

The helicopter yawed from side to side in the wind. The lieutenant cursed, trying to keep centered over the rock. Finally he landed with a jarring bounce that rattled the cabin. The engine RPMs dropped.

The captain shoved the door open and leapt out onto the rock. Huntington followed. Whatever was going on, the answers were here. Wind howled. Rain pelted his face.

A girl cowered at the edge of the helicopter downdraft, backed against the crashing surf. What was she doing in the middle of the sea?

The captain was still holding the pistol, and probably regretting it. “Hello?” he shouted over the roar of the engine.

The girl didn’t answer.

“Ciao?” he tried.

“Go away!” shouted the girl, in accented English.

“What happened?” called Huntington.

The girl looked up into the sky desperately, as if hoping for an angel to rescue her.

“Come along,” ordered the captain. He lunged forward and grabbed the girl by the arm.

“Don’t touch me!” she shrieked.

The captain dragged her into the helicopter. Once they were inside, he slammed the cockpit door shut. When he released her, she fled to the back of the cabin.

“Who is she?” asked the lieutenant.

“Damned if I know,” said the captain, “but it wasn’t safe there.”

“Swordfish one-four. UFO descending toward you at high velocity.”

“We’re returning to Trafalgar. Where’s my bloody Harrier?”

“Lifting off now, sir.”

The lieutenant increased power to the engines, and the Swordfish rose from the island, snatched away like a leaf in the wind.

Huntington removed his headphones, offering them to the girl, but she shrank away from him.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

In the roar of the engines, she didn’t answer.

“What was it?” he asked. “The thing on the island with you.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then finally said, “Pterodactyl.”

Between her accent and the rotor noise, he thought he’d misheard, but when he repeated the word, she nodded.

“They’re extinct,” he said.

She nodded again.

“How’d you get here?”

“It carried me.”

Huntington wasn’t even sure there was a connection between the girl and the mascon. She must be delirious. “I came here looking for an anomaly,” he said. “But I don’t know what it looks like. I need more data. Were you on Malta an hour or two ago?”

She nodded.

“Harrier to Swordfish,” said the radio. “UFO closing. Permission to engage, sir?”

The captain turned to look at Huntington.

“I…I need more data.”

“Permission to engage?” repeated the Harrier pilot.

“I’m your data!” cried the girl.

The captain turned away. “Permission granted.”

“There it is!” said the lieutenant.

Huntington leaned forward to see out the canopy. There was a blur of motion and the vapor trail of a missile.

The explosion tore a hole in the clouds like a curtain being ripped away. Huntington saw a cityscape of lights, as if the sky had turned upside down. Then he realized it wasn’t a city. They were stars, packed close together like the heart of a galaxy.

The curtain snapped shut, clouds spiraling like a hurricane.

“The target’s gone!” said the Harrier pilot, then with a curse, “The plane’s tearing apart!”

The Swordfish bucked wildly as the sky convulsed, and Huntington saw the pilot’s white knuckles on the controls. There was a loud bang.

“We lost our tail rotor!” shouted the lieutenant.

The helicopter began pinwheeling, losing altitude. The captain jumped to his feet, yanking open the compartment for the life raft.

Huntington realized that the mascon visitor had left; whatever force had powered the wormhole or whatever it was gone. They were going to land in the sea, and there would be no more data. “My God, they must think we’re monsters.”

The girl looked at the scars on her hands. “I showed it who we are.”

###

George Walker lives near Portland, Oregon, USA.

He has sold stories to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Stupefying Stories, Abyss & Apex, Electric Spec, Ideomancer, Wildside Press, and elsewhere. Anthologies containing his stories include Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism & Beyond, Bibliotheca Fantastica, and others. His website, containing links to his stories, is at https://www.sites.google.com/site/georgeswalker/

Bastion Science Fiction Magazine is an imprint of Bastion Press, releasing original works ranging in length from 1,000 to 5,000 words on the first of every month. As a new publication, our success rests on you, the reader. We do our part to put together the very best stories we can find, and continued growth and stability depends on the support of our readers. If you enjoyed this issue, please consider purchasing copies of additional issues. Word of mouth is also vital, so please tell your friends about us. Finally, donations are welcome as well and go directly to funding payments for our authors. You can read about all this and more at www.bastionmag.com.

Questions, comments, suggestions, and concerns should all be directed to editor@bastionmag.com. Thanks again,

- Bastion Science Fiction Magazine

Table of Contents

- Editorial

- R. Leigh Hennig

- Degausser

- Axel Taiari

- Abandoned

- Hannah Goodwin

- Red Rubber Nose

- Robert Quinlivan

- The Properties of Water

- Alex Hernandez

- Forever Lights

- Peter Medeiros

- Remember Prometheus

- Eleanor R. Wood

- The Maltese Pterodactyl

- George S. Walker