Uncanny Magazine Issue 24
Author: Dominik Parisien
Date: 2018-08-27 01:40:57+00:00
Keywords: Dark Fantasy; Fantasy; Horror; Magazine
Description: The September/October 2018 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine. Our Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Special Issue! Guest edited by Dominik Parisen and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Nicolette Barischoff, S. Qioyi Lu, and Judith Tarr. Featuring new fiction by William Alexander, Rachel Swirsky, Jennifer Brozek, A.T. Greenblatt, A. Merc Rustad, Katharine Duckett, Nisi Shawl, Stu West, P.H. Lee, Fran Wilde, and Marissa Lingen, essays by Andi C. Buchanan, Fran Wilde, Zaynab Shahar, John Wiswell, A.J. Hackwith, Ira Gladkova, Gemma Noon, teri.zin, and Marieke Nijkamp, and poetry by Rita Chen,
Rights: 2018Uncanny Magazine and the respective authors.

UNCANNY MAGAZINE

Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction

“Uncanny Magazine Editorial Staff” by Uncanny Magazine

About Our Cover Artist: Likhain by Likhain

“The Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Manifesto” by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry & Dominik Parisien

“Fiction Introduction” by Dominik Parisien

“The House on the Moon” by William Alexander

“Birthday Girl” by Rachel Swirsky

“An Open Letter to the Family” by Jennifer Brozek

“Heavy Lifting” by A. T. Greenblatt

“The Frequency of Compassion” by A. Merc Rustad

“The Stars Above” by Katharine Duckett

“The Things I Miss the Most” by Nisi Shawl

“Abigail Dreams of Weather” by Stu West

“A House by the Sea” by P. H. Lee

“Disconnect” by Fran Wilde

“This Will Not Happen to You” by Marissa Lingen

“Reprints Introduction” by Judith Tarr

“By Degrees and Dilatory Time” by SL Huang

“Listen” by Karin Tidbeck

“Nonfiction Introduction” by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

“Design a Spaceship” by Andi C. Buchanan

“The Linguistics of Disability, or, Empathy > Sympathy” by Fran Wilde

“The Body to Come: Afrofuturist Posthumanism and Disability” by Zaynab Shahar

“The Expendable Disabled Heroes of Marvel’s Infinity War” by John Wiswell

“And the Dragon Was in the Skin” by A. J. Hackwith

“Miles Vorkosigan and “Excellent Life Choices”: (Neuro)Divergence and Decision-Making in Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga” by Ira Gladkova

“Give Me Heroism or Give Me Death” by Gemma Noon

“My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” by teri.zin

“The Future Is (Not) Disabled” by Marieke Nijkamp

“Poetry Introduction” by S. Qiouyi Lu

“Ctenophore Soul” by Rita Chen

“core/debris/core” by Rose Lemberg

“How to Fix a Dancer When it Breaks” by Genevieve DeGuzman

“the body argonautica” by Robin M. Eames

“All the Stars Above the Sea” by Sarah Gailey

“Convalescence” by Alicia Cole

“hypothesis for apocalypse” by Khairani Barokka

“Spatiotemporal Discontinuity” by Bogi Takács

“You Wanted Me to Fly” by Julia Watts Belser

“Interview: Rachel Swirsky” by Sandra Odell

“Interview: Marissa Lingen” by Sandra Odell

“Personal Essays Introduction” by Nicolette Barischoff

“The Stories We Find Ourselves In” by A. T. Greenblatt

“The Horror and the Reality: Mental Illness Through the Lens of Horror” by V. Medina

“We Are Not Daredevil. Except When We Are Daredevil” by Michael Merriam

“Nihil De Nobis, Sine Nobis” by Ace Ratcliff

“From Rabbit Holes to Wormholes: KidLit Memories” by Alice Wong

“Stories That Talk” by Keith A. Manuel

“Once We Were Prophets” by Leigh Schmidt

“Science Fiction as Community” by Kathryn Allan

“Constructing the Future” by Derek Newman-Stille, PhD (ABD)

“Disabled or Just Broken?” by Jaime O. Mayer

“Now I Survive” by Jacqueline Bryk

“Instant Demotion in Respectability” by Bogi Takács

“Being Invisible” by Joyce Chng

“We Are Not Your Backstories” by K. C. Alexander

“Disabled Enough” by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

“Malfunctioning Space Stations” by Marissa Lingen

“BFFs in the Apocalypse” by John Wiswell

“Why I Limp” by Dilman Dila

“Disability and Fiction” by Liana Brooks

“The Only Thing Faster Than Tonight: Mr. Darkness” by Elise Matthesen

“Homo Duplex” by Tochi Onyebuchi

“A Dream to Shape My World” by Eli Wilkinson

“To Boldly Go” by Cara Liebowitz

“Move Like You’re From Thra, My People” by Haddayr Copley-Woods

“Everything Is True: A Non-Neurotypical Experience with Fiction” by Ada Hoffmann

“Unlocking the Garret” by Rachel Swirsky

“The Stories We Tell and the Amazon Experiment” by Day Al-Mohamed

“Science Fiction Saved My Life” by Laurel Amberdine

“After the Last Chapter” by Andi C. Buchanan

“Dancing in Iron Shoes” by Nicolette Barischoff

Edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota

Ebook generated by Clockpunk Studios.

Copyright © 2018 by Uncanny Magazine.

www.uncannymagazine.com

Uncanny Magazine Editorial Staff

Guest Editor-in-Chief/Fiction Editor: Dominik Parisien
Guest Editor-in-Chief/Nonfiction Editor: Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Guest Reprint Editor: Judith Tarr
Guest Poetry Editor: S. Qiouyi Lu
Guest Personal Essays Editor: Nicolette Barischoff
Guest Interviewers: Haddayr Copley-Woods and Sandra Odell
Guest Copyeditor: Suzanne Walker

Publishers/Editors–in–Chief: Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Managing Editor: Michi Trota
Podcast Producers: Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky
Podcast Readers: Stephanie Malia Morris & Erika Ensign
Interviewers: Caroline M. Yoachim & Lynne M. Thomas
Editorial Intern: Chimedum Ohaegbu
Submissions Editors: Andrew Adams, Cislyn Smith, Coral Moore, Dolores Peters, Eileen Wu, Heather Clitheroe, Heather Leigh, Jaime O. Mayer, Jay Wolf, Jesse Lex, Karlyn Meyer, Kay Taylor Rea, Lena Ye, Liam Meilleur, Matt Peters, Piper Hale, Renee Christopher, Tazmania Hayward
Logo & Wordmark design: Katy Shuttleworth

About Our Cover Artist: Likhain

Likhain is a queer Filipina artist who migrated to rural Australia for True Love. She works in traditional media, primarily ink and watercolour, and is always keen to experiment with gold, grit, and glorious chaos to create queer postcolonial art that defies the status quo. She writes about art, mental illness, and resistance at patreon.com/likhain , and is intermittently on Twitter as @likhain .

Cover: And With the Lamps We Are Multitudes of Light

The Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Manifesto
by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry & Dominik Parisien

Destroy. That’s the brief of this issue. Destroy science fiction. Why? Because disabled people have been discarded from the narrative, cured, rejected, villainized. We’ve been given few options for our imaginations to run wild within the parameters of an endless sky.

This issue destroys those narratives and more.

As with the previous Destroy projects (Women, Queers, People of Colour), Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction takes the rallying cry of We are here and Our stories matter and looks to the future. The other projects all began by “destroying” science fiction, and this one is no different. By turning our attention to the future, we are able to explore concerns and realities in the present and amplify them, correct them, highlight the ways they might become better or worse if allowed to continue on their present course. Through science fiction, marginalized people are able to say, We are here, now, and we will be there later, too.

But it is not just enough to talk about disability. It is not enough to just say that we are here, that we will be there later. We need to remember that we are people, too. The disabled artists in this issue are not just disabled people, as so many would boil disability down to a single trait. These are fully actualized individuals, living at the intersections and axes of identities. Queer, nonbinary, Jewish, black, PoC, Christian, straight. We are all of these things and we are disabled. Disability itself means different things to different people. We are not a monolith.

Throughout the stories, nonfiction, and poetry in Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, you will encounter narratives and experiences that may be familiar, or not. Perhaps some disabled readers or writers will encounter an experience they recognize, but handled slightly differently than their own. No one experience of disability is the disability experience. Many of the themes dealt with by our authors could, and likely would, be handled in radically different ways by other disabled authors. And that’s the point. The Destroy projects are important to the field because they amplify the work of a specific demographic at a specific point in time, but they are only a small part of what needs to be an ongoing conversation. We need more of those narratives, with a broad range of experiences.

Destroy projects do not, cannot, must not exist in a vacuum. They are as much a call to readers and writers as to editors; they allow members of our field to compare the work they encounter to what they read in other venues and ask, are these stories being told elsewhere? If not, why?

If you don’t have a good answer, maybe it’s time to change the genre, the magazine, the world you work in. Because we cannot destroy forever—we need to build.

© 2018 by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry and Dominik Parisien

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a deafblind speculative fiction writer and editor. Her nonfiction work can be found in The Boston Globe, Fireside, Uncanny, and Tor.com. She is the managing editor of Hugo Finalist magazine Fireside. Dominik Parisien is an editor, writer, and poet. His work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. He also co-edited, with Navah Wolfe, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales and Robots vs Fairies.

Fiction Introduction
by Dominik Parisien

Disabled people are here, now. We are everywhere. Based off the media we encounter and consume, that might not be readily apparent. The system fails us. Our bodies and our persons are so often misrepresented, shut down, shut out. Our stories are so rarely told.

When we put up the call for submissions for Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction we only asked that authors identify as disabled. We encouraged people to write stories exploring disability, but we didn’t require it. Despite that, the vast majority of the work we received featured disabled characters. Disabled writers and readers are hungry for their narratives to be out in the world, not always in stories that focus on disability and its multifaceted dynamics, but simply to be there, to be seen, to be heard, to belong and to be recognized as having stories worth telling. Others are asking for those stories, too. While those tales our important, it is crucial to recognize that our narratives focusing on something other than disability are not lesser tales, or any less important. Disability is a part of who we are, it informs our work, even when it doesn’t feature prominently. Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction as a project showcases both work that has disability as the focus, and some that doesn’t, and that is as it should be.

Working on this project was, for me, fulfilling and affirming, and it gave me such pride and joy seeing the work other disabled people are bringing to our field. It allowed me to collaborate with a remarkable group of people, especially my co-editor-in-chief, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry. Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction is a contribution we—the editors, the writers, the poets, the podcasters, the interviewers, the publishers, the artists—make to the field. It is our efforts, our thoughts, our narratives offered up to spark conversations about and around disability, and we hope you will enjoy and engage with all of it as passionately as we did.

© 2018 by Dominik Parisien

Dominik Parisien’s work can be found in The Fiddlehead, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, Wordgathering, Plenitude, Uncanny Magazine, as well as other magazines and anthologies. His poetry chapbook, We, Old Young Ones, is forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press’s Dis/Ability series. He is also the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Starlit Wood, which won the Shirley Jackson Award, and Robots vs Fairies. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual, French Canadian man. He lives in Toronto.

The House on the Moon
by William Alexander

Castle Jordan stands in a place that makes sense according to the logic of castles. It has a good view of a remote area, the better to spot siege-minded armies on the march. But castles do not fit the logic of the moon. Exposure and isolation aren’t very useful survival traits here.

A new line of train tracks connect the castle to the rest of lunar civiliza-tion. This place isn’t so isolated now. But it still looks exposed. I have a window seat and I can’t look away, even though I very much want to.

I don’t like visiting the surface.

The sun is out. It shouts down all other stars. Castle towers stand brightly lit at the edge of a crater beneath an otherwise absent sky.

Ms. Gorodischer must have told my whole eighth grade class to count off—um, dois, três, quatro—but I don’t notice when we stall at seven.

Tiago gives me an elbow nudge from the next seat over. It hurts. He should know better.

“Ana?” Ms. Gorodischer prompts me.

“Sete,” I say.

The rest of the class continues to count.

“Are you okay?” Tiago asks in Portuguese.

“Fine,” I tell him.

Most of my school and neighborhood speaks Portuguese. I’m from the drifting island of Miami, originally, but we all came up via the Brazilian equatorial elevator—or else our parents and grandparents did. The rest of my classmates are lunar by birth. I’m the only one with first-hand experience of that elevator.

“Please be on your very best behavior,” Ms. Gorodischer says to all of us. “Castle Jordan is not yet open to the public. We are very lucky to be allowed inside. My brother is in charge of surveying the place, and he will be showing us around personally. Please listen very carefully and respectfully to everything he tells us.”

The train pulls into a temporary station, which envelops the outer gatehouse of the castle walls. Two completely different kinds of architecture look like they’re trying to eat each other. I can’t tell which one is winning.

We all file out. Tiago knocks into me with his shoulder. I can tell it’s an accident, so I don’t hit him back. He usually knows when to give me and my cane extra maneuvering room.

Canes and crutches are not unusual on the moon. Recent arrivals use them all the time. It helps to have more points of contact with the ground when your whole body is accustomed to a full Terran G and the ground doesn’t behave the way you might expect it to. I’m not such a recent arrival, though. My family got here three years ago.

We all pause at the drawbridge. I twist the handle of my cane in a slow circle. It makes faint but satisfying clicking noises.

A man comes bounding across the drawbridge, waving and grinning. He is very obviously Ms. Gorodischer’s brother. They look exactly alike. But they don’t move the same way. He’s a puppyish version—all enthusiasm and no dignity.

“Welcome!” he calls out. “Welcome to Jordan Castle. My name is Carlos Jorge Gorodischer. Call me Cajó. I’m running this bizarre archeological dig, and approximately half of the place is still blocked off, unexplored, inaccessible, and probably haunted. You shouldn’t be here at all, really. I shouldn’t let you inside. Don’t stray from the path I’ve set out or else very loud alarms will sound. Okay? Okay. Follow me.”

Cajó leads the way through the castle gates. A gold-plated shield hangs on the wall above. It has a picture of a dragon on it—or possibly a fish. Inscribed beneath the fishy dragon are the words “Ad astra per aspera.” To the stars through hard work.

“This place was first constructed in Wales at the behest of Edward Longshanks,” Cajó tells us. “Eight hundred years later it was transported across the vacuum of space, stone by stone, and rebuilt here by a man named John Jay Jordan, Jr., who made a fortune mining rare metals on Earth before the war, and ice on the moon afterwards. He spent his entire fortune to bring up a castle. He used rockets to do it, since the elevators weren’t quite up and running yet. Let me repeat that: Jordan used rockets to carry rocks to a place that already had plenty of rocks.”

We all crowd inside the gatehouse. A gramophone stands in one corner on a little wooden table. It plays ancient European music. I’m curious, so I run a search and blink up some identifying data on the song itself: “The Fairy Round,” by Anthony Holbourne. The music is four hundred years younger than the castle, and four hundred years older than the very first gramophone. That has a nice mathematical balance to it. The anachronism still bothers me, though. Gramophones aren’t medieval. They’re just old.

Cajó cheerfully describes the unwelcoming features of the gatehouse, which was originally designed to slaughter people the castle didn’t want to welcome. “Those trapdoors in the ceiling are ‘murder holes.’ Guards used them to drop heavy things down on unsuspecting heads. Those things might not fall with such deadly force here, in our gravity, if anyone tried to drop them on us. Boiling oil would still hurt, though.”

I do not enjoy standing beneath murder holes.

My cane handle clicks as I twist it twice.

“Castle Jordan still has guards looking after the place,” Cajó says. “Watch this.”

He approaches the doors at the far side of the gatehouse passage. Two automata emerge from alcoves in the wall. Both use fifteenth-century suits of armor as their bodily chasses. Both wear nineteenth century tuxedos overtop. Both look ridiculous. The clothes don’t fit around the armor very well.

John Jay Jordan, Jr., was obviously unbothered by anachronism. He compiled Ye Olde Stuff indiscriminately in this place.

The pair of butler knights open the doors for us and we all file through. Slowly. I try to be patient. I try not to rush my classmates through the doorway with a few choice whacks of my cane. I really want to leave the gatehouse and its murderous welcome, though.

“Easy there,” Tiago signs at me, his hands low and whispering.

“Have a cookie,” I sign politely back, which means I am very close to punching you in the teeth. I don’t know why cookie = fist in this expression, but it does.

He smiles and signs “Yum,” with deliberate misunderstanding.

I’m not Deaf. Neither is Tiago—though his older brother is. Lots of people sign here. It’s helpful to have a language that doesn’t require atmosphere between the people speaking. It likewise helps to have Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua on school field trips, because Ms. Gorodischer has all of our eye-to-eye texting blocked. She has most network access blocked. But not mine. My abuela helps me stay connected at all times. She gave me military override codes that I’m not supposed to have.

Outside the gatehouse is a wide-open space between the inner and the outer walls. I wished I hadn’t hurried to get here. A vast lack of atmosphere looms above us.

“We’re perfectly safe,” Cajó assures us. “There’s a ceiling of thick, solid quartz to maintain the illusion that we’re standing outside. Windows inside the castle are grown of the same stuff.”

I can see stars. The walls block enough sunlight to let me see them. Then I look more carefully. Several of the “stars” are points of impact where small asteroids whacked against the quartz ceiling and made starburst fractures on its outer surface, which fractures my already fragile sense of our perfect safety.

Part of me notices with calm, cold clarity that adrenaline has just flooded my bloodstream and altered my breathing. Look down, that calm part of me says. Look away from the sky. But I can’t. I wonder what space is made of. Matter bends it, but what’s the substance of the stuff that gets bent? What do light waves make waves in? We live in the Space Age, but we still don’t know what space is.

I feel skinless.

Looking up makes my lower back ache even more than usual, but I still can’t stop looking—not until I pinch my hand hard enough to distract. The brain can only take so many signals at once. Pinch a nerve and pain from some other part of the body fades a little. Just tapping those pressure points is supposed to work, but mine only really notice when I dig in with fingernails.

The hard pinch works. I look down and notice real grass under my shoes. Jordan must have spent a whole lot of effort on decorative irrigation when he built this place. He owned the first ice mines, so I guess he had water to spare on a lawn.

“Go ahead and run around,” Cajó tells us. “None of the outer ward is fenced off.”

Most of my classmates take him up on it. They leap through space that seems simultaneously wide open and penned in. Tiago can jump higher than anyone else. He looks back at me to make sure I notice.

“Any questions so far?” Cajó asks.

I raise my hand. “You said that Jordan came here and built a castle after the Eugenic War.”

“That’s right.”

I blink up more details. Then I blurt them out loud without meaning to. “He fought with the Eugenicists. He volunteered.”

Ms. Gorodischer makes a thoughtful noise. Oops.

Cajó drops a little of his puppyish demeanor. “He also received a full pardon afterwards, and maintained control of his mining enterprise—at least until he spent everything he had to build his own private castle and retire here. Jordan was wounded in the fighting, apparently, and found lunar gravity a little easier to take.”

I didn’t know that part. John Jay Jordan, Jr., earned himself a crip membership while fighting to kill us off.

Funny.

Cajó glances once at my cane and looks quickly away. I turn the handle. Click click click.

“How did he die?” I ask.

Cajó doesn’t know, either. “Jordan’s postwar life was isolated, and he set up the castle to run autonomously. It’s still running without him, and it informed us last year that Jordan had died. Not that we’ve found him yet. Some passages are still locked. But he must be here somewhere…”

Our guide’s grin is back. I can’t tell if he’s kidding.

Ms. Gorodischer helps her brother muster my galloping classmates. We all pass through the inner gatehouse. This time we don’t linger beneath murder holes, which is nice. A gramophone in the corner plays more European music. I blink up the data. J.S. Bach wrote that song four hundred years after the castle was built and four hundred years before it flew to the moon. History squishes together here. But at least it does so in a mathematically balanced way, like two sides of a solved equation.

“There’s a dome of quartz protecting the inner ward, too,” Cajó tells us as we step outside again.

I take tactical putty out of my pocket so I’ll have something to dig fingernails into without drawing blood. I call it “tactical putty” simply because I keep it in my pocket. Abuela is a semi-retired military engineer, and she told me that a pen in the pocket of her uniform automatically becomes a tactical pen. A pocketed spoon is a tactical spoon. Her whole unit carried spoons around. They called them PTPEM, or Pala Táctica Para Eliminar Mierda. A tactical shovel for bullshit removal. Army people like acronyms. They also like to bond over how awful it is to be in the army.

(That was Spanish, by the way. It would be a ‘pá tática para eliminar merda’ in Portuguese. I think. I’m not completely sure, and I can’t really ask Ms. Gorodischer for a proper translation of tactical shit shovel.)

Don’t look up, I tell myself while digging nails into tactical squeeze putty. Don’t look up. Look anywhere but up.

That turns out to be easy.

A huge golden statue dominates the very center of the inner ward. Sunlight shines bright on its surface.

Cajó gestures at the statue with both arms and a horrified kind of delight. “Jordan fancied himself an art collector. He commissioned this piece from the famous sculptor Linus Hapka. It’s a scale replica of the first Voyager spacecraft rendered in solid gold. Very heavy. And again he had it shipped here via rocket fuel. The figure standing on top of the craft is Jordan himself, dressed as Galileo. His telescope is always oriented toward the Camelopardalis constellation whenever those stars are visible, because that’s where Voyager 1 is headed. The craft will reach the star system Gliese 445 in approximately 40,000 years.”

That statue is the gaudiest thing I’ve ever seen.

I blink up some data on Linus Hapka.

That statue is the gaudiest thing I have ever made, he said. Jordan sued him for saying so, but the charges were dropped.

“Do research later,” Ms. Gorodischer whispers next to me. Of course she knows about my override codes, and of course she recognizes what my face looks like whenever I gaze into the middle distance and try to fill it up with info. “Pay attention to what’s right in front of you first.”

“Yes, Ms. Gorodischer.”

I try to pay closer attention to the thing right in front of me. I stare at Jordan-Galileo’s sculpted and beatific face. Who was this guy? Who thought a huge, golden statue of himself would be a tasteful thing to make?

“The next room might be my favorite,” Cajó says as he ushers us all across the grass and back indoors. “This is the Great Hall.”

We’re in a very big room. A wooden table takes up most of it. Another gramophone sits on the table and plays a violin solo. Tapestries cover most of the white plaster walls.

“Look up,” Cajó says.

Now that he’s suggested it I would really rather not, so I squeeze tactical putty before looking.

Costumes hang from the ceiling. Dozens of medieval European outfits dangle on wires and fill up the whole volume of the space above. It looks like a crowd of invisible people with visible clothing is falling out of history and onto our heads.

“Jordan enjoyed dinner theater,” Cajó tells us. “He kept a whole company of actors here for a few years, and penned the scripts for most of their plays himself.”

I raise my hand. “Were they any good?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all. His scripts are floating around on the commons if you want to check them out later. Go ahead and explore now, but note that some of these walls and exits are fenced off. We’ll be leaving through the kitchens.”

I can’t help blinking up more about the plays, even though I’d promised Ms. Gorodischer I would save such searches for later. I pretend to examine tapestries in the far corner so she won’t notice my distracted, faraway stare. But I have to be careful not to get too close to the tapestries. A waist-high piece of rope blocks my way.

Most people agree that the plays were not good.

Eurocentric Narcissism in the Wuxia Adaptations of a Lunar Robber Baron
by Juna An

…Jordan loved Chinese cinema, especially those based on the wuxia literary tradition of martial arts fantasy. He was, however, unable to reconcile that love with his loathing for the competition: Chinese mining ventures that rivaled his own. So Jordan personally translated his favorite films into live performances and changed the settings from mythical China to medieval Europe. Crouching Lion, Hidden Unicorn was a favorite in his household. They say he wept at every show.

Jordan displayed similarly nostalgic Eurocentrism in his musical choices. He enjoyed selections from Voyager’s Golden Record. The original NASA project was a diplomatic gesture intended to represent the entire planet, but only European music ever played in Castle Jordan—a miserly subversion of the original intent. This narrow obsession with ancestral Europe is consistent with the aesthetic and ideological foundations of the Eugenic War that Jordan himself willingly participated in.

Several theaters in New Jakarta’s Chinatown district show more faithful adaptations of wuxia stories. The gravity-defying leaps of skilled martial artists, once fantastically exaggerated in film, remain a realistic part of lunar stage combat…

I feel a sudden draft on my face, which wrenches my attention back to my immediate surroundings. Drafts are dangerous and I don’t trust the structural integrity of this place. Castles were not made to fit the logic of the moon.

Two butler knights have just opened the doors to the kitchens. Cajó is boasting about open flame and other marvels of pseudo-medieval astroengineering. The class is gathering to follow.

I should join them.

But the draft made one of the tapestries move.

It has a picture of a fenced-in unicorn on the front, and it seems to have a passageway behind it.

I need to know where that passage leads.

Cajó promised loud alarms if we stray from the path. There’s a whole fence of sensors right here. Some are obvious and must belong to the excavation team. Others are older and cleverly hidden in the walls. But they can’t hide from me, and none of them matter. I ignore locked doors whenever I need to.

Do not abuse this privilege, chica, my abuela has told me several times. I don’t want your override codes confiscated.

I’m sorry, Abuelita, I pretend to tell her. But the unicorn moved. It looked at me with a plea and a challenge, and I can’t walk away. I need to know what’s hidden behind it, just like the absurd front lawn in this place needs sunlight and hoarded ice, and just like the way people in your favorite stories need to kiss each other with urgency that feels more like a gravity well than an actual choice.

She doesn’t buy it. I can’t even pretend that a daydream-conjured version of my grandmother would think this is anything but a terrible idea. But she isn’t really here, so she can’t stop me.

I ignore the guilty ache and get Tiago’s attention.

“What is it?” he signs.

“Make some noise,” I tell him. “Show everybody how high you can leap.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“You owe me,” Tiago says, hands and posture resigned.

He takes a running, bounding leap from the ground to the table, and then from the table into the costume-crowded air. The violin solo skips a beat, jarred by his passage.

Tiago smacks into a dangling coat of armor. It all comes down in clattering pieces, which is pretty spectacular as distractions go. No one notices me—not even Ms. Gorodischer, who usually pays particular attention to me while pretending not to. No one sees me slip under the rope and through the wards and sensors that also fail to notice my passage. I slip behind the unicorn tapestry and into a hitherto unexplored part of Castle Jordan.

The passageway leads to a spiraling staircase. Back on Earth I wouldn’t be able to climb anything so steep. But ability is contextual. Whatever we’re able to do—and whatever meaning we make of that—changes from one environment to another. We make all of our own environments now. To design a place that others can’t possibly move through or inhabit is the same as raising up a drawbridge, dropping down a toothy portcullis, or punching a row of murder holes through a ceiling. It writes down a clear, solid message in the language of architecture: You are not welcome here. You don’t even have the right to exist here. Please cease to exist as soon as possible.

That’s what the stairs would have said to me, back on Earth. But we aren’t on Earth. I bound up that staircase, which cannot object.

The first tower room is full of harpsichords and fancy beer steins. That’s all. Musical instruments and stacked piles of ornate mugs clutter up the entire space. It doesn’t look like anyone has ever played these instruments, or drank from these mugs.

Another gramophone sits in the corner, but it doesn’t play anything I recognize as music. Alien and unsettling noises came crawling out of it. I blink up identifying data by reflex, without expecting the search to recognize anything, but it pulls up a match anyway: “Sounds of Earth,” another track from NASA’s Golden Record. I’m surprised those sounds come from the same place I do.

I keep climbing.

A scale model of the castle itself takes up most of the second room. It’s made out of Legos, which I haven’t seen since leaving Earth. Not Lego bricks, though. Lego heads, each one a classic shade of yellow. Thousands of tiny painted faces watch me from the surface of the walls and towers. The Jordan-Galileo statue in the middle of the inner ward turns his little plastic telescope to look at me.

I leave quickly and bound up the rest of the stairs.

Who was this guy? Who would rebuild a real castle, fill it with random things, and then make a toy version of the very same castle out of dismembered plastic heads? Why would someone who needed lunar gravity to move around make a home with such steep staircases? Maybe he had something to prove to himself. So far he has failed to prove it to me.

Records take up the uppermost chamber, which smells faintly awful. The disks cover the plaster walls like framed paintings and lay scattered all over the floor in cylindrical piles. There is nothing else but a gold-plated gramophone, a cold stone fireplace, and a big leather chair.

A corpse sits in the chair. Shriveled hands clutch the golden handle of a cane.

“Found you,” I whisper.

A golden record sits inside the golden gramophone. It’s probably a replica of the Golden Record, the one currently hurtling through space, but I can’t tell because this one isn’t spinning.

English words have been chiseled into the mantle above the fireplace: To the makers of music—all worlds, all times. —Timothy Ferris.

I take two cautious steps further into the room.

Metal creaks behind me. A butler knight stands guard by the door. He turns his helmet to look in my direction. Then he shuts the door and locks it with an actual, physical key. I hear the suction of an airtight seal. My uplink disappears, blocked by something Abuela’s codes can’t override.

“Greetings, your lordship,” the armored thing says in English. “Would you care to listen to the answer this evening?”

“What answer?” I ask, once I remember how to ask. Few still speak English in Miami, but I learned a little. The question doesn’t matter, though. I am neither heard nor understood.

“Very well.”

The butler knight’s body is obviously heavy. He moves across the room with an almost Terran gait. But his movements are precise as he winds up a crank on the side of the gramophone with his gauntlet-hand.

“Please make sure that your breathing mask is firmly attached,” he tells me.

The corpse in the leather chair is wearing a breathing mask—one that clearly didn’t work very well. I don’t have a mask.

The door doesn’t budge when I yank on it.

The imaginary abuela inside my head is trying not to say, I told you so.

“Are you ready, your lordship?” the butler knight asks.

“No!”

“Very well,” he says. “We will recreate the atmospheric conditions described on the surface of the answer.” The knight removes a stone from the side of the fireplace and pulls the lever hidden there.

A sudden draft comes whooshing through the room.

I feel skinless again. The air is leaving, abandoning me. My brain drinks adrenaline, but I can’t move to spend it.

The calm part of me notices that I am currently experiencing two places at once—a tower room in Castle Jordan and an airlock on board the Brazilian equatorial elevator. That airlock memory is three years old, but it hasn’t stopped happening since.

Elevators are big. They scrape the sky, containing whole entire towns with distinct neighborhoods on different levels. It takes months to leave Earth and reach station orbit. Most disembark when they finally get there, but lots of people make permanent homes in that in-between place.

I spent most of fifth grade on the elevator. My school put all of the disabled kids into one classroom. None of us used the same sorts of strategies or accommodations, but they lumped us all together anyway. That used to happen in Miami, too.

One day they lumped us into one small classroom with a window. It had a few snacks and toys scattered around, but no teacher.

A soft-spoken woman with a clipboard dropped us off there. The paper on the clipboard said “T4” in the top right corner. I still remember the woman’s hair. I don’t know why I remember her hair. It was very straight, with bangs so precise they seemed laser-cut.

A security guard flanked the woman with the clipboard.

“Do it now?” he asked, in English, once we were all inside the room.

“No,” she said. “I have more names on the list. We’ll do it all at once. Easier to hide a single egress.”

They left and shut the door behind them.

I stood at the window and watched the curve of the world. It didn’t seem to get further away no matter how long I stared at it. The elevator climbed too slowly to register as movement.

I still liked windows, back then.

Most of the other kids scarfed down snacks.

Beatriz joined me at the window. Or maybe her name was Brigida. I can’t remember. I hate that I can’t remember her name. She taught me ISN basics. Right then, at the window, she stood close to me so no one else could see her hands. I do remember exactly what her fingernails looked like.

“What’s going on?” she signed.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “But I think this is an airlock.”

She looked around, and understood. “What should we do?”

“I don’t know,” I signed again.

Since then I’ve thought of several dozen things I could have done, and should have tried. But the only thing I did at the time was look out the window and whisper-sign with my closest friend whose name I don’t even know anymore. We haven’t kept in touch.

The door behind us opened.

I expected to see the guard and the woman with the clipboard.

Abuela stood in the doorway instead. She was in uniform. She seemed very calm and very cold, like an automaton that only knew how to be formal.

“Come with me, my heart.” She pushed her Cuban accent to compress words so closely together that few other Spanish or Portuguese speakers could possibly understand her. She didn’t want to be understood by anyone but me. “Come out of there. Lead the others. Try not to let them look at the dead men out here in the hallway.”

Once upon a time someone put me in a room with a few other kids. Then, an hour later, my grandmother came to let us out again. That’s it. That is all that happened to me during a recent skirmish in the Eugenic War, which never really ended. History doesn’t ever really end. It just overlaps and squishes all together.

I’m still in both places at once.

Move, I tell myself, and then pinch my hand until I listen. Do something.

“Stop this.” It comes out as a croak rather than a command. I try again. “Restore standard life support immediately.”

The butler knight draws an ornate sword. “Who goes there?” The glitchy thing has only just registered that I’m not who it thought I was.

My cane handle clicks as I spin it around, just once more, building up a substantial kinetic charge. Abuela gave me this cane. She built it herself soon after we arrived.

Sir Butler takes two heavy steps toward me.

I discharge my cane directly into his armored chest.

He falls down hard.

I’m a dragon now, and not a captured unicorn. I am here to fry knights who guard golden treasures and dare to challenge me.

Air is still leaving the room. But my tactical putty was engineered to patch hull breaches. It stays strong even when stretched very thin. I stretch it across the entire fireplace. Putty bulges toward the still-tugging vacuum. It doesn’t tear. The seal holds.

Sir Butler stirs.

“Want some more of this?” I crank the cane handle to build up another charge, but the automaton doesn’t stand up. He starts babbling instead.

“I apologize, your lordship. We are having difficulties recreating the atmosphere the answer requires. Its music will not sound precisely as it did when first recorded on its homeworld orbiting Gliese 445, which is a star in the Camelopardalis constellation seventeen-point-six light-year’s away. Camelopardalis is a giraffe-shaped constellation created by the seventeenth century Flemish cartographer Petrus Plancius. The cartographer Petrus Plancius is also known for—”

I gently remove the door key from Sir Butler’s tuxedo pocket. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“This record is from another planet,” I say out loud, testing the idea.

“Yes, your lordship,” says the glitchy automaton, which makes me jump. I didn’t expect him to hear me. “It arrived early and by a balanced paradox. The craft that carried it landed in the Andes forty thousand years ago, in response to a message that will not be delivered until forty thousand years from now. The craft was discovered in your Peruvian lithium mines and its age determined via analysis of the surrounding rock. I must again apologize that we cannot recreate the pure atmospheric conditions of the original recording. Sound quality will be compromised.”

I take a good, long look at the dead man.

“That’s okay,” I tell Sir Butler. “Those atmospheric conditions killed the master of the house. He died of delusional purity. But I’d rather hear music through air I can breathe.”

The answer sits in the gramophone, already spinning.

Someone will record this in the distant future. Then they’ll send it into our distant past. Their civilization might not exist yet, but it will. They’ll be there by the time Voyager arrives. Someone will hear our music and share their own.

I set the needle in the groove and let it play.

(Editors’ Note: “The House on the Moon” is read by Erika Ensign and William Alexander is interviewed by Haddayr Copley-Woods on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 24A.)

© 2018 by William Alexander

William Alexander writes fantasy, science fiction, and other unrealisms for young readers. Honors include the National Book Award, the Eleanor Cameron Award, two Junior Library Guild Selections, a Mythopoetic Award finalist, an International Latino Book Award finalist, and the Earphones Award for audiobook narration. He studied theater and folklore at Oberlin College, English at the University of Vermont, and creative writing at the Clarion workshop. He now teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Find him online at goblinsecrets.com.

Birthday Girl
by Rachel Swirsky

Bella arrived late at the party, carrying a doll in a box in pink wrapping paper. She’d owned the doll when she was young, and she’d hoped Natalie would like that. Now, she wished she’d bought something.

Her sister’s husband answered the door while holding a bunch of balloons. He looked surprised.

Sorry I’m late, Bella said.

We weren’t sure you’d come. Cheerfully, he added, We hoped you would.

Bella resented both his surprise and his cheer, as if the last year hadn’t happened. I said I would.

We weren’t sure. He patted her shoulder. It’s good to see you. I’ll put your gift on the table.

Lavender and fuschia streamers swagged the living room. They read Happy Birthday, Natalie! and You’re Seven! Girls giggled, and twirled in dresses with tulle skirts. Natalie twirled with them. Parents clustered by the walls, watching. The children paid no attention to the adults.

Bella’s sister kissed her on both cheeks. You came! Natalie will be glad to see you. She always asks for Aunt Bella. She looked at Bella appraisingly. Has it really been a whole year?

The affection was uncomfortable after their estrangement, but Bella just stood and let it happen. Her sister was the one who’d banned her from the house and from seeing Natalie, and she had total control over whether Bella would continue to be allowed back. Bella knew better than to risk an argument.

Bella’s sister offered to get Natalie, but Bella didn’t want to interrupt. She found a corner, sat, and watched. Natalie’s body had stretched in the last year. Her face was leaner in every dimension, even her flushed cheeks. Bella recognized the look from her own childhood pictures.

Natalie was teaching the other girls how to do ballet positions. She squealed with delight when a small girl with springy brown curls managed to do an approximation of fifth. Bella watched how happy Natalie was, feeling both grateful for it and also like she was intruding. It was good to know that Natalie was all right. Maybe she was better off without Bella there. Maybe Bella’s sister had been right. Maybe she should leave.

Bella’s sister gave Bella a plastic cup of punch. She left it on the table.

As the afternoon turned hot, the party migrated outdoors to the pool. Lacy dresses were exchanged for neon swimsuits and water wings. The little girls’ arms were like waterfalls, droplets cascading as they jumped in and out of the water.

When Natalie’s blonde hair started to green, the girls and their parents assembled for presents and cake. Slices of frosted strawberry cake arrived on plastic plates. Natalie’s father started the birthday song, and the girls pitched in with squealing voices.

The gift table sat under a palm tree. Bella’s paper faded among metallics and ribbons. She should have known it would.

Natalie shredded the first gift’s iridescent wrapping with a gleeful screech.

Don’t get so excited you drop something, said Natalie’s father.

Natalie was riled up from the long day, the sugar, and the anticipation. Frosting smudged her cheeks. She jumped around with increasing intensity as she ripped into more presents.

Careful, said Bella’s sister’s husband.

You need to calm down now, said Bella’s sister, or you’re going to have to take a break until you can be more appropriate.

Natalie’s face pinked and then flushed crimson. She screamed, I hate you! I hate you! You want me to die! You’ve always hated me! She gulped air. Her neck twitched. Her voice went deep. Shit shit shit shit! Shit! Her fists beat the table. Bella’s gift tumbled, pink against the grass, before being covered by other presents. Natalie’s father leaned in to catch a falling box, and a punch landed in his ribs.

Bella wanted to go to her, but held herself back. Bella’s sister and her husband might not want her interfering. Still, Bella’s stomach ached, watching Natalie twitch, and she had to exert effort to stay where she was.

Shh, shh, murmured Natalie’s father as he took his daughter gently by the shoulders. It’ll be all right. He carried her just out of sight to privacy behind the house. Bella’s sister told everyone to be patient; they would be back in a second.

Is Natalie okay? asked a girl in blue.

She’ll be fine in a minute, said Bella’s sister. T. J. is really good at helping her relax.

The girl asked, Because of how she’s sick?

Bella’s sister’s practiced reply came quickly. She’s not exactly sick. Some people have different challenges. She stopped for a moment, glanced at Bella, and then glanced away again. After a beat, she added, Like some people are good at the cello, and for other people it’s hard. Natalie is good at some things, but she has trouble with other ones.

What’s a cello? asked the girl.

A musical instrument, said her father. Why don’t you help Natalie’s mother pick up the presents?

An intense expression pinched Bella’s sister’s face as she piled boxes onto the table. Drying hair frizzed around the still-wet maternal bob clinging to her neck. During the past year, her crows’ feet had burrowed more deeply. The tiny girl beside her chuckled and tried to balance a gift on her head.

Bella’s breath hitched. She was afraid to open her mouth in case she started crying.

She’d been very good at the cello.

Natalie returned triumphantly on her father’s shoulders. Her eyes were still reddened from crying, but her smile was bright, and her father had fixed the curls around her face. He exclaimed, Here’s the birthday girl!

A few people applauded. The parents marshalled their children’s attention. Bella’s sister turned to them with an expression of relief. All right, everyone! Let’s get this started again.

Bella slipped away. She managed to keep the tears in until she’d retreated to the side yard. They poured out of her. She held her ragged breath, and they went away. She let herself breathe in, and they came back.

She sat alone while the shadows lengthened. The air chilled. She wiped her face over and over on her dress.

Sometime later, the noises of the party faded. A while after that, Natalie found her. She stood a few feet away in wilting skirts, regarding Bella. She yawned and rubbed her eye. Aunt Bella?

Yes, Bella said.

Natalie moved a step closer. Why are you crying?

Oh… Bella blotted her eyes.

Mom said I should ask.

Oh. Bella stopped blotting.

Natalie’s skirt shushed as she came nearer. But why?

Oh. Oh.

Natalie disturbed the dirt as she sat. She laid her head on Bella’s lap, and stared upward with eyes that were pinwheels of grey and blue.

Bella’s lip trembled as she looked down. Things were different when I grew up. That’s all.

Is it about you being my egg mama?

Is that what your mom said?

She said you gave the egg because she didn’t have any eggs.

Bella nodded.

Natalie’s face suddenly pinched in anger. But then why haven’t you been here!

The question rose into a cry of frustration.

Bella’s voice stuck in her throat, trapped behind tears. She had to release a few of the tears to continue. When she was done, she said, Your mom didn’t want me around for a while.

Why!

Does your mom want me to tell you this?

Natalie squirmed in Bella’s lap. I want to know!

Oh. Bella bit her tongue, and searched for words. It was when you got sick.

I’m not sick. I have different challenges.

Right. They used to call it sick when I was growing up.

Natalie settled again. Her head made a warm and comforting weight in Bella’s lap. Bella’s fingers drifted to Natalie’s hair, and she began to stroke it.

I’m sick and your mother’s not, Bella said. When you got sick, your mom got mad at me. She said I gave it to you.

Natalie toyed with the bows on her collar. She enunciated carefully. Your challenges are bipolar and Tourette’s, too?

Early-onset bipolar. Not quite as young as you, Bella said. I don’t have Tourette’s, though. I used to have an anxiety disorder that made me too scared to talk. They called it selective mutism.

You can talk now, Natalie said.

Yes.

You conquered your challenges.

Some of them.

Natalie whined her vowels. So whyyy are you cryyying?

Bella sighed. Her nose remained congested. She blotted her eyes again, but it just made a mess. You should go inside and find your mother.

Mom told me to find you.

Bella nodded restlessly. Right. To ask why I was crying. Her head ached. The tears had made her voice cracked and rough. People thought about this stuff differently when I was growing up. If I had a meltdown—

She cut herself off. It felt strange, how sometimes talking about her past forced instant tears, when at other times she could speak matter-of-factly, even joke about it.

She stared down at Natalie’s peach-soft skin and clear trusting eyes. Natalie stared back. She reached up to touch Bella’s earrings.

What’s a meltdown? Natalie asked.

Like what happened to you today. If I—

Bella’s memory rang with the echo of a locking institutional door. Her throat hurt. She tried again.

Our parents didn’t know what was wrong with me, so they—

She remembered her mother’s sobbing rants about how she should have had an abortion, and stopped again.

They used to call it being sick. They didn’t want to change things for you. They wanted you to get better so you’d stop needing anything. If you weren’t going to get better, a lot of people didn’t want you at all. Even if you were a kid, you could end up being sent to places that were almost prisons. Or to real prisons. That’s against the law now. They have to pay for kids to get treatment at home. And the treatments are better, too. They don’t just…

She stopped again. She remembered nurses making jokes about ice picks. Natalie didn’t need to know that.

She continued more quietly, When you don’t talk, people don’t really see you. They think you’re like a chair or a lamp…

Her eyes glazed. She shook away the memories that wanted to come, delayed them for later.

She squeezed Natalie’s hand. I’m so happy you have the things you do, Bella said. Just, sometimes I wonder what I would have been like if I’d had some of them, too.

Natalie’s thin blonde brows tilted inward over sad eyes. Bella wasn’t sure how much she’d understood. She said, I wish you’d had things when you were growing up.

Bella teared up again. I’m so sorry.

It’s okay, said Natalie.

I’m so sorry, Bella repeated. She started sobbing again, and this time she didn’t try to choke it off. She talked through the garbled tears. I’m so sorry I made you sick.

She held Natalie close in her arms as if she were still an infant, rocking her back and forth, and repeating, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Natalie clung to her, pushing her head against Bella’s chest and making the noises her father had made to her when she was melting down. Shh, shh, shh.

Bella became aware of the passing time as chill air blew across her arms. Tears ebbed. She nudged Natalie off her lap and stood, and then took the child’s hand as they crossed back toward the house.

Bella wasn’t surprised to see her sister standing at the corner where the side yard met the lawn. They nodded at each other.

Natalie swung Bella’s hand. I asked why she was crying.

Did she tell you? Bella’s sister asked, looking at Bella.

She had the wrong things growing up, Natalie said. She also has challenges with bipolar and Tourette’s.

Just bipolar, said Bella.

The women stared at each other. Bella’s sister wore a hard year’s worry on her face. Scattered grey striped her hair.

Bella’s sister spoke to Natalie without looking away. Hey, hon. Why don’t you go inside and ask Dad to help you get into your pajamas?

Natalie drew a big breath, and looked like she might fight. She blew it out again, and rubbed her eye. She asked Bella, Will you be here when I’m changed?

Bella’s sister raised her brows in question. Bella nodded.

All right, Bella said.

Natalie ran toward the house. Bella and her sister stood awhile in silence, toeing the dirt. Her sister crossed her arms over her chest. She kept trying to smile, but awkwardness wiped it from her face.

Bella’s sister spoke first. You didn’t make her sick.

Bella snapped back. You’re the one who said I did.

Her sister looked down in embarrassment, and then raised her head again so she could meet Bella’s eyes. I was wrong.

Bella shrugged, conceding nothing.

It’s been so long, her sister said. I don’t even know what you’re doing these days.

Whose fault is that? Bella blurted. She bit back her anger. I’m living in the same place. The bookstore lets me work odd hours. Disability’s keeping me afloat. She paused. I got a cat.

Bella’s sister nodded without really engaging, thinking about something else. She swept the hair out of her face. She said, I wonder about it sometimes, too.

About what?

What it would have been like if things had been different when we were children. You might have been a cellist.

Bella shrugged again. I am what I am.

You should see what they can do for Natalie now. When she has an episode at school, no one panics. The SSDA sent an educator in at the beginning of the year, to explain things, neurodiversity, to everyone, the students and the teachers. Her sister approached a step. She spoke with slow delineation as if she was holding each syllable in her mouth to perfect it. I never thought you were a lamp.

Thanks, Bella muttered, but she kept listening.

Her sister continued, I always cried when they sent you away. You were my big sister. I didn’t care whether you talked. She assayed a familiar smile. Remember the first time you sat down with my cello?

Sort of, said Bella. Maybe not the first.

You were so good. You just sat down. I never got any better at all. Do you still have it?

No.

Bella…

After a beat of hesitation, she reached to clasp Bella’s shoulder. Bella did nothing. The touch lasted a few unrequited seconds before she withdrew her hand.

What do you want from me, Bella?

Nothing, Bella said. You’re the one who sent me away. You’re the one who invited me back. You decide everything, so do what you want.

You shoved me. What was I supposed to do?

You pushed me into a corner. You were yelling in my face. You wouldn’t let me out.

Afterward, my head was bleeding.

Jenny. You told me the combination to your gun safe. You told me to do the world a favor.

I—There was—I don’t—Bella’s sister stumbled back a step as if being hit again. Her fingers moved to the long-healed wound. I don’t remember exactly—everything, that day, it’s a blur. T.J. saw the blood, and—

Why did you even ask for my egg, Jenny? You could have picked someone outside the family. You knew if I was the mother she could have it.

Not like that! She tried to kill herself! She was six! I didn’t know how— I went blank for a while. My brain wasn’t anywhere. When you find your six-year-old throwing herself off the roof because you told her it was dangerous to fall from up there—How could I have expected that? You weren’t like that.

You don’t know that. You don’t know what I did in the institutions.

Bella’s sister stopped arguing. Her hands stilled midair. You never said…

Bella shook her head. I didn’t. Not until I was older than that.

Bella’s sister’s hands drifted slowly to her sides. The tension in her eyes faded into pleading. Bella, I don’t know how to explain. I thought I understood what it was like for you before, but I didn’t. I didn’t understand anything until Natalie fell. Not a damn thing. It’s taken me a year to get here.

She held out her hand again, not touching Bella this time, just letting her fingers brush the space between them.

I understand more now, I think. I hope.

Bella regarded her sister’s short fingers with their close-cut nails for gardening. A scattering of healed scratches inscribed white lines on the backs of her hands. Bella’s own hands felt raw and chapped from too much soap and hot weather.

She remembered the hands they’d had as children, peach-soft and plump.

You don’t have to accept my apology, her sister said, but please, come in and say goodnight to Natalie?

Bella nodded, and took her sister’s hand. They walked together in Natalie’s footprints across the lawn to the back door.

( Editors’ Note: Rachel Swirsky is interviewed by Sandra Odell in this issue.)

© 2018 by Rachel Swirsky

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop where she, a California native, learned about both writing and snow. Last year, she traded the snow for the rain of Portland, Oregon, where she roams happily under overcast skies with the hipsters. Her fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Asimov’s Magazine, and The Year’s Best Non-Required Reading. She’s published two collections: Through the Drowsy Dark (Aqueduct Press) and How the World Became Quiet (Subterranean Press). Her fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award, and twice won the Nebula.

An Open Letter to the Family
by Jennifer Brozek

2336.10.19

Dear Mom, Dad, and the rest of the family,

By the time you get this missive, the deed will be done. I think it is best this way—an old-fashioned letter and a fait accompli (that’s “an accomplished fact” for you, Raymond 🙂 ). I know it may come as a shock to some of you. I know, Mom, you’re going to be worried. Maybe even a little disappointed. But, please know this is the right thing for me. This is my choice.

Before I get into what the procedure entails, I’m going to tell you all how I got here. I know I haven’t talked to a lot of you about this, about my condition, about how it feels, and about how I feel. Nothing has changed. My legs still don’t work. Everything still hurts. It’s not a fun or informative conversation to have. I know it. You know it.

You all were so proud of me being assigned to the Melroy-Tereshkova Station. I worked hard to get here. My education, my thesis, my experiments, and my Ph.D. in zeroG food production have made me one of the leading experts in my field. But all of that was because of my Garrod-Chariot Syndrome. It was inspired by it, forced by it, and dreamed because of it. As my GCS got worse, I knew… everyone knew… the only real place for me was a zeroG station.

Sometimes, you message me and ask when I’m going to come home to visit. For years, I’ve put you off because of my class schedule, my exams, my dissertation defense, my job. The truth is that I don’t want to come home. To your home. I was born on Artemis II, but the Melroy-Tereshkova Station is my real home. It’s the one place where I can be myself.

It’s not that I don’t want to see you. I do. It just hurts too much. The Garrod-Chariot Syndrome has progressed so far that the physical act of sitting in a chair or even laying down on a bed, while on a 1G-gravity planet, would be too much after a short time. I’d have to resort to painkillers that would knock me out. A visit to see you wouldn’t be much fun with me sleeping, in pain, or drugged to the gills all the time. That’s not me. That’s not the daughter, sister, niece, or cousin you knew in years past.

For as long as I can remember I have hurt. I remember the first time I realized that not everyone lived with pain every single day. It was a relief. I didn’t suck as bad as I thought I did at hiding the pain. It was also a slap to the face. Why was I the only one in the family to suffer from this disease?

GCS focused my life. With limited career options, my fierce determination, and the medical grants it made me eligible for, GCS paid for my education, my gravity care, and for the life it messed up. When I realized I had to make a future for myself or live in misery and pain, I turned my mind to find a cure. When that failed, I found a workaround: the stars and zeroG.

Even here on the station, where I feel not even one-tenth of the pain I feel on a 1G-gravity planet, GCS is my ever-present companion and warden. But I still have a good life. I’m happy. I’m respected. I’m competent. I’m whole in the way that only I can be.

Except…

You all knew there was an “except.” At least, Mom and Dad, you knew. And anyone you’ve told about our conversations.

[As an aside, the physical act of writing a static letter is as strange as it is liberating. There’s no back and forth. I’m finally just saying what I’ve always wanted to say, knowing no one can thread the email to object, or argue with me in DM, or send flailing “good vibes” or “hopes and prayers” at me. So, forgive me if I meander.

I digress…]

Except…the GCS has advanced to the point that my unused limbs—my legs—have become so delicate and so brittle that they are in danger of literally breaking off. Over the last few months, my doctors have become so concerned that they’ve ordered me to wear protective leg braces. Imagine that. Me floating around the station with hunks of plastisteel framing my legs to keep them “safe.” Instead of floating in a natural form with my legs partly curled, they stick out straight and get in the way of everything.

Mary—you remember when you broke your knee and had to be in the wheelchair for weeks with your leg out straight? Everyone kept trying to “help” you into the lifts while leaving your foot stuck outside the lift doors. Yeah, it’s like that. Only it’s part of me and it’s never going to go away. Ever. And I’m the unobservant “helpful” one leaving my feet sticking out of the lift doors.

The braces itch and rub. For limbs that haven’t worked in years, they are annoyingly sensitive. It’s almost like Aunt Zoe’s phantom ovary pain. After the endometriosis surgery, the ovary was gone, but she could still feel it because of the confused nerve endings. My whole body seems to be one giant confused nerve ending.

So, that leads me to the whole point of this letter. As of 2336.09.21, both my legs will be amputated from the knees down. For me, this will be a new sense of freedom. The cutting off of a part of me that:

1. hasn’t worked in decades.

2. has become a physical and medical detriment to my health and safety.

The procedure is a simple one. The flesh and bone from my knees down will be surgically removed. My femurs will be uncut at this time. Surgical end caps will be added to the end of my thighs and I’ll have hardened end caps to wear for at least a few months after surgery. Later, my doctors and I will evaluate if we need to remove part of the femur as well. We (the doctors and me) hope not, but we’re not exactly sure how my GCS will react. There are small risks of infection and end cap rejection, but these are risks I’m willing to take.

It’s not like any of you will really notice in the grand scheme of things. You now know I won’t return to Artemis II for the reasons stated above. You only see me from the waist up on video calls and recorded messages. I will still be me. I just thought it was important for all of you to know what I am doing and why. I don’t want a video interview to shock you. Or a surprise visit to the station to be more dramatic than it already would be.

Yes, I did talk with Mom and Dad about this first. As you might imagine, they were not happy with the thought. In their minds, and in the minds of many others, amputation means that I won’t be “whole.” On the other hand, leaving things as they are for aesthetic reasons could kill me—never mind the quality of life thing. Not to put too fine of a point on it, legs that haven’t been used in a very long time have no muscle mass. Between the boniness and muscle atrophy, my legs are not a pretty sight. Trust me on this. The lack of pain will also help my mood. A happy scientist is a productive one.

As for the idea that I won’t find the perfect partner without legs? Well, if my “perfect partner” can’t accept me as I am, then they aren’t perfect for me. This is my body and my choice. I’m happy that I have the right to choose this surgery; that the amputation procedure exists, that there are no laws against it, and that I have the money to pay for it.

Please be happy for me. If not happy, please understand and accept that what I have done is in my best interest. If you can’t do either, I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Truth be told, this was a terrifying letter to write. But I needed to put it down in words and in a way that couldn’t be changed. I feel so much lighter now.

This letter should arrive sometime in late 2336.10. I’ll send a follow-up email by 2336.10.30 to tell you (maybe even show you) how well I’m doing after 4-5 standard weeks of healing.

I love you all and I do want to hear from you.

As always,

Hayley

© 2018 by Jennifer Brozek

Jennifer Brozek is an award winning author, editor, and tie-in author. Never Let Me Sleep and The Last Days of Salton Academy were both nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. She was awarded the Scribe Award for best tie-in Young Adult novel, The Nellus Academy Incident, and won an Australian Shadows Award for best edited publication. Visit Jennifer’s worlds at jenniferbrozek.com.

Heavy Lifting
by A. T. Greenblatt

Okay, this rogue robot recovery gig is getting old and I’m saying this as the tech geek of the team. So that should tell you something about our situation. I mean, it’s not like the hacker is trying to steal different robots every time—it’s always a Commando 237X, which also happens to be like one of the most valuable models the factory owns. So that’s a problem. Also, my teammate Bruno isn’t even considering other solutions. He just wants to shut the robot down.

Fine, great, so here we are. Again. Bruno is perched on the factory roof watching the 4-meter-tall human-shaped machine of high-grade alloys and compromised code tear a hole in the fence between the factory lot and forest outside. And I’m watching the video feed from Bruno’s glasses in my computer lab/living room and getting nervous.

«What the hell are you doing?» I ask through my mic, even though I kinda know the answer already.

«Not now, Gee,» Bruno whispers back. «Can’t you see what I’m up against? Please tell me the video feed isn’t acting up again.»

«No, I’m seeing everything damn fine. Are you?» The robot’s stooped, head bent, its black painted body scratched from years of use, and its weird three joint fingers are busy pulling the fence apart. According to the readout on Bruno’s glasses, it’s a 3.2-meter jump from the ledge Bruno’s on to the robot’s shoulder.

«Maybe,» he says. Which we both know means “Yes.”

«You’re not a superhero, dude.»

«One of us needs to be,» he says and as I’m opening my mouth to tell him that we should really try something else, Bruno jumps.

«SHITSHITSHIT!» Bruno’s not going to make it, he undershot, and I’m going to watch my friend die. Shitshitshit.

But then the robot takes a step back and Bruno manages to grab on. Or at least I’m guessing that’s what happened. I’m not exactly sure because my view is limited here. Point is, Bruno’s not falling anymore and the robot’s neck is like two centimeters away from his glasses and everything’s wobbling and oh my god, I think the robot is trying to shake him off like a wet dog.

«Don’t fucking let go, Bruno. Please!» I can hear Bruno’s torso thud as it bounces off the robot’s back and I’m picturing the bruises and I don’t know how to help. «Use the access key!» I say. I can see the panel, it’s on the robot’s right shoulder. Bruno’s hand is reaching for it, fingers scrambling over the hinges. «WRONG WAY! WRONG WAY! IT OPENS THE OTHER WAY!»

Finally, Bruno manages to open the panel and tries to plug in the key but everything is shaking and crap, he’s holding the plug upside down. «The other way, Bruno!» I’m trying not to be a complete asshole here because I know he’s hanging onto a rogue robot with one arm and the robot keeps moving and he can’t get the connectors to line up, but my muscles are seizing up with the stress and I feel so goddamn useless.

This plan really, really sucks.

Finally, he manages to plug in the access key, and I see the LED light up. At which point, I’m guessing, Bruno lets go because we’re falling again.

«SHITSHITSHIT!» I’ve never been on a rollercoaster and I’m fucking glad because I just manage to grab the trashcan under my desk right before I hurl.

I swear if Bruno survives this, I’m taking away his gadgets.

When I look at my monitors again, he’s on the ground, staring up at the robot’s massive back. «Hurry, Gina!» he yells, all panicky. The robot turns its head and locks eyes on him. «Hurry!»

Oh god, this is going to end badly, isn’t it? Bruno’s a good guy and all, but he has this annoying habit of freezing up. At the worst times. Shit, I can’t look, don’t have time to look, don’t have time to hesitate entering the usernames, passwords, program commands. This would be so much easier if I had more than the lowest level of security clearance here. Okay, I can do this. Hopefully before my friend gets trampled.

Okay, okay, file loading, come on, come on, come on. Hurry up. Bruno, please, don’t die.

The shell terminal pops up and I swear to god I’ve never executed a kill command so fast. End the program, robot, ABORT.

At first, the Commando 237X doesn’t respond. Then it says: «Help me.»

Then it shuts down.

Okay.

Okay, I think it’s over? I peek up at the screen, sort of half terrified of seeing Bruno’s blood splatter all over those damn glasses. But all I see is tall pines and clear sky. I can hear him panting though.

«Worst. Fucking. Plan.» I say. My voice is all shaky.

«I’m okay, thanks,» replies Bruno, wheezing.

«Fantastic. Because I just got so motion sick, I puked.»

«Hopefully not on the equipment.»

«I hate you so much right now.»

I put my head in my hands. Ok, real talk, this is not the job I signed up for. When Bruno asked if I wanted to join the robot systems team, it was supposed to be just me, him, a dozen repurposed robots, and lots and lots of lentil soup cans. Our jobs were to figure out more efficient routes and routines for the robots in the factory. That’s it. He’d be the guy on the floor and I’d handle the coding. And I was so excited to finally put some of my software skills to use, and you know, be part of the community.

My dad would say “The best laid plans,” but I think this is grade A bullshit. Bruno and I have had this job for a month and this is the fifth time in two weeks we had to recapture a rogue robot, though we managed to stop the other four before they got out of the factory and anyone else noticed. But every recapture has been super stressful. We need to use a manual access key to shut down a Commando 237X unit because the community’s equipment and infrastructure team is that fucking paranoid about something happening to these machines. I mean, I get it. The Commandos are repurposed ex-military equipment and there’s not many of them and the factory needs every person and robot it has just to keep feeding everyone in the area. But let’s be real here. I hang out with Bruno Wong, the most devoted community member ever. Shouldn’t that speak volumes about my moral compass, even if most people think I’m just Bruno’s assistant?

«Dude, we need to let the bosses know this is happening…» I say.

«They’re more useful to the community than we are,» he says. For a sec, I have no idea what he’s talking about. But then I realize he’s staring at the robot. Oh my god, he’s not even listening to me.

And a small, tired part of me agrees with him. I mean, I’m just the girl behind the code. Practically stuck in the house 24/7. There’s only so much I can do.

Screw this.

I push back from my keyboards and computer screens, grab my crutches, and get to my feet. Shit, I’m a wobbly mess. I look down and realize I vomited in the trashcan and on my favorite girl punk band t-shirt. So while Bruno is busy glaring at the Commando unit, I head to the bathroom and scrub. I feel like I’ve been electrocuted, though that’s just my muscles telling me they hate me for hanging out with Bruno. I really should find better friends. Except this factory town is pretty light on population. Just like every other community on this continent.

Plus, I really want to keep this job and Bruno is the only person who takes my skills seriously.

Fuck it, I use my wheelchair on my way back, because I don’t feel like working on my arm strength anymore.

By the time I’m in my living room/office again, Bruno’s on his feet. He’s still staring at the rogue robot. He’s taking these security breaches personally.

«We really need to figure out who’s behind these hacks,» I say to him.

«Easy. Selfish thieves.»

«That’s a broad definition and a narrow view, bro.»

«Really?»

«What if the people trying to hack them are just desperate for the extra manpower?» I say, running my fingers through my wet hair. Damn it, my hands are still shaking from Bruno’s crappy action hero maneuvers. «Or maybe it’s bored kids? Or maybe that factory worker who left, what’s their name—»

«It’s stealing,» Bruno says, in that idealistic, self-righteous tone he uses when he can’t win an argument. «No matter the reason.»

«Well, the communications network is pretty shitty outside of town. Maybe we should just follow one next time a Commando goes rogue.»

«Easy for you to say. I’m doing the heavy lifting here.»

I inhale and lean back from the screen. «Really, dude?»

«Sorry, Gee. Didn’t mean that. Rough day.» He sounds like a beat up, tragic emo band member. Serves him right. He’s busy playing savior, while I’m stuck here trying to figure out why. I’m tempted not to forgive him. But I care too much not to.

I sigh. «How are we going to explain the fence, dude?»

«We’ll figure something out.» He looks at the half torn fence and the forest of evergreens behind it. Thing is, Bruno’s super helpful and charming when he’s on his game. I mean, when we first met on one of my walks six months ago, he was the new person in town, a total stranger. I’d pushed my legs too hard that day and he hung out while I rested and we geeked out about tech and he walked me home. Later, I even let him try out my salvaged drone. And I’m super protective of my equipment.

I bite a nail as I look at the ruined fence. I don’t know how he’s going to swing this one, though. That’s a big hole.

Bruno glances around the factory lot. «So, I probably look like crap right now.» He tries to laugh. It sounds scary. «What’s the best route for avoiding people, Gee?»

«Hell if I know. Turn on the drone and give me a second.»

I wait for Bruno to boot up the aerial drone. As soon as it’s ready, I have it take off, loving the way the world slowly falls away as it climbs upward. I mean, I do what I can here, covering my office/living room with all the band posters I can find from back when musicians had things like merch and massive audiences. And I try to walk a little farther every week too, one way or another. But soaring above the old factory with its cracked pavement parking lot and patched up warehouses, it feels like freedom.

«I think we’re the only ones out here, Bruno.» I say after a moment. Which isn’t surprising considering how badly behind schedule we are. Heavy rains, floods, and mudslides have wreaked havoc on the infrastructure that was barely holding together anyway. Almost everyone in town is out trying to repair cell towers and roads or getting the crops from farms or delivering soup cans to nearby towns.

«Cool.» Bruno looks up at the drone and gives me a smile. Poor dude, he really does look like a beat up emo band member.

«Five in two weeks isn’t normal,» I say, trying again, because seriously, I’m really worried about this. I mean, I’ve heard of hacks occasionally happening in other communities, and the factory IT team is always on guard for it, but even then, it’s pretty rare and usually someone local is behind it. «I’ve been taking at look at the hacker’s code and it’s kinda sloppy and—»

«Please, Gina. Not now.»

Bruno can’t see throw my hands up in frustration. Damn it, if not now, when? I’m tempted to give up for the day and listen to all the black metal music I own until I feel better. Why the hell is he being so stubborn about this?

Then it hits me. Bruno’s embarrassed that this is happening on his watch. He and his mom came to our town about six months ago, walking all the way from another state, and since then, he’s gone out of his way to be useful here. So basically, he’s just as scared of being a failure to the community and losing his job as I am.

I sigh. «Fine. How about telling the equipment team to give me full access, then? I’m serious, dude. I understand that the Commandos are super important, but I can’t fix shit if I’m stuck at basics here.»

«Sure thing, Gee.»

But he doesn’t fool me with his platitudes. We’re going to have this argument again in T-minus two days, more or less. He’s walking away from the real problem. Which is why he doesn’t see the Commando 237X open its eyes, sit up, curl its fist, and throw a punch worthy of a robot uprising.

Bruno hits the ground with a groan.

Every muscle in my body seizes up. Oh my god, not again. What am I supposed to do?

«Move your ass,» I shout at Bruno and steer the drone so it’s right above him. But then I see that his glasses and the connecting earpiece are lying on the ground ten meters away.

Oh shit, now Bruno can’t hear me when I yell at him. Have I mentioned that Bruno sometimes freezes up at the worst possible times?

I make the drone spin in circles above the fallen glasses, trying to ignore that the lenses have cracks, trying to catch Bruno’s attention. But he spots the massive robot first and his face goes straight white. Then he faints.

Goddamnit, Bruno. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS ON MY OWN.

Okay, okay, okay. Shit. Okay. Options? The key’s still in the robot. I still have limited access to the programming. Okay, okay, I think I can make this work.

I land my precious drone on the factory roof. I’m going to need both hands.

All right, step one. I bring up the robot’s video input on my computer screen, because as much it hurts to admit, I think Bruno’s glasses are broken beyond help and I’m not doing this without any visual feedback. So the robot’s “eyes” are now mine too. And it’s staring at Bruno. Which is sort of creepy.

Step two, the kill command. The one I’ve gotten oh so good at using. Except this time, it doesn’t work. Oh god, why isn’t working? The Commando begins moving to where Bruno’s lying sprawled in the dirt and the prompt’s showing that it’s running one of its military self-defense programs. Oh shit. Hard restart, robot. HARD RESTART.

The robot keeps moving forward, its military defensive programming more or less giving me the middle finger at every new line command I enter.

It’s four paces away from Bruno. Two.

«Sorry, dude,» I mutter as I do the only thing I can think of and run the original programming. You know, the one that made it go rogue in the first place.

I swear to god, the robot seems like it’s considering my request, like it’s tempted to give me the middle finger again. But then it stops walking, turns around, and starts moving to the fence. I almost fall out of my chair in relief. Dear god, I’m shaking again. Forget Bruno, my body is going to be a mess tomorrow.

Okay, okay, okay. I’ve got this. And for the record, I’m with Bruno on this one.

We are not going to lose this fucking robot.

While the robot is busy with the fence, I attempt to do the responsible friend thing and leave Bruno a message on his phone. My voice is so ridiculously shaky as I say, «Hey, Bruno, don’t worry, I got things under control,» that I wouldn’t believe me if I heard it. That is, if he actually gets the message. The cellular networks are shitty at best.

But Bruno’s a smart guy. He’ll figure it out. Or at least he’ll be in suspense until he drags his sorry ass to my house and asks me himself. I’m sure I’ll have a good story for him then.

Or at least, I hope so. God, I don’t even want to think about what’ll happen if I lose this robot. It’ll be all my fault and people will never trust me with anything again and that will be the end of my very short career. Worse, there’ll probably be families in neighboring towns that’ll starve if one of our robots gets stolen.

Oh god, I think I’m going to be sick again. My mom is always nagging me to ask for help and shit. I could really use some help now, but my parents and brothers and roommate are all on the road being useful and stuff and my teammate and only other friend in this lonely town is knocked out cold.

I guess that means the girl behind the code will have to do the heavy lifting after all.

So, when the robot finishes tearing that hole in the fence and steps out into the outside world, I go with it.

Here’s a moment of honesty for you: I’ve never been outside my little factory town. Yeah, I know. I mean I did as a little kid, when the roads weren’t in such terrible condition and my family still took vacations to the mountains or the lake and stuff. But nothing cool. I’ve always wanted to see live concerts or try a fresh mango or something, but leisure traveling is not really a thing anymore. Especially not for a chick with mobility issues.

Besides, it would be ridiculous for me to leave. I mean, my family’s here and it’s a good community, even if 85% of the population doesn’t remember I exist because most of the damn buildings have steps at the entrance.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on my endurance, though. I walked almost two kilometers last week before my brother had to give me a piggyback ride home. My plan is to try to hike to the next town one summer, one way or another.

I imagine it’d be just like this, walking through the forest on a muddy but pretty even path, with nothing around except trees and squirrels and moss. Well, the robot’s doing all the heavy lifting right now, but I’m really loving the video feed.

The trail the Commando’s following is one of the delivery routes. According to the canning directory, it’s about 23.4 kilometers until the next town and nothing but forest in the middle.

Where the hell is this robot going? I mean, I’m not complaining because this must be what freedom tastes like. But something about these hacks, I don’t know, just feels off.

«Okay, listen dude, we need you back home,» I tell the robot’s code.

This would be a million times easier if the paranoid equipment team would give me full access. Sometimes I think Bruno is little bit too charming and people forget I’m part of the team. Which, I mean, I am, but I’m more than just a name and a voice, you know? I know I can be useful even though I have to depend on other people for, well, mostly everything that happens outside my house. And with the town barely holding itself together, sometimes I feel like just another responsibility.

Bruno can be straight up macho sometimes, but right now I’d give anything to be as independent as he is.

Though in this case, it’s probably a good thing that I’m not quite like Bruno. Read: Idealistic. Because…I might have been a bored kid once. Who taught herself the basics of hacking. I skill I think I’m going to have to use here because I’m not fucking losing this Commando unit.

So the robot walks and I type. It’s slow going for both of us. The muddy trail is a bitch for the machine and my rusty hacking skills are definitely a bitch for me. The only thing I manage to access is the Commando’s audio input and output. I test swear into the microphone and the robot suddenly becomes very foul-mouthed. All the birds in the trees flee.

Screw this. I try doing a hard restart again.

«Help me,» the robot says.

I pause mid-keystroke. What the hell? This is the second time the robot’s said this, but the first time meaning sinks in. Factory robots are programmed to only use that phrase when they’re stuck, like under a pallet or in a ditch. Which sometimes happens when they’re delivering shipments between towns.

But why is it using it now?

Huh. Color me curious. So, for the first time in my very short career as a rogue robot hunter, I let a hacked machine be.

Okay, now I’m confused. Why the hell is the rogue robot standing in front of a pile of fallen trees, staring? Why does this Commando unit stare so much? I mean, there’s nothing special about this spot. It’s just another point on the muddy trail where on one side, the terrain drops off and becomes a steep rocky slope. Like the hundred other spots we’ve passed on this stroll.

Then the trees start to talk.

«Oh, thank god.»

«Holy shit!» I say and almost fall out of my chair again, forgetting I left the audio output is still on. It’s become quite an indelicate robot in my care.

The forest goes silent for a moment and then…is that a dog barking?

«Who are you?» say the trees.

«Who the hell are you?» I say. Shit, my hands are shaking again. I might not be the most outdoorsy type of girl, but even I know trees aren’t supposed to talk.

«I’m Evie Stevenson. I could use some help.»

Why does that name sound familiar? «Where…where are you?»

«Down here.» Someone—not me—tries to make the robot move its head, but the prompt keeps saying “Invalid command.»

«Damn computer. Actually do you mind?» the trees say.

«Mind what?» I say, but then I see that I’ve somehow gotten temporary access to the robot’s motion control program. What the hell?

Cautiously, I have the robot step forward and tilt its head so that it gets a good look between two fallen trunks. Seriously, who is this terrible hacker?

Then I see the answer.

On a rocky ledge, about three meters below the robot, there’s a lot of open, empty soup cans, one very muddy dog, and one exhausted, muddy white-haired lady.

«Holy shit,» I say. «You’re the hacker?»

«Surprise,» Stevenson says. She looks like she’s about to cry with relief. «Who are you?»

«I’m Gina. I work with Bruno Wong on the robot systems team.»

«Oh, I’ve heard of you. I thought you were just his assistant.»

I sigh. «Trust me, he’s charming and all, but he’s useless without his gadgets.» This makes Stephenson laugh. Sounds likes it’s been a while since she had a good one. It sort of makes me happy cheering her up a bit. «I’ve brought you the robot you wanted, I guess.»

«Thank god. My tablet was starting to get super glitch-y.» She waves her handheld and the thing looks miserable too. Full of cracks. I wonder if I can fix it.

Suddenly, I feel really guilty about stopping the other four hacked robots.

«How did you end up down there, anyway?» I ask.

«I was accompanying a Commando delivering a shipment of cans. The factory needs someone to check on our customers occasionally.» The dog starts barking again and Stevenson beckons it over and puts an arm around it. «It was right before a storm hit and the winds got bad. We shouldn’t have been out here.» She stares at her dog’s ears. «The path got too muddy. The robot lost its footing and slipped but managed to stay on the trail. Me and Peanut lost our footing too, but we weren’t so lucky. The damn robot kept going on its route even though most of the shipment was down here with us.»

That’s when it clicks. «Oh, you’re the missing employee.» I remember seeing her name on the factory employee list. Everyone on it had weird nicknames in parentheses. Stevenson’s was ‘Tougher than your rusty robot, damn it!’

«They thought you ran off,» I say.

Stevenson’s expression is all sadness. «Did they really think I’d abandon them?»

«Yeah, they tend to assume the worst about people.»

«Or make snap decisions.»

I look around my lonely office. «Yeah.»

«Hey, I’d hire you. You figured this out with just an access key.»

That makes me smile. «Okay, listen, I’m going to sign off for a hot second. I think I just heard my roommate come home. Going to see if we can send some help.» I grab my crutches.

«Don’t go. Please,» she says. I think it’s the most desperate thing anyone has ever said to me. I get the feeling that this woman usually doesn’t let anything stop her, but right now, she looks scared.

I put down my crutches. «Okay. What should I do? I’m sort of limited from over here.» And to prove my point, the temporary access I’m using for the robot’s motion controls time out.

«Somehow I really doubt that,» Stevenson says. She’s completely serious, too. «How about giving a lady and her dog a lift?» She taps her tablet. «What’s your MAC address?»

I give it to her and seconds later a new window pops up on my screen. It’s full access to the robot’s program.

Holy shit. My hands are shaking again, but this time with excitement. This is what freedom tastes like.

I make good progress clearing the fallen trees, using the robot, of course. I even start to think this might be a straightforward rescue mission. But then a system warning pops up on screen.

Apparently, the Commando 237X thinks it’s under attack.

Wait, what? Attacked by who?

Then, the robot’s falling. Its video feed bounces as it hits the ground and I’m clutching the end of my desk. Seriously, this has to stop. My stomach cannot handle this shaky camera shit.

«Hang on for a sec, Ms. Stevenson,» I say through clenched teeth. Then I bite my lip, because oh god, I’m going to vomit again if I keep talking.

Fuck it, I’m just going to let the defense program do its thing because if you think you can just attack a rogue Commando in the middle of the woods, then you deserve to be crushed with robotic fury.

According to the code that I refuse to look away from, the robot picks itself up and spins around. It lifts its arms and brings them down over and over again.

Morbid curiosity makes me peek at the screen to see if the Commando has beaten the attacker into a pulp yet.

Then I see who the attacker is. Who is now lying directly under that angry metal arm.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Abort the program, robot. ABORT THE DAMN PROGRAM.

I hate déjà vu. Especially when it’s a repeat of bad ideas. He’s so fucking lucky though. The robot’s arm stops centimeters above Bruno.

For a second, neither of us can breathe. Scratch that: it’s all we can do.

«Worst. Fucking. Plan.» I gasp and the robot repeats my words.

Bruno blinks like he’s just seen the sunshine. «Gina?»

«Who else, dude?»

He opens his mouth. Then closes it. Then opens it again. «What the hell, Gee?» he says, finally. «I thought you wouldn’t…you couldn’t…»

«Couldn’t what? Do my damn job?»

He spots the key that’s still sticking out of the robot’s shoulder. «Oh.»

«What the hell’s happening up there?» Stevenson calls up. Peanut is barking furiously.

«Who’s that?» Bruno says, twisting around in the muddy path.

«Evie Stevenson. You know, the person behind the hacks. She’s been stuck there for weeks and needed help to get out.»

«Oh. You figured it out without me,» Bruno says and damn it, he looks like an emo band member again.

«Don’t move, dude, or I swear to god I will crush you.»

I walk the robot over to the ledge, which is mostly tree-free now. Carefully, I guide an arm down. Peanut is the first to come up. Then Stevenson.

«It worked,» she says when she’s back on the path. Her eyes tear up. «This absurd plan actually worked. You’re hired, Gina.»

We both laugh, while Bruno looks confused.

«Can I give you a lift?» I ask. Stevenson picks up Peanut and nods.

The Commando scoops them up in one hand and my stubborn, well-meaning teammate in the other.

Bruno keeps insisting that he can walk back on his own, which is sort of hilarious because right now, he has more bruises than charm.

«Chill, bro. I got this.»

My mom is right, it’s important to ask for help when you needed it. But sometimes you have to make your own help too.

«Gina—» Bruno begins, but I cut off the audio input because I’m the girl behind the code and I can.

I check on them occasionally though. Bruno’s pouting on the left and Stevenson is smiling in the nook of the robot’s right elbow with her arms around Peanut, who is cautiously wagging his tail. They can’t see me, but I’m smiling back at them.

This is what freedom is, isn’t it?

Oh my god, I’m going to have so much fun programming these Commando units. I have so many ideas. Starting with creating the best routines possible and trying to fix that hole in the fence. And maybe next time Stevenson walks to the next town, I’ll walk with her, one way or another.

© 2018 by A. T. Greenblatt

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s well acquainted with all four seasons and is known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, as well as other fine places. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt.

The Frequency of Compassion
by A. Merc Rustad

Kaityn Falk loves the dark phase of the moon. It’s quiet. Soothing. Insulated in their spacesuit, comm dimmed, Kaityn sits in the rover and watches the sky. Here on Io 7, a newly discovered satellite in retrograde orbit around a dwarf planet the size of Pluto, they are the only living human in several thousand lightyears. They are here to establish research beacons for star-charting, a risky job for how isolated it is—and Kaityn hasn’t loved anything this much in their life. The exhilaration of travel, the calmness of deep space, the possibility of an ever-unfolding universe.

“Daydreaming again?”

The onboard nav AI, Horatio, is the exception to Kaityn’s preference for silence. Developed with multi-faceted personality modes to stem off homesickness and loner’s fright, the AI is Kaityn’s co-pilot, research assistant, and friend.

“Just dreams,” they reply. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we evolved in a way to survive vacuum and could sail around without spacesuits?”

“Technically, I already can,” Horatio says.

Kaityn laughs. “When I was a kid I wanted to grow giant dragonfly wings in order to zip around in zero-G. I guess hyperdrive is close enough.”

The vast scope of sky, its silken blackness, rocks Kaityn in a serene, wordless lullaby. These few hours between the rotation from dark to light on Io 7 are theirs, and they bask in the solitude. There are plenty of other taxing, long distance meetings and digital paperwork to dull their enthusiasm of being in space, on the rim of the Milky Way. This time is theirs.

In another two weeks, they will begin the trip to Mars HQ to re-orient and decompress from a six-month shift. Kaityn sighs. They don’t like thinking about the inevitable burst of human interaction they will have to bear for half a year before they can travel again.

“You seem melancholy,” Horatio says. The AI’s voice is warm against Kaityn’s ears inside their helmet. “Is something distressing you?”

“Just thinking about how little time we have left on this shift.”

Kaityn is autistic and hyperempathic. When they were young—before they knew they were agender, before they had words for why they always felt so keenly for everyone around them—they coped badly. So much sound, so much light, so many shades of emotion. It was the promise of cold, isolated quiet in space that drew them to the Galactic Exploration for Peace agency. GEP needed people willing to risk the vast expanse on the edges of known space.

Out here, Kaityn can breathe. They can serve humanity without being overwhelmed by everything that makes humans imperfect and wondrous.

“I’m programmed to list the benefits of six months on, six months off duty,” Horatio says, “but I suspect that is unhelpful.”

Kaityn smiles wanly. “I’ll figure out something—”

A bright wisp flickers across their helmet’s viewscreen. It moves too fast for them to define it—but its distress radiates sharp like a needle. Kaityn straightens with a gasp. “Horatio, did you pick that up on scanners?”

“Yes, I did,” Horatio says.

“What’s your take?”

“It touched down two kilometers from your position. Odd energy reading, extremely small mass. There should be no minor satellites in decay orbit.”

“It feels alive.” Kaityn ignites the solar engines and guides the rover along the path Horatio provides via map readouts. “And it’s hurt.”

Their thoughts blur with sudden excitement. Alive. Could this be potential first contact? Protocols rush through their mind. Establish sensory verification if possible: auditory, ocular, olfactory, tactile, light spectrum, mechanical observation, recordable frequencies; identify yourself and designation but do not engage in any negotiation without authorization—

Kaityn’s pulse races. They shouldn’t assume anything: maintaining objectivity is the leading tenet for space exploration. It’s hard when so many ideas are flooding their brain, the adrenaline spike intoxicating.

“Better hurry,” Horatio says. “I’ve just detected ZeroGen Corps’ beacons; their vessel has also picked up the signal.”

Kaityn’s shoulder twitches in surprise, the emotion fast bleeding into sharp fear. “Why are they in this sector? No reports were logged!”

ZeroGen personnel, unlike Kaityn and members of the GEP, always explore with weaponry ready. ZeroGen Corps is a multi-national conglomerate for profit-based space exploration. But there are rules, regulations, responsibilities. Any human-piloted expedition or spaceflight is supposed to be logged on a public records database. If ZeroGen is out here incognito, they are disregarding all safety protocols. Why?

“They are not responding to my hailing request,” Horatio says. “Please proceed with caution.”

Kaityn swallows. “I will.”

The sense of pain grows stronger as Kaityn approaches the signal.

The rover purrs over the rocky surface of the moon. Kaityn remembers playing the old video game series Mass Effect, where they piloted an indestructible ground vehicle. They reveled in flying it off cliffs just to watch the absurdity of low-G and unbreakable shock absorbers. They aren’t nearly as reckless with an actual GEP commissioned rover—especially when they’re driving, and this is reality. Still, in private, Kaityn thinks of their rover as the Mako 2.0.

Dust kicks up behind the treads, and on the radar map, Kaityn notes the signal lit up as a green flare. They park the rover half a kilometer away and strap on their survival/first aid pack.

The vibrations of hurt-lost-scared presses against their consciousness even this far away. They swallow hard, their throat tight.

In space, they have only their own emotions to process. This nervousness is all theirs. Although Kaityn believes AIs have cognition and emotion, Horatio operates on a different frequency from their perception. They asked once if that was intentional to accommodate them. There was a long pause—for Horatio, at least—and then the AI replied: “Yes, I do. I was not programmed to project emotions, merely to observe and respond to them when appropriate.”

“But you’re full of sensors,” Kaityn said, flapping their hands in excitement. “And you do feel, I can tell by the way you operate. We might be similar in that way.”

“Interesting analysis,” Horatio said. “Perhaps we are both outliers from how we were originally programmed.”

Kaityn liked that: another thread of connection between them and Horatio.

Now, Kaityn struggles to rein in their wildly fluctuating emotional response. This could be first contact! The sheer thrill is muted with fear, and the building sense of pain they can’t ignore, like an oncoming migraine.

Kaityn unstraps from the rover and hops out.

Their boots leave quarter-inch tracks in the soft moon dust. Kaityn resists the urge to flop down and roll around, making an angel-pattern in the sediment. It isn’t polite to the moon, and they can’t spare the time. They’re reminded of fresh, soft snowfall in North Dakota, where they lived as a child. They would bundle up in plush jacket, snow pants, mittens, hat—always refusing a scarf for how it itched against their skin—and dash out into their huge yard. After a snowfall, there was a sense of calm and serenity under the vast gray sky. They would flop in the beautiful drifts, gather clumps of snow to make forts or dinosaurs, until called back inside when their lips grew numb and their cheeks turned bright red. Winters were never the same for Kaityn when they moved to Chicago at age ten, and there was no peace under the sky.

Kaityn navigates via digital map and their helmet’s built-in spotlights. Mesas sprout up and meld into cliff faces on Io 7’s surface. Their helmet light casts jagged shadows along the gray-blue stone. There: a disturbance in the arid stone. Dust sways like smoke suspended over dimming embers. Something bright and translucent shimmers within a tiny crater, a crack in the stone.

Pain.

It makes Kaityn flinch: the intensity is needle-hot, cascades of glass fragments carried in ice water. Alone. Lost. Help.

“I’m coming,” Kaityn calls aloud, aware that whatever it is, it may not understand vocal resonance or language constructed for human tongues and minds and hands. Protocol states any approach should be made with caution and only as a last resort if visual, verbal, or mechanical hailing signals do not produce a verifiable response. But they can’t wait. They break into a run, the low gravity carrying them in long, effortless leaps across the remaining distance.

“I advise caution,” Horatio says. “Even if unintentional, a distressed lifeform may prove dangerous.”

“I know.”

“Overriding internal contact failsafe,” Horatio says. “I will abide by your discretion.”

Kaityn didn’t know the AI could do that, but right now, they are too focused on reaching the lifeform and aiding in whatever manner they can.

Kaityn narrows their eyes as they approach, dimming their helmet light to the lowest setting. It takes a second to control their momentum and balance theirself. They hold their hands away from their body, heart pounding, and edge around the last chunk of rock between theirself and the hurt lifeform.

The lifeform is octagonal light, soft-edged, with undulating ripples along the surface. Perhaps two feet in diameter, with no visible protrusions or indentations. Yet it has mass, for it is partially buried under crumbled rock and dust, and it is hurt.

Kaityn takes slow, deep breaths, centering theirself and trying to control their vocal tone.

“My name is Kaityn Falk,” they say as they edge nearer. GEP protocol dances in their foremost thoughts, ingrained training, and yet the wonder almost closes off their voice. First contact with another being, out here on Io 7. This is real. This is real. “I’m a human from the planet Earth, and I mean you no har—”

The alien shape undulates, its light frequency strobing, and it lets out a sound that is not auditory so much as felt in the bones, in the soul. Kaityn screams as the pain hits them—

—breaking away from the cluster, caught in solar winds, tossed and tumbled against ice and void, snagged in gravity, pulled through atmosphere. Where are the others? So alone. Afraid. Lost? How will others find? No communication thread, broken from stress. Falling, matter denser and sensation-undocumented-not-good—

The sensory overload sends Kaityn reeling back, and they collapse.

Kaityn is six again, sitting on the porch of their house with their Mom, drinking hot cocoa and watching the aurora borealis dapple the sky with spilled gasoline colors.

“I want to fly in space!” Kaityn declares.

Mom laughs. “What would you do in space?”

“Pick up all the colors and put them in a basket and bring them back for you. So you can paint with them!”

“Wow, that’s pretty cool,” Mom says, grinning. “Are there colors up there I can’t find in the art department?”

They nod solemnly. “Those are space colors, Mom. You can’t buy them in the store.”

Mom hugs Kaityn with one arm. “Well, baby, that sounds like a good plan. When you bring me space colors, we’ll paint a picture together.”

Kaityn beams and finishes the melty marshmallows at the bottom of their mug.

Mom never saw them celebrate their twelfth birthday. Car accident. Kaityn stopped drawing; they would never collect space colors, not when their mom couldn’t paint anymore.

In the cluster, we all are connected by the billion threads. We flow ever outward, sharing thought and wonder and memory. Languages saturate our understanding, rich and intricate; trillions of ways for connection, for empathy, for life. We are vastness, we are unity, we are individual. And there is a hole in ourselves: we are missing one of us. This is hurt, this is pain, this is sorrow. We cannot move forward, towards the beginnings and the ends of the universe, until we find ourself. To abandon one is to abandon the cluster. It is not who we are. We will find ourself, ourselves, for one is no greater or lesser than all.

Kaityn often chats online with their boyfriend (before he’s their ex) about the possibility of first contact. One day, he says, “You know I support you and all, but what if you were the first person aliens met? Wouldn’t being agender just confuse them?”

Kaityn grasps for words, their mouth empty, their brain feeling sluggish and disconnected.

He presses on, his face close to the screen. “I mean. Wouldn’t it make more sense, if you met an alien, to explain you were a woman? That way when they encounter the rest of humanity, it wouldn’t be as jarring.”

Kaityn looks at their hands, their whole body flushed with shame. They can’t find a coherent way to explain all that is wrong with his assumptions. Would aliens need to be dual gendered, or even have a concept of gender? Would aliens even need pronouns? All Kaityn’s snappy semantic and scientific theories and explanations vanish like a hard drive crash.

“I’m just saying,” he says. “You’ve got to think of what’s best for humanity. First impressions only come once.”

“I know,” they mumble. It’s in all the training material for GEP, and they’ve downloaded and studied it over and over with giddy excitement. There is such possibility in the stars.

“Kaityn,” he says. At least he consistently uses their correct name. “You know I care about you. I just want to make sure you’re doing what’s right.”

He’s been subtly resistant to their gender and pronoun choices, especially when they legally changed their ID before accepting the position in GEP. Kaityn doesn’t want to confront him about it. He gets defensive and asks why they’re attacking him over such trivial details. It’s his disappointment that always stings worst.

Kaityn can’t shake off the doubts that are always there, in the back of their mind, insidious and small and prone to springing up when they are least prepared. What if he’s right? Their chances of encountering alien sapient life are billions to one; yet people still win lotteries. It isn’t impossible.

“Okay,” Kaityn says then, and mumbles an excuse about a migraine—their head throbs, their eyes sting from withheld tears—and logs off.

“He was bad for you,” Horatio says later, when they share that painful story while almost drunk. It’s their first week on a solo trip and every time they look at the vast mural of space, they hear their ex’s voice and his… concerns. “He wanted the his-version of you, not your true self.”

“Yep,” Kaityn agrees. “Should have dumped his ass long ago.” Their voice doesn’t have the conviction they want, but it feels good to say aloud nonetheless.

Kaityn blinks against the searing light-pain in their eyes. They’re lying just outside the crevice where the lifeform crashed; their suit’s readings show no physical damage, and the timestamp in their helmet’s log indicates barely thirty seconds have passed.

“Kaityn? Kaityn?” Horatio sounds deeply concerned. For a moment, Kaityn feels the AI’s worry like an ache in their jaw, spreading down their neck. “Your biorhythms and brainwaves were erratic and completely inconsistent with human physiology. I was afraid you were dying. I have sent distress signals on all frequencies.”

Carefully, Kaityn sits up. They want to rub their face, dig their thumbs against the cheekbones and sinuses to alleviate the throbbing pressure. Their helmet prevents them. Gloves too insulated, no skin contact. Their vision normalizes, the afterimages of falling stars and sun flares dissipating into memory. The suit injects a mild painkiller and a faint whiff of lavender into their oxygen supply. It’s the scent Kaityn likes most, and they have the dosage perfectly balanced so it won’t overwhelm them.

“I’m… okay… ” Kaityn blinks again.

We are so sorry, says the light still trapped under stone.

Kaityn’s whole body shivers and their shoulders hunch up in excitement.

“Horatio?” Kaityn whispers. “Do you hear that?”

“I do,” the AI says. “There is no auditory or digital relay for this communication, however, at least that my sensors can detect. It is… not a phenomenon I am programmed to understand. Is this telepathy?”

In a sense, the voice says. It is soft, like a pillow wrapped in microfiber and with no aroma. We did not intend you harm. We bonded thoughts without your consent, and we are deeply ashamed of this. We ask forgiveness for such violation.

Kaityn shakily regains their feet and edges nearer to nu. The knowledge of the cluster’s pronouns—the cluster and this individual alike—feels natural. Nu broke free of nur clusterselves and fell. Nu is alone here, unsure where nur otherselves are now. It was not an intentional fall—nu simply wished to reach out to the colors of the universe, the beautiful radiance that shimmers between folds of vacuum.

“Wow,” Kaityn breathes. Their thoughts spin in ecstatic patterns, like small shiny cubes all clanking together. They resist flapping their hands, even if it makes their arms ache. “Wow.”

Nu is still trapped under the outcropping of moon rock.

They need to focus. Their GEP training is a solid grounding point: in an emergency, remember to breathe. Oxygen for the brain. Appraise the situation. Your kit and vehicles are equipped with a wide range of multi-situational tools. Your AI co-pilot will assist you.

They kneel by the rocks. Their kit has a collapsible pole for a mobility aid. It’ll work well as a pry-bar. Kaityn withdraws the metal tube and snaps it open.

“I’m going to loosen the rocks,” Kaityn says, their voice shaking. “I’m going to move slow so more debris doesn’t fall.”

Understanding shimmers from the lifeform.

Gingerly, Kaityn digs the tip of the pole into a crevice where the largest rocks are pinning the lifeform’s body. “Is there anything I can do to ease your pain?”

Not alone, nu says. Enough for… It flickers, the pain flaring and dimming. Kaityn gasps and flinches. Tries to steady their hands and push past the hurt.

“Alert: ZeroGen Corps’ shuttle is in orbit and locked onto our location,” Horatio says.

Kaityn bites the inside of their cheek by accident, and a sharp tingle of pain makes them wince. They scrabble to get leverage on the stone without harming the lifeform or causing more rocks to fall.

You show distress, nu says, and sends concern-for-well-being and offers soothing-calm-serenity. Kaityn hesitates: the emotions hover in soft swirls, like fresh watercolors held in little paper cups. They accept a sip of soothing-calm, if only to steady their nerves. Peace settles inside their mind, and their bio-rhythms smooth. Their focus sharpens. There, mapped out like a puzzle’s answer, they see where they need to apply leverage to the moon rock and shift it so the low gravity will roll it safely away and let nu free.

“Thank you,” they say aloud, and nu’s light tones warm in mutual pleasure to have helped them. Nu is transferring nur pain inward so as not to distract and cause harm to Kaityn. They smile shakily in gratitude.

With a slow tumble and spray of dust, the rock shifts and the lifeform lies bare and exposed. Kaityn pulls out an emergency solar blanket and drapes it across nur body.

Nu sends thankfulness to them.

And then ZeroGen Corps arrives.

Dust gusts and spins in angry patterns, violently disturbed as a militarized shuttle drops from orbit and blasts the surface without care or consent of the moon.

Kaityn flings an arm up in reflex.

“Step away from the alien.” The ZeroGen operator’s signal blasts into Kaityn’s frequency. “It is being claimed by ZeroGen Corps for scientific study.”

Kaityn winces in pain and freezes. Their suit compensates for the decibel level over the channel and drops it until they can hear and aren’t overwhelmed by the noise. They raise their hands, the protocol for a GEP employee’s non-hostile acknowledgment and negotiation tumbling in tangled patterns through their head.

There are five operators: all in dark-tinted armor and helmets, armed with electric bolt guns, and radiating intensity tinged with hostility and nervousness. The ZeroGen personnel have already logged the signal and site; if they don’t return with evidence, or secure the asset, they’ll be docked and fined.

“I’m Kaityn Falk from—”

“We know who you are,” snaps the operator who spoke first. “GEP outposts are noted on this moon but you haven’t tagged the alien for official observance. Move away from it now.”

“Nu,” Kaityn corrects, and then realizing the operator may not understand, they add, “Nur pronouns are—”

“Alert!” Horatio beeps in alarm. “Weapons armed!”

The lead operator shoulders their bolt gun and aims at Kaityn’s torso. The ZG-X24 model: it has enough force, even in low gravity, to damage or rupture their spacesuit. Worse, Kaityn is alone except for Horatio, who is incorporeal, and if ZeroGen intends to harm them, it’s no stretch to assume the operators would also disable the AI and leave no contestable records of illegal activity. Horatio has sent an emergency ping, yes, but signal still takes time to traverse space, and by then it will do Kaityn and Horatio and nur no good.

Kaityn’s pulse flutters, a rush of blood in their ears. They can’t hold down their terror, the sudden, visceral realization they might die here on this moon and it will be weeks before the next scout ship reaches them. Days before anyone knows something’s wrong when they don’t log a report update. Unknown span of time where their body will freeze from depressurization.

Yet worst of all is knowing that if ZeroGen captures nu, nur will be subjected to horrors and pain and aloneness.

“I’m sending an additional distress—” Horatio’s frequency shorts out. Jamming signal. Kaityn can only hear their own breath, their own thoughts.

Trembling, Kaityn puts one foot before the other. They will not leave nu alone. They will not fight—they’re unarmed and outnumbered and have always been a pacifist—but they will not abandon the lifeform to cruelty and destruction.

“You are not going to harm nur,” Kaityn says. The radio frequency is still open between them and the leader. “Please return to your vehicle and—”

“Step. Away.”

Kaityn steps, but they step in front of the light and keep their arms outspread. “No,” they say, soft and firm, and press outward with their emotions as steadily as they can. Peace. Calm. Acceptance. They do not want to die afraid; they do not want nur to suffer. “I cannot let you harm nur.”

“Fine,” the ZeroGen person says.

The leader fires.

We reach across the brightness of space, searching, and we find ourself, ourselves, once again. There! The thread is splintered, an unanticipated fall, suspended in this chronological moment. We knit closed the hurt and we see ourself huddled beside the other selves. There is distress and fear in all the selves that are not ourselves, and we see the patterns unwind from one self: violence intended. This self acts from bitterness, willingly, and the self’s anger radiates outward like the self’s weaponry. We sing sadness for this self, this lost one that is not ourselves, for they are alone and do not understand the harm they bring themself when they aim such violence at others. It is not our preference to intervene, and yet, there is a bright self that stands betwixt the violence and our lost self, and we will not let them perish.

Kaityn is packing for their shuttle flight to GEP Station, which is in orbit around Mars. They have a list:

- favorite video games stored on a flashmem drive, portable screen and controller

- a tablet loaded with their music library
- plenty of ebooks
- their favorite sweatshirt
- a plush squid, named Inky
- headphones

- There’s room for a few more physical objects before they reach their weight limit in their suitcase and carryon. Kaityn looks at the sketchpad, yellowed with age, and the cup of colored pencils that have gathered dust on that same shelf for years.

For a moment, they almost reach out and drop the art supplies in their bag. Mom isn’t here to see this. Mom would have loved every minute of packing, departure, hearing the updates, even waiting on lag from text and compressed video messages from Earth to the station.

Mom would have been so proud.

Kaityn leaves the remainder of their weight limit unfilled. They haven’t drawn or colored since they were a child. There’s no point in trying again.

The universe is bright.

Warmth and love and protection flare around Kaityn. They gasp. Relief: strongest, with the mellow undertones of welcome and we found you!

Kaityn blinks rapidly, trying to ground theirself in the sudden flood of emotion and light.

The ZeroGen Corps unit is suspended in a shimmery bubble. The electric bolt drifts away, freed from trajectory, left to float calm and cold in space.

“Their vitals and brainwaves are stable,” Horatio reports, “and it appears to be a state similar to cryo-stasis.”

“You’re all right,” Kaityn breathes.

“I am. Are you?”

Slowly, Kaityn shifts their gaze upward.

The sky is bright with bodies of light, the cluster, for nur’s family has come to find nur.

Their chest squeezes in excitement, in wonder. A vast cloud of light, all hues and tones and shades—so many distinct selves within a whole—

We greet you, the cluster says. A chorus, a unity of voices in cascading music.

Kaityn’s mouth hangs open and they slowly lift a hand towards the cluster. “Hello…”

Then nur floats beside them, free of the moon rock, and Kaityn turns their head to meet nur. Their blanket is folded neatly at their foot.

Thank you for your aid, Kaityn Falk. Nur voice is one and many.

“I… think we’re… even,” Kaityn manages. “You saved me, too.”

Nur, and nur cluster above, stretches out a fan of synapses, tendrils of light that coil and drift in the vacuum before Kaityn’s helmet.

We wish to share views from the universe as we have traveled, the cluster says.

Kaityn gasps, nods, and lets the light twirl around their helmet. “Can I see… can I see them later?” They’re on the edge of a crash, overwhelmed, and they don’t want to collapse under the pressure of so much input and sensation.

Whenever you choose to see, they are yours, the cluster says.

“If I may,” Horatio says. “There is still the ZeroGen team to deal with. I have logged a complaint about the hostile interaction we have experienced on Io7.”

Kaityn turns back towards the suspended soldiers.

They intercepted our self’s cries when we separated, nu says. They followed us when we fell.

That makes sense to Kaityn. Even if ZeroGen didn’t feel nur’s distress, the energy reading would explain how they arrived so fast, if they were already in the sector—chasing an unknown signal the way Kaityn did.

“What will you do with them?” Kaityn asks the cluster.

We will carry them back to their base of operations and release them from stasis, nur replies. They will not be harmed, and their memories will not be tampered with. They will simply have wasted fuel and resources in this endeavor to do harm.

Kaityn lets their breath out in relief. “Thank you. For not hurting them.”

There is no value in violence, nur says. Its sum equals only pain, and we do not wish to bring pain upon anyone. We hope, in time, your people will understand this.

“I hope so too.”

Nu floats upwards into nur cluster, is welcomed back with affection and joy, and reconnects into the synaptic threads of the whole.

The ZeroGen team is pulled gently into the light, along with their shuttle.

“Will we see each other again?” Kaityn asks.

Naturally. The cluster gives off pleasant, soothing reassurance. We are part of the universe and so are you. We continue onward. So do you.

“I’d like that,” Kaityn says, and lifts their hand to wave. It’s not goodbye; it is until we share again.

“This will be quite the report,” Horatio says as Kaityn begins their careful walk back to their rover. They’ve repacked the emergency blanket and will clean moon dust off it later.

They need to lie down; the overstimulation is fast catching up to them and it will take six hours or more of sleep to compensate for the effects of the encounter. Then they will self-sooth by playing one of their favorite video games installed in their quarters: the newest PuzzleCroft, or the Star Harvest sim. They’ll need to decompress over the next few days, too, and access Horatio’s self-care subroutines to help them process all of this. They nearly died, and that isn’t a shock easily brushed aside.

“GEP will be…” Kaityn leans against the hood of the rover. They’re still aware of the shimmering halo-effect around their helmet, the gifted glimpses of the universe. For later, when they can savor and appreciate the offering in full.

“Excited?” Horatio offers. “This is confirmed first contact with another sapient extraterrestrial species.”

Kaityn is too tired to parse the correct words. This is first contact, yes; their helm cam will display a visual and auditory record, and Horatio—

Horatio. Kaityn’s face heats with sudden embarrassment. “I’ve never asked you if you have pronoun preference, Horatio. I’m so sorry.”

“Apology accepted, and please do not berate yourself,” the AI says. “While my programmers coded me as male due to, I assume, an overwhelming influence of male-ID’d droids in popular media, I’ve come to think of myself as ze/zir.”

Their heart swells, bolstered by hope, relief, and kinship. Kaityn grins. “That’s awesome.”

“Indeed,” ze says.

“With your corroboration and my helm feeds and report, I think GEP will believe us. Perhaps one day nur and nur cluster will visit us all.”

“That is my wish, too.”

“Horatio,” Kaityn asks as they steer their rover back towards their ship, “do we have any art supplies aboard?”

“Affirmative,” ze replies. “GEP regulations do allow for a percentage of cargo weight to be allotted to creative pursuits vital for mental health. There are markers, paper, and a paint app tablet aboard. Plan to take up drawing?”

“More like resuming,” Kaityn says. “I once told my mom that when I fly in space, I’d collect all the colors for her.” They can see more shades and hue in the sky, in the dust, in the distant gleam of stars. Another small gift the cluster left them. “It’s time to keep that promise.”

The dark phase of the moon is turning towards the bright star, and soon it will be dawn.

© 2018 by A. Merc Rustad

A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Cicada, and other fine venues, with reprints included in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015 and 2017). Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com. Merc also has a debut short story collection, So You Want to Be a Robot, published by Lethe Press (2017).

The Stars Above
by Katharine Duckett

Under cover of night, our village moves across the steppe.

Aliya leads the way. Her whistle is high and in harmony with the wind, so an untrained ear would ignore the sound. But we, the hushed and listening herd, heed the falconer’s call for what it is. Aliya trained golden eagles long before the invaders came, and her flock travels with us still. Her brother Alibek had the idea to strap small cameras to their chests, to use them as scouts in our ceaseless tracking of the alien forces. We plundered an abandoned electronics shop in Saryagash together to get the equipment, in a rare plunge back into the ruins of human civilization before we rejoined the village on the plains.

When Aliya confirms a clear path with an untouched radius of at least 200 kilometers, she signals the flank captains, and we begin to move as a many-limbed unit, the wheels of the mechanized yurts creaking forward, the cows and sheep and horses and a few camels snuffling and bleating as their keepers urge them forward, the stray dogs dodging and darting under hooves and feet.

I’m always with Alibek and Yura and Ramazan and Gaini, overseeing the operation of the yurts and their various modifications. We’re the inventors, the tinkerers, the little team always armed with our toolboxes and indefatigable can-do spirit, even after twenty hours on the move. Should anything go wrong during the migration, should a lever catch or a cart get caught in a rut, we leap into action, patching and fixing and trying any and all solutions for keeping the village in motion. We’ve kept up the pace ever since the invasion six months ago, kept the four hundred remaining residents of what used to be Zhuldyz safe by running, running through heat and rain and mud, though not yet snow. We left our cell phones behind, anything that could be traced. Any object that could be misconstrued as a weapon, in case we were given the chance to surrender. We could have split up, sought greater security in smaller numbers, but scattering across the steppe would have meant starvation or injury or death for many of the villagers, including me. The village carries me now when I need it, when my hip gives way and I can’t walk, when Alibek can no longer hold me up. In Kazakh the word for “family” is the same as the word for the fire that burns at the heart of the yurts, the fire that nourishes and warms and comforts in the tenebrous steppe. It’s that spark that keeps us going. It’s that fire that keeps our village alive.

In the early days panic shot through me every time an axle cracked or the improvised supports of the yurts gave way. Now, though, the course almost always runs smoothly, and I handle aberrations with calm. It doesn’t pay to panic. Panic slows me down. Panic kills my instincts. If I let my hands guide me—the same hands that have always known what my body needed and how to build it—I find the rift and the way to heal it swiftly. I force into place what must be mended until my knuckles swell, and ask Alibek for help once my fingers are too sore and cramped to continue.

Alibek and I rarely leave each other’s side. He can’t always hear Aliya’s whistle because he’s deaf in his right ear, so I make sure I’ve got a good grip on his hand when we’re waiting for her sign. I press my thumb into his palm as the lilting sound comes over the steppe, passing the cue between us like a pulse in the dark. “Roger that, Jack,” he whispers back to me, using one of his favorite expressions. He’s always peppering his speech with new English slang and phrasing he’s picked up, refining his idioms and getting ever-closer to sounding like he could be a Chicagoan like me or Molly.

Alibek and I still talk in the Russian-Kazakh-English-sign-language mix we started using when I moved to southern Kazakhstan over a year ago, often between snorts of laughter, because no one makes me laugh harder than Ali. When I started teaching English alongside him at the local high school, Alibek was the one who made the long days better. Even now, when we’re grimy and tired and worried about food a good deal of the time, he’s smiling, and trying to cheer me up, and drawing me new episodes of my favorite anime by hand because we haven’t been anywhere near a TV for months.

We saw a few of them at the electronics store back in Saryagash, after we’d raided the pharmacy in town for necessary supplies, including precious painkillers and anti-inflammatories for me. Nothing there had been shut down, so the place was buzzing with monitors still occasionally beeping and brightly lit phones on display. Alibek had rolled his eyes. “And now of course the electricity is on.” Back when I was living with Alibek’s family in Zhuldyz, we dealt with blackouts all the time, but Saryagash still teemed with electronic life two months after the starships landed. That was the only kind of life we’d seen in the town’s once-crowded streets. Even the animals had the good sense to stay out in the steppe.

“It’s good, though.” Ali crouched down to examine a row of digital camcorders in a glass case. “We can test what works.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Can you set up one of those tablets?”

“Sure.” I walked behind the counter to pick up an iPad, pressing my thumb to its power button. It awoke and hummed in my hands.

My eyes darted to the top left of the screen. Wi-Fi. It was still picking up Wi-Fi. Somewhere in this place, a router was working.

“See if there is a program on there we can use.” Ali’s instructions floated up from where he squatted on the floor. “If not, Gaini can hack it. We will bring her what we find and she can build something for us.”

“Mm-hmm.” I swiped to the second page of icons, my eyes searching out one particular symbol. I found it, and pressed my finger against the bright blue “S.”

Skype opened, and I entered my username, the familiar motion unnerving. I hadn’t typed anything, much less my old sign-in info, for weeks and weeks. I used to be on Skype every other night when I first moved to Kazakhstan. Even though the connection was shoddy, even though the time difference was impossible, it was the best way to communicate with home.

My contacts list popped up. I scrolled, and there she was. The picture had been taken at her birthday party a few years ago, and she was laughing, her smile wide as we brought her in her cake. I’d baked that cake, with my mom’s help, because it was hard for me to be on my feet for the length of time it took to complete a full recipe. We’d presented it to Molly and she’d lit up, laughing at our off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Someone—my dad, probably—had captured the moment, had captured Molly’s inimitable smile. Even though she was in pain a good deal of the time, just like me, Molly always smiled like everything was right in the world, a broad, cheek-to-cheek grin that probably lit up rooms several states over.

My fingertip hovered over her avatar for a moment before I pushed down on the call button. I knew I shouldn’t give the invaders any signal to trace. I knew the risks. But this little shop was surely sending off small electronic signals they had ignored. One more blip in the midst of all the chatter would go unnoticed.

I was rationalizing. I knew it, but I couldn’t help myself. My own icon popped up on the screen, a thin line linking it to Molly’s. Connecting. Connecting.

I held my breath. Below me Alibek dropped an object to the ground with a thud. Connecting. Connecting.

No answer.

I pushed again. “Got it, Jack?”

“Working on it.” Connecting.

“Let’s try it out. We shouldn’t stay here much longer.”

Connecting.

“Jack? We should go soon.”

Connecting.

“Jack?”

No answer.

The alien invasion was televised, but everyone called it fake news.

That’s what Molly told me back in March, anyway. “It was just this group trying to stir up some Orson Welles, War of the Worlds-type panic out in Québec,” she told me over Skype. “You know, when he produced it as a radio play in the ‘30s, and people freaked out because they thought the broadcast was real? You had some people who supposedly bought into it, but I don’t know, I think they mostly went along with it because it was fun. Millennium Park was full of cosplayers getting into it, and there was this whole theater group doing a live version of La Planète Sauvage. I thought you’d appreciate that deep cut.”

Molly almost always Skyped me from the same spot in her dorm room at the University of Chicago, with her Klimt poster in the background and her roommate occasionally passing through. The image on my end was unchanging, too: Alibek had rigged up an Ethernet cord to allow me to access the Internet from my bedroom on the second floor, but the only way he could make it work was by running it outside, from the family computer downstairs to my window. So I was stuck there when my laptop was plugged in, and Molly’s view of me was always against the hanging orange and brown carpet on the wall, the traditional decoration for pretty much every apartment in Kazakhstan.

“We haven’t heard much about it here,” I told Molly, shifting as my knee twinged, the way it did when I’d been sitting too long. “But it’s not just the Canada thing—did you see the St. Petersburg video? I caught a bunch of kids watching it in class today.”

The clip I’d seen on the students’ phone screens was short, only 30 seconds. It showed nothing but the iconic onion domes of the Спас на Крови, set against a clear blue sky, as if someone were filming from right at the cathedral’s base. Suddenly an object zoomed overhead: a ship, sleek and triangular, made of a black material that seemed to absorb all light, a void moving across the screen. It vanished from the frame, and the video ended, cutting off in the middle of the videographer’s shouted reaction in Russian.

It could have been anything. The oddness of the angle and the briefness of the clip stank of manufactured news, which had been getting more and more realistic these past few years. In the States, Molly told me, they were perfecting software that could imitate anyone’s voice and face on video, given enough data on the person. I’d already started teaching workshops at the high school about watching news critically, checking for secondary sources and not believing the slew of strange reports that made it all the way out to rural Kazakhstan by very slow Internet. The rumors were usually no more harmful than a shocking celebrity death, but they ranged into the political, from rumors of unrest in regions that were actually peaceful to the reverse, depending on the picture Moscow wanted to paint.

“Yeah, they’ve been taking down all the videos here,” Molly said. “But I hear there are ones from Cape Town and Buenos Aires, too. Some group out there is putting a lot of effort into trying to make a real-life science fiction film, clearly.”

I stretched my arms above my head. “Well, if aliens are real, I just hope they don’t attack before May.” That’s when I was due back for a visit to the States. I’d been serving in the Peace Corps for the past six months, driven by a desire to travel coupled with the need for comprehensive healthcare. The Peace Corps offered that deal, although when I showed up in country I learned it wasn’t as comprehensive as they’d claimed. After all the medical tests and specialist visits I’d endured while applying, they still told me my first day, without warning or apology, that they wouldn’t be providing me the pain medication I needed to manage my genetic joint condition because it was schedule IV, a controlled substance. I’d traveled for twenty-four hours with my legs aching and my heavy suitcase in hand to get to Almaty, and I considered, right then, turning back around. Maybe my mom had been right. Maybe this was too hard, a step too far. Maybe I needed to be close by to my family, to Molly, my sister, who understood, who helped me the way I helped her in getting through a world that wasn’t set up for the way we moved, the way we needed to live.

But I’d stayed. I’d stayed, and I’d trained to teach, and I’d moved in with Alibek and Aliya and their mom and dad and grandmother once I was assigned to the high school in the village of Zhuldyz, only three hundred miles or so from where my great-great-uncle Nicholas Eliades once labored at a camp for political exiles in the 1940s. Molly mailed me the medication I needed, even though the packages were sometimes stolen on the way, and I modified my cane to hold up against the broken sidewalks and slushy puddles of Zhuldyz’s streets, lined with Soviet-style apartment buildings and low houses with gated gardens. I found that village life suited me, and I spent lazy hours playing cards with Alibek or watching cartoons with Aliya or helping Yura, their Russian neighbor, work on the many cars in his garage. I’d always been good with machines. I’d led my robotics team in high school, and even though I was a history major in undergrad, I kept working on my own projects in my free time. Molly and I designed all kinds of adaptive devices together, from grabbers with different grips and functions to canes with built-in cup holders. I’d thought for a while Molly, who was smart in a far more focused, determined way than me, might go into engineering, but she’d chosen pre-med instead. “You know how many terrible doctors I’ve dealt with,” she told me. “I’d like to be one of the good ones. There should be more disabled doctors out there, ones who get what it’s like.”

Molly was about to graduate from U of C, which was why I was going back for two weeks. I’d hated leaving her to move away, but she’d encouraged me to go despite the difficulty, despite the fact that we had always been each other’s support system. “You can do this, Jack. You should do this. Don’t worry. We’ll still be here when you get back.”

On the screen, Molly’s pixilated image smiled. “Okay. If I see any aliens, I’ll tell them to hold off. I can’t wait to see you, Jack. We’ve missed you a lot.”

I smiled back. Only a couple more months, and I would be home, and nearly halfway through my two-year service. “I can’t wait, either.”

Molly’s graduation day passed three months ago.

We’re somewhere in the middle of September. The wind has gotten cooler, but in part that’s because we’re headed north. We’ve heard from others we’ve passed along the way—groups of twenty to fifty, never anywhere near as numerous as our own collective—that there’s a fortress in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, built by communities there to wait out the winter. It sounds like a fairytale. It might be. But we have nowhere else to go. The yurts are warm-weather dwellings, and we’ll have to abandon or find a way to store the collapsible structures soon enough. Already their felt walls are inadequate for the blowing winds, and I worry about the babies in our midst, the elderly and the children who I can hear sniffling in their sleep.

Signs of the invaders are strongest in the west. The far south is an unknown variable, since the others we’ve met are all coming from Kyrgyzstan, or the Pavlodar or Akmola oblasts, or Xinjiang. They all tell us the same thing: that the aliens and their machines have taken over any city and town with anything worth scavenging, and that they’re concentrating on coastal areas. Since Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country, Alibek and I theorize that their presence is sparser here. We’ve been able to map a rough trajectory of their regular patrols, and after the initial invasion, they’ve never ventured outside of a certain swinging radius around major cities or bodies of water.

We don’t know why they’re here. But they haven’t set their sights on the immense stretch of nearly deserted land in the center of Kazakhstan, on the remote tracts of the steppe that we travel, or the fortified mountains bordering its furthest reaches. Not yet. Their takeover was total, their integration into our media and our atmosphere seamless, designed to cause as little fuss and chance to fight back as possible. They seem unconcerned with rebellion, with hunting down the dregs of the human race, and I dread the reasoning behind that cool certainty. If we’re still living, I suspect it’s because there may be too few humans left on the face of this earth for them to worry about our little roving band. If they’ve let us wander this far, it’s because we’re not even worth the trouble it would take to quash us.

Whenever we settle after a long journey, when we find our way to relative safety, we have a feast. Daughters and mothers roll out plastic dastarkhans and long cushioned mats on the rolling wooden platforms used to carry cargo, now transformed into dining patios. Sons and fathers dig pits in the dirt to build fires, hauling aluminum kazans out of the wagons to make plov and soup and beshbarmak. Tea is a must, and the grandmothers busy themselves with its preparation, digging into the stores we’ve collected on our few careful forays into roadside shops. Grandfathers light the stoves inside the yurts, and start up games of tavla while smoking their now-precious cigarettes. Children run around playing soccer and tag and oshuq, a dice game played with the anklebones of sheep and goats.

For a little while life feels like what it used to be. This kind of picnic was typical for special occasions back before the aliens came. We would have celebrated Nauryz, the spring festival, only two weeks after the aliens struck, and Alibek tells me the village square would have been filled with tables laden with food and drink. A yurt would have been erected in its center, a nod to a nomadic past lost, stolen from the people of Kazakhstan by Josef Stalin, who forced the residents of this region into collective farms, to the ruin of countless communities.

No one could have imagined that we’d use these yurts again, that we’d raid the museum in a nearby town to retrieve the plans and the parts to reconstruct them, that Ramazan, who used to work as a docent there, would need to use all of his knowledge of the ancient craft to recreate their construction. Yura, automotive genius that he is, upgraded the design, using the shells of old trucks and vans to allow the yurts to move by their own power, guided by drivers. We call all the vehicles in the fleet big enough for sleeping in “yurts” now, though we’ve got a motley collection of cars and marshrutkas, the big vans once used to transport passengers from Zhuldyz to other cities and towns. On clear nights some of us bunk outside, though the sight of the stars still makes many people uneasy.

Sometimes I sleep in Alibek’s family yurt, and sometimes under the sky. It’s uncomfortable either way: the thin mats stacked one upon the other still leave my joints vulnerable, and I awake each morning stiff with pain. The disease in my genetic code, a form of skeletal dysplasia, means my joints scrape and smash instead of fitting together like hinges. Molly has it, and my dad has it, and he believes my lost great-great-uncle Nicholas, who died out here somewhere on the steppe, probably had it too, from the few photos my dad’s family possesses that record Nicholas’s short stature and turned-in knees. When I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in college, I thought about how interminable such a day and the many days that followed must have felt for Nicholas, his body contorted into positions it couldn’t take. His body, and his bones, so much like mine.

Nicholas’s bones lie somewhere here, in the endless steppe, along with the remnants of countless other exiles, travelers, civilizations. People in the States hardly ever think of Kazakhstan, and if they do they usually know nothing of the Greek, German, and Korean diaspora here. When Stalin decided to cleanse Russia proper of “enemy nationals” and increase the labor force available to cultivate cotton in the southern USSR, he exiled scores of Soviet citizens to the gulag and collective farms. Nicholas was among their number, and he never made it back home, not to Moscow, where he’d lived his entire life, and not to Greece.

“Why are you sitting alone, Jack Achilles?” Alibek has come up beside me, his forehead shining with sweat. He’s been helping with the cooking fires, and I can smell the roasting meats now, the smoke rising from the center of the camp as the sun sets over the steppe.

Ali’s the only one here who ever uses my middle name. It’s the result of a deal my parents struck long ago: my Irish mother got to pick our first names, and my Greek comic book geek father got to pick our middle ones, which is why Molly’s middle name is “Antiope.”

Even hearing Ali say that name, that name no one but my family ever calls me, sends a pang through me so strong that I have to close my eyes. He sits down next to me, on my right side so that he can hear me better. I can smell the musk rising from his skin, can feel the warmth of his bicep against mine.

“What’s on your mind?”

I will myself to open my eyes, to look over at him and smile. “I’m just tired.”

“Jack.” Ali shakes his head. “I can tell when you are worrying. You tap your cane. Like this.” He reaches out and clicks his fingernail against the cane’s plastic grip, and then slides his hand down to squeeze my knee. He knows how my joints ache now that I’m rationing pills, and helps me rub out the knots in my complaining muscles on nights when the pain has me in tears. “You have been doing it for a week, Jack Achilles. Ever since we turned north. Something is wrong.”

Everything’s wrong. It’s been wrong since the last time I saw Molly. The last time I thought I saw Molly, anyway. Her face, flickering on the screen. Her voice, oddly even, and the screen seizing up even more than it usually did. Our call had been ten minutes, tops, even though we often talked for an hour. “Everything’s fine, Jack. Chicago is fine. The videos are fake. Don’t believe everything you see.”

Ali’s eyes haven’t left my face. “I want to help, Jack. Will you let me?”

“You can’t.” A tear slides down my cheek, and I wipe it away. “It’s not…it’s okay, Ali. I’m just working through some things.”

I can’t tell him. Not yet. If he tries to talk me out of it, I’ll listen. I already know all of the reasons this is a bad plan, this idea I’ve been turning over in my head for days, but hearing those reasons in Ali’s voice will stop me in my tracks.

“But will you tell me what’s going on? When you’re ready?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“You promise?”

“Later.” I meet his eyes, signing the promise with my fingers.

Music drifts towards us across the plain. Whenever we gather for these meals, the songs start up. The music teachers with their dombyras play the classical folk songs, but there are pop songs, too, a mix of the sounds of the place we’ve left behind, the modern Kazakhstan that no longer exists, now that everything that’s living has returned to the steppe. It’s not only us out here. The grasslands teem with life. We see rabbits and foxes and saiga antelope, undisturbed by the trains and cars that once crossed through their habitats. The music of birds mixes with our own, and at night the dogs howl along the wolves.

Ali gets to his feet. “Okay, Jack.” He extends both of his hands to help me up. “Let’s go eat.”

Alibek and I were together when everything changed.

We’d gone for a walk through the village after we washed the dishes from dinner, rinsing them in soapy and then clear water in the plastic buckets outside the apartment. As Ali and I wandered, I could still see the last orange hints of the sun fading from the edge of the steppe, the golden glow cutting across Alibek’s cheekbones.

I had spent months trying to ignore how cute Alibek was, but it was an impossible task. With his shaggy black hair and warm brown eyes, Ali could have passed for a Kazakh pop star, even in his customary teacher’s uniform of a white button-down and practical slacks. His relatives were always hounding him about getting married, since at twenty-three he was expected to have some prospects. But he always ducked his head and blushed in response to their urging, and showed no sign of interest in the dozens of women in the village with crushes on him.

It made me wonder, but my wondering was in vain. I wasn’t out to anyone in Kazakhstan but other American volunteers, and they lived far from Zhuldyz. My Peace Corps recruiter had told me I’d need to stay in the closet for the duration of my service, and I had agreed. I’d agreed to all kinds of bargains to get here, and while it was worth it, I wished I lived in a world where I didn’t have to compromise so much of myself in order to move through it.

My phone beeped, and I pulled it out of my pocket to see a WhatsApp message from Molly. Pick up.

A second later, an unfamiliar number flashed across my screen. I answered, continuing to walk alongside Alibek. “Hey. Where are you calling from?”

“I don’t have much time.” I could barely hear Molly’s voice over the clangor on the line. “They’ll shut this call down too. Jack…they’re coming.”

I shifted the phone over to my other ear, trying to hear her better. “Who’s coming? What are you talking about?”

“The aliens. They’re real, Jack. They’re real, and they’ve been blocking the news about it. Taking the cities down one by one. But the resistance got word tonight that they’re taking everything from northern Kazakhstan to Afghanistan. They already got Russia, most of China. We think they—” A blast of noise swallowed her words. “They’re keeping the infrastructure, Jack. Trying to keep people from panicking as much as possible, so everything doesn’t get destroyed. What we don’t know is why.”

“I don’t understand.” Ali shot me a worried look. Above us, the sky had turned pitch black, night now fully fallen. “I talked to you just, like, three hours ago and everything was fine. Why—”

“It wasn’t me.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t me, Jack. They’ve been monitoring our data. Building programs that can imitate and automate brief conversations. That’s how they’re generating all this news, keeping everything seeming normal. It’s not just public broadcasts. They’re in calls and emails too. They’ve got enough on us to build digital versions of us all. Don’t trust anyone you can’t talk to in person, okay? I’m calling from a protected line, but it won’t be up much longer. We’re going underground. Get away from the cities, Jack.” She paused. “I love you. I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“Molly,” I said, my mouth dry, but the line was dead. I looked at Alibek, whose eyes were wide and fixed on the sky above us.

“Look up.” He stepped closer, taking my hand. “Jack… look up.”

I did, and saw nothing but blackness. “What are you—” My breath hitched as I worked out what he meant. Blackness. No stars; no clouds. A solid ceiling of black, from here to the horizon, over the whole of the desert steppe.

I shivered, searching for the moon, for signs of a distant star, but the blackness hung impenetrable. Then, slowly, with fine lines of dark gray running through it, the blackness began to crack.

I strained my eyes. Alibek’s fingers dug into my palm. Shapes started to detach themselves from the mass, their surfaces glinting under the moonlight as they parted to let it through. The star-veined blackness shifted, split, and suffused the welkin, until I could see exactly what it was made of—

“Ships. Oh, god, Ali—they’re ships.”

A thousand thick, blanketing the endless sky. I turned to Alibek, grasping his forearms. “Inside. We have to get inside.”

“Kaida?”

Where? They were above us, and any place below was as unsafe as another. “The high school. It’s close, and people will be gathering. Text everyone and tell them to meet us there. We’ll figure out what to do.”

Ali and I rushed through the village, as quickly as we were able, over the rocks and dirt in the dark, his arm steadying me. We passed a long stretch of small houses, and I could see the crowds beginning to emerge from their doorways, the word spreading of the strangeness above. A few young people were beginning to run, to break away from the buildings and head to the school at the center of the village, but in their wake they left the rest of us: the older people, the children, the ones who, for whatever reason, couldn’t get themselves to safety as swiftly. I grabbed Ali’s arm, slowing him. “I have to help them.”

He looked towards the apartment nearest to us, where an old woman was sitting, her eyes on the sky, worry beads in her hand. “I’ll help you too.”

“Your mom will worry, Ali.”

“I’ll tell her I’m okay. That we are both okay. She’ll understand.”

We joined up with a group of people who were already working out how to secure everyone rides over to the high school. A couple of cab drivers offered up seats in their cars, and a neighbor with a donkey cart was able to take a few others. I helped quickly rig up a reinforced rope lead to turn one of the wheeled pallets vendors took to the bazaar into a form of transport, and finally made my way alongside the motley collection of vehicles to the high school gymnasium with Alibek. We arrived to find most of the village inside, and searched the crowd for Alibek’s mother, who embraced us both when we found her.

We waited: in terror, we waited. The boys from the soccer fields, the girls from the English club, the old men who sat smoking near the magazine, the woman who worked there, her headscarf glittering in the darkness, its edges etched with shining white stones.

I kept dialing Molly, but there was no reply. After a while, I stopped, to try to save some of my cell battery. Around me people were checking the news using radios and phones, but there was nothing. Not a word of what had come from the sky. Tuning into these broadcasts, any viewer would have thought that everything was normal. They would never have known what had come to Earth.

We found out about the gas later.

Ali was the one who convinced the village to head out into the steppe. Not everyone wanted to go, but I told them what Molly had said about getting as far from the cities as we could. Zhuldyz certainly didn’t qualify as a city—the biggest city nearby was Shymkent, four hours away—but if the invaders were scanning for signs of infrastructure, they could wind up here eventually. Every second we stayed in Zhuldyz made us a target.

In the end almost everyone joined us. I don’t know what became of those who stayed behind.

If the gas hit them—if those huge, floating clouds enveloped them—their bodies crumbled into dust. We’ve seen it happen from afar, from the footage Aliya’s eagles brought back to us. That’s the only way we’ve witnessed the invaders’ work. We’ve never glimpsed the aliens themselves, but only their ships and vehicles, those black armored spheres that plunge from the sky and unfold into crab-like machines, made for mining or building or killing, resurfacing towns and extracting resources.

They could drop a bomb on us at any time. Though we stay off the grid, though we camouflage the yurts as best we can, if they wanted to they could locate and exterminate us easily with their unfathomable technology. That they haven’t only speaks to the fact that we aren’t a priority. We’re pests, nothing more. But I don’t doubt that they’ll deal with us eventually.

If we get to this base in Mongolia—if we go underground for the winter—that’s months more I’ve lost. Months where parts of the steppe may be impassable. If I’m going to get back to Molly and my parents—if I’m to have any hope of reaching the States—I have to go now. Take the route through the Polygon, where the aliens are avoiding the radioactive traces left by the testing of nuclear weapons there in the Soviet era, from what Aliya’s eagles have seen. Head through the desolate heart of the steppe, south of Karaganda, north of Kyzylorda, where few villages and even fewer cities lie. On my own, because I can’t ask anyone else to risk their lives. Too many have already died. Our entire neighboring village. Friends and family who were in Tashkent and Almaty and Astana the day the ships touched down.

“Is now later, Jack?” Alibek’s voice is soft in my ear. He’s lying beside me. We’ve chosen to sleep out under the stars tonight, on the edge of the camp, listening to the wind rustling through the grass. All the way from here to the Caspian Sea, where a man from Atyrau we met on the road claims there are secret submarines ferrying passengers to Azerbaijan. If I can get there, I’ll see. I don’t have a choice. I can’t abandon Molly, not if there’s any chance she and my parents are alive.

I turn on my side, making sure he can see my lips in the faint light from the nearby fire. “I’m going to do something really ill-advised, Ali.”

His eyes are dark in the flickering glow. “I know.”

“What do you mean, you know?”

He reaches out. Puts his hand on mine, where it lies on the mat between us. “I would go too, Jack. If it were my family. If it were Aliya—I would go too.”

I stare at him a moment, and then take his other hand. “Come with me,” I whisper. I don’t want to say it. I hate that I’m saying it. But my hands are curled around Alibek’s, and I can’t seem to let go.

He shakes his head. “I can’t go, Jack. I have to stay with them. They’re my family. But I—” He swallows. “I do not want to lose you.”

I’m still afraid of misreading signals. We’ve been using a multi-dimensional language, Alibek and I. Struggling to find the right signifier, across symbols and sounds and tongues and touch, to express precisely what we mean. But then Ali releases my hand, pressing his fingertips to my cheek, and brings his lips to mine.

I depart at noon the next day.

Alibek helps me pack up one of the smaller wagons, one set on a motorized tricycle. We’ve planned to tell anyone who asks that we’re heading to a bus station we passed along the road for supplies, but no one interferes.

When I’m ready, Ali travels with me until we’re out of sight of the camp, sitting beside me as I navigate the wagon over bumpy terrain. I don’t say goodbye to anyone else, even though it hurts to leave this way. I know they’ll try to stop me. I know they’d be right to do so. But I have to do this, either way.

I plan to find shelter where I can along the road. I’ve got medical supplies, though my crucial stash of pills keeps getting smaller, and food, and as much water as I can carry. I’ve got the iPad, if I can find Wi-Fi again to use it, and an atlas, and a compass. The way is easy enough for the first leg of this journey, though. I only need to follow the sunset.

Ali embraces me for a long time before letting me go. “Come back,” he says into my ear. “If you can, come back. Or maybe I will find you. Maybe we’ll find each other again.”

I nod, holding him tight. I know we never will. I drive away, leaving him to walk back to the camp, and try not to look back. I almost make it. I glance behind me once, and nearly turn the wagon around at the sight of Alibek there, receding into the steppe, standing motionless as I get further and further away.

But I don’t. I press my foot to the pedal, already feeling the little aches it sends up through my ankles and knees, leaving Alibek and Zhuldyz and Nicholas Eliades behind.

I’m no threat to the aliens, but I know there’s little chance that I’ll survive this journey. I try not to think of that, though. As I travel on, I think only of where I’m going. As the day darkens, I keep my eyes on the steppe, watching for invaders. On the steppe below, and the stars above.

© 2018 by Katharine Duckett

Katharine Duckett is a writer of weird fiction by night and works in science fiction and fantasy publishing by day. She is a a graduate of Viable Paradise, and her fiction has appeared in Interzone, Best of Apex Magazine: Volume I, Wilde Stories 2015: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, and is forthcoming in Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up to No Good from Upper Rubber Boot Press. Her debut book, Miranda in Milan, publishes next March.

The Things I Miss the Most
by Nisi Shawl

The talk. The sex. Somebody to trust…

Before the Grigsby Process my life was like a series of ads being skipped. I blacked out a lot. Had lots of seizures. So many that sometimes my learning software obsolesced before I could complete a semester. At home I avoided clothes—they’d just get peed in or tangle me up and hurt me. I averaged four grand mals a month, but there were strings of lesser “events” too, which made me the perfect candidate, as the doctor explained to my moms when I reached fourteen. That and my resistance to the usual drugs, and my age.

“She’s entering her second neuroplastic peak.” Dr. Skilla had us all in his old examination room. It was stuffy and crowded.

Mammai nodded. She’s Sicilian, so that meant “No.” She didn’t want me getting the Grigsby. Mombie put it into words for her, like she does: “Another gadget? I don’t think so. How this gonna be different than VNS?”

Dr. Skilla pushed his blond bangs straight back and licked his lips. “Vagus Nerve Stimulation has a success rate of 60 percent at 36 months after implantation, and is especially effective with younger patients. Julia, though, is outside the optimal—”

“Cut to the chase.” Mombie hates every minute spent in Private Space. She wanted to get away from the office and back on the Web. “If we’d a done the VNS first off insteada fartin around with drugs you wouldn’t have to try no experiments like this Artificial Interthalamic Adhesion. Amirite?”

Skilla looked surprised. Probably that a woman fluent in AAVE and Leet could pronounce “interthalamic.” Offended, too. “Surgery’s only recommended for highly refractory cases. We had to be sure—had to exhaust all the pharmacological options prior to moving on to non-pharmacological therapies, and each formulation requires a period of several months to test its adequacy for the patient and register inconvenient side effects. There was no way to have known we’d reach this point. Fortunately, new developments make AIA a real possibility.”

“I want to do it.” I don’t know why I said that. I mean, I had no idea then about Angelique.

Mombie looked stunned. “Chile—”

Mammai jumped in. On my side. “She want it, she have it.” She shook her head yes.

And that was that. They argued, of course. Even in 2036 brain surgery was a big deal—sawing open someone’s skull is no joke. But Mombie never denies Mammai what she wants, because she loves her. A thing I finally understand.

Apparently I stayed in a hospital the night before they put in my AIA. Apparently I was in there a couple of nights afterwards, too. I don’t remember. That’s how this stuff works.

OTOH, as Mombie would say, I remember plenty of incidents that never occurred.

For instance, my first meeting with Angelique. It was snowing, very rare these days. The white crystals clung to her dark hair, stuck to her striped and spotted furs. The sky churned with weather, grey on silver on dusk. In the shelter of a pine she stood alone, a cone of pinkish light falling toward her from the lamp across the street, her huge eyes dazzlingly beautiful. “Girl, why are you crying?” she asked me. Which made me laugh in recognition of the line referenced—I wasn’t crying, actually. But Peter Pan is my favorite. It’s a play about playing—something I would have needed friends to do.

According to what I found out later Angelique wasn’t there. Oppositional personas never are, per consensus reality. My ride home picked me up, and before it came I waited for it safe inside the community center, with all the other kids whose parents sent them there in the hope they’d form relationships with one another. But what I remember—what I believed before her death and in some sense still believe—is that she was waiting out there for me after choir practice and we walked home together and I was nine. Nine years old.

Five years ante surgery.

Angelique was my age. Always. How could she not be? As I’m told, she was me—the personality generated by the brain hemisphere that was split off during my callosotomy. In preparation for implanting the AIA, the major connection between my head’s halves—the corpus callosum, it’s called—was severed, along with a couple of other connections. Then the AIA was put in place, to funnel signals between the halves through there instead and filter out anything capable of causing a seizure.

Angelique had always been around, according to my restructured memories. Our initial meeting had felt fated—well, yes. Left, meet right. But in addition to an unreliable record of that first snow-hushed encounter, I had impressions of hearing of her earlier exploits, stories like flickering shadows or nonexistent flames: she was popular with other kids. Adults, too. She was a poet, a child prodigy—I’d read her work. It was published on several pages and I’d saved some of the most interesting pieces. Mine, I’m told, though I don’t remember writing them.

Nine is too young for what we were. My retroactive recollections of the time before the operation include hand-clasps, wrestling holds, casually draped arms. Though we always seemed to be by ourselves, it wasn’t till we turned fourteen—till the Grigsby—that our intimacy became more physical.

How could it? I know. Dreams aren’t physical. And Angelique was very much like a waking dream.

Masturbation is such a sneaky-sounding word. Besides, we didn’t just manipulate our—my—genitals. The softest brush of the back of her hand against my shoulder curled my toes.

Why didn’t I notice immediately that she never operated the door controls? They opened and she came in, or more usually was already there. She left with or without me by simply being gone. She never used my setup’s touch pad, either—I did all the searches she suggested and followed the links she sent in texts, and I made and found my own threads, too. By the time I noticed what was missing from it I had come up with my own version of Angelique’s existence and believed both its contradicting sides. She was me. She was herself.

I knew I was right.

Seizureless weeks became seizureless months. The surgery’s success seemed more and more self-evident, and gradually Mammai and Mombie grew accustomed to honoring the room lock I’d configured. I put on clothes most of the time, since it no longer felt so futile. And taking them off along with Angelique’s felt so good.

I can’t stop thinking about the last day. The last twenty-four hours we were together. I was seventeen. We were “studying.” Angelique sat on my bed so lightly the covers barely wrinkled. Or maybe they didn’t wrinkle at all.

At Mammai’s ping I swiped off the lock and let her in. Her frizzy ponytail swung side to side as she scanned the room. “Where at is your Angelique?” she asked. I pointed. “Okay.” She made a show of looking in the right direction, then turned back to me. Neither of my mothers ever pretended to talk to Angelique. “I leave this informational brochure for you to see later. When you are alone.”

Which was whenever I wanted to be. Which was never.

The door opened again without me getting a ping. Mombie leaned in. “You havin problems with your studies? With that analogy question? It might make more sense if you get out an mix with real people your own age. Now you ain‘t all the time naked and you takin an interest in how you look.” Pressure to relate to my supposed peers had increased with my neurotypicalness. “You be gettin better grades when you listen to how we want you to do. Don’t hafta rely on that clunky old AIA no more, accordin to what we hear.”

If I acted nice they left faster. “Okay. I’ll watch the brochure. But first I need to see if the Miss Splooge patterns fit better than Dressy-Dress. They have wider colors.” There. Nothing monosyllabic about that answer.

Angelique sucked her puckered lips to make big fake kissing noises. I scowled at her, then grinned to show I wasn’t genuinely mad. She smiled her gorgeous smile, like a fat-bottomed cupid’s bow.

Sure enough, Mammai joined Mombie at the room’s threshold. But she wasn’t quite ready to give up the inquisition. “How much higher are their price—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I interrupted. “Thirty day approval period.” Then I went into a long-winded enough of an explanation to drive them completely off and we were by ourselves at last. I set my tablet down on my carnation-molding nightstand and reached for Angelique’s plump upper arm.

She flashed her palm at me in warning. “Stop. Are you sure they’re gone?” Impatiently I picked the tablet back up and opened a surveillance window to show Mombie’s back retreating from my door—though nearer than it should be.

“You think they don’t know we fuck?” I asked. Mombie left the window’s frame. Mammai’s head replaced her.

“I think they’d rather they didn’t have to. What’s it cost to humor them?”

Precious seconds passed. The window cleared. The hairs at my neck’s nape stirred and lifted in Angelique’s damp breath. Then her lips pressed them flat, her teeth nipped the skin beneath, and as I turned and clutched her to me her tongue slicked half a circle around my throat. Instead of completing it, she lapped the tender triangle under my jaw and chin. I tilted my head up to feed her, then down to devour her mouth.

I held her. I held the world. Now I’m empty.

Such pleasure that night. After we tired, we slept. In the morning we woke curled together. Everything as usual. I wouldn’t change that if I could.

I made tea, eggs, and toast in the kitchen and brought them in on a tray. Breakfast in bed. I can’t recall—ever—her eating or drinking anything, but we talked and eventually it was all gone.

Our top topic was music. Angelique turned me on to jazz. Not that fake-hallelujah stuff they play in churches that’s supposed to make you join in. The real thing.

She got me to buy a keyboard for my tablet. “Here and here and here.” She arched my fingers—too long, we’d decided, for a sax or guitar interface—and poised their tips on the ivory-colored oblongs.

“That’s still a C minor?”

“The F note makes it a C sus 4. Same if it was major. Now add a low A and double the F in that lower octave.”

The chord rang like sleigh bells, crisp and metallic. “What is it?”

Angelique laughed. “You want a name? Call it what you want. Murgatroyd. Throckmorton.”

Our second choice of topic was star worship. She went for old people like Gonzalez and Hudson. They made me nervous, tottering around their modified circuits, always on the verge of collapsing, it seemed, despite the guardrails and nets and cushions surrounding the seniors’ courses. I crammed them into the tablet’s smallest window and projected Audie T and Scrapple from the Apple and Martha Vineyard on the wall screen. Audie jangled when she walked or jogged or skipped or jumped over obstacles, with the musical clash of her twentieth century-style bling. Martha wore quilted skirts like ruffs, multicolored tutus that rendered her leaps for marginal targets tougher to execute but fun to watch. She twirled excitedly while waiting her turn to run the course. Scrapple painted his body with a variety of patterns and always fussed at perceived attempts to mess them up. This morning he was threatening Audie with dismemberment for allegedly smearing his leopard markings.

“You know they make that shit up,” Angelique said.

“‘That shit’?” I repeated, snarking it.

“It’s all an act to attract sponsors.”

“Works, doesn’t it?”

“So would authenticity.”

Sometimes our talks became arguments. I hated them then. Love them now. Or anyway, I long to have them back.

The third most popular topic rotated a bit, usually between my health, my moms’ increasing insistence on a non-Angelique social life, and plans for the future. All related. I had an appointment at the hospital in the afternoon, so perversely we avoided talking about anything to do with the improvement in my condition. I didn’t tell her what the brochure had shown me when I watched it in the kitchen that morning. But if she was me, she must have known. Must have.

When our argument over who in the game to cheer for turned stale, I switched to wondering out loud what my moms found deficient about her. I fixated on how even the wind pushed things around but Angelique didn’t: leaves and branches tossing in the breeze. Visible effects of things invisible to see. If we could change that, they’d cease their objections, right?

“Tilt it back,” I told her, pointing at my Eames lounger. Obligingly, she settled onto the teal mohair cushion-covers. But the seat’s incline stayed stubbornly at 40 degrees until, encouraged by Angelique’s pats, I joined her on its edge and used my long legs to push us out of true.

“It’s observer interference,” I said, letting the chair’s legs settle down again. This was the one serious thing we seriously fought over: what made her real. Sometimes we changed sides, though neither of us ever would give in.

“You mean, I’m here because you see me? Hear me?” She pinched my nose lightly. “Feel me?”

“Mmm-hmm.” I nuzzled the fold of her armpit. “Smell you. Taste you.”

“So if you were everywhere at once, I would be everywhere at once too.”

“And if I die—when I die—you’ll disappear.” The logical conclusion. The one that made me cringe and change.

“Die?” Laughing bravely, fakely, she shook an admonishing finger in my face. “No! Nononono! You’re rich—you can’t die!” She snaked one arm between me and the scoop of the seatback, wrapped the other around my sweatered curves to meet it and hold me tight. I lost sight of her face. Laughter or sobs now? “Swear you’ll never die! Swear we’ll live forever!”

I swore. According to what I’ve been told, it was a promise asked of and given to myself.

My minder chimed for school. I minimized the game’s feed and opened the latest module: historical precedents for restricting political representation. Recorded lecture, then an essay prompt, then access to a forum. Angelique helped with the essay and gave me feedback on my forum posts before I sent them in. “Too involved,” she complained when I tried arguing that nonhuman intelligences like sharks and foxes deserved a voice in government too, now the pendulum was reversing. “That’s, what, three points in one paragraph?”

“But they’re true!” I protested.

“Doesn’t matter. Copy and delete.” Trailing her smooth fingers along the part in my hair. “Send the first sentence; save the rest to use later.”

She was right. I got twelve replies, and a lively conversation in which I not only brought forth my other assertions but heard new proof of them. Who knew snails were so devious? Before we finished answering all the threads my minder chimed again. “Not another module,” I groaned. No. It was my hospital appointment already. Annual follow-up on the success of my Grigsby. And the choice the brochure presented.

Angelique and I chose my outfit: an orange-and-violet polka-dot tent dress and spangled silver tights. Kind of a circus theme. Miss Splooge’s specialty. I’ve kept it, but I don’t wear it anymore.

“Your Angelique comin along?” Mombie asked when we found her waiting out on the porch for our ride. “I booked for four, in case.” A brown Placid pulled around the cul-de-sac’s corner as she spoke.

“Yeah. Where’s Mammai?”

“Here I am.” She stepped out through the front door and we went down the steps and got in the Placid. I reminded Mammai to leave room for Angelique in the middle of the back seat. She had made a joke out of sitting on Mammai’s lap that first trip to see Dr. Skilla, but of course I wasn’t fooled.

Mombie and the contingency driver talked about the game I guess—I don’t recall. I was splicing both Angelique’s hands to mine, twisting to face her and knotting our fingers tight. Anxious.

Skilla had a new office on the sixth floor. We got out of our ride on the third. “Stairs this way,” Mombie said. “Use it or lose it. Cmon.”

Angelique passed me on the way up but waited on the last landing. Mammai opened the fire door for us. Then we had to find the elevators anyway, to check the directory.

The new examination room was part of a corner suite of epileptologists who shared a single reception desk. Seconds after sitting down in a carpeted lounge sort of area we were admitted. A nurse unnecessarily took my height, weight, temperature, pulse, and blood pressure, and used—I am not making this up—a little rubber mallet to tap my knee and test the speed of my reflexes. Then he left us to ourselves long enough that Mombie stood up and scouted the room for inactivated Web access points. Would she really dare open one? We were the only people around at the moment, but potentially exposing other patients entering what was supposed to be Private Space could mean a big fine. Angelique and I watched her anxiously.

At last Skilla showed. Mombie subsided. Paging through my file via his proprietary display, the doctor hummed a happy-sounding tune. “Excellent!” He looked away from the blank wall where he’d been projecting. “Nearly four years without an event. I think it’s safe to say you’re cured!”

Mammai smiled a small, tentative smile. But Mombie frowned. “That it? How we spozed to handle that other thing we brung up?”

“Yes, well, when we turn off the AIA the situation with the Oppositional will resolve itself.”

I edged closer to Angelique on the love seat. “What do you mean, ‘when’ we turn it off?”

“As per the brochure, removal’s unnecessary. And far too invasive. The organic adhesion that’s built up mimics the AIA’s structure fairly strictly, and in some cases the two are indistinguishable. Much easier to simply flip off the bridging current and leave the disabled hardware in place.”

“You—you already decided on doing this?” Mammai only shook her head in agreement; she didn’t talk much around strangers.

“It’s in the literature I sent Ms. Klaver.”

Mombie cut her eyes away from mine. Anger fought a thrill of uneasiness. “We ast was there a risk of your seizures startin up again. Tell her.”

“No risk. The natural adhesion has essentially taken over the AIA’s function. The Grigsby Process is a bit experimental, even today,” he admitted. “But if there’s a recurrence we can turn your AIA back on. Easily.”

A soft weight against my side: Angelique’s warm, sweet-scented flesh. I couldn’t lose her. I wouldn’t.

Nothing in the brochure had hinted at it.

Mombie, though—“That other thing we brung up”? Which the doctor blandly assured her would be resolved—which involved my Oppositional—that sounded potentially problematic. “What if you don’t turn the AIA off? If I don’t authorize it?” I asked. “What if I want to keep things how they are?”

A momentary silence. Dr. Skilla seemed puzzled. “Why?” he asked. “I’ve never had a patient refuse at this stage—wait!” He leaned toward the wall again, thumbing virtual pages. “Ms. Platto reported that you’ve become attached to your Oppositional, even named it—‘Angelique,’ right?—and that it seems to impede your social progress. Don’t let an unfortunate side effect dictate your behavior.”

Dictate? My Angelique?

“Besides,” he added, “technically, for now, you’re a minor.”

Mammai sat forward and laid a spidery hand on my sleeve. “It is for your good.” Mammai’s words were valuable in their scarcity.

Mombie faced me full on at last. “You gotta trust us. Everything gonna be all right.”

Everything would be all right. The situation would “resolve.”

I looked at Angelique. Her eyes were wide. She was scared. Like me. But according to her argument, she was real, with or without me. Which I believed when she didn’t. And the natural adhesion had already taken over from the AIA. And they could turn it back on easily. That would surely restore her. Surely.

“Okay.”

The switch was internal; they used a thing like a light-up tiara to move it. I put on the tiara. Felt nothing. I took it off and Angelique was gone.

I put the tiara back on and made them make the AIA work again. And again. And again.

She stayed gone. Gone for good.

Dr. Skilla and his techs say there’s no reason why. None they know. It’s so experimental. Give it time.

How many years.

Once in a while, yeah, I see her out of the corner of my eye, catch a glimpse of that adorable ghost. A lie.

The sex; the talk.

Somebody to trust.

(Editors’ Note: “The Things I Miss the Most” is read by Stephanie Malia Morris on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 24B.)

© 2018 by Nisi Shawl

Nisi Shawl wrote the AfroRetroFuturist novel Everfair, a Nebula Award finalist set in an imaginary Utopia in the Congo; and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award-winning story collection Filter House. Recent fiction includes “Sunshine of Your Love” in the disability-themed anthology The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked, and another Steely Dan-inspired story, “The Best Friend We Never Had,” on the Apex Magazine website. She’s the co-author, with Cynthia Ward, of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. With K. Tempest Bradford she teaches courses on inclusivity expanding from this original foundation.

Abigail Dreams of Weather
by Stu West

Everything is broken. The screen that takes up one entire wall of the play area is broken, cracked from corner to corner. There’s nothing usable in the games and toys cupboard, which is piled high with neatly stacked boxes full of mismatched parts and flat batteries. The few handhelds that work at all are agonizingly slow and manage to connect to the wifi for five minutes out of every hour.

The play area is boring, but at least it’s colorful. Abigail and the others come here for a couple of hours every day just to spend some time away from the washed-out greys and greens of the main ward. Low-technology entertainments help ease the boredom a little. Lei and Simon have a set of playing cards scavenged from the remains of at least three different decks. The Kid has his drawing pad and Lynn sits with a beaten-up old paperback. Sometimes Abigail reads too, but today she just wants to daydream by the window, looking down at the street through the gap between buildings or up at the lid over the station.

“I feel sick,” the Kid says, suddenly.

“You always feel sick,” Abigail says. The Kid is a strange color, but then his color is always a little strange. Abigail has not had a lot of practice looking at sickly white people, so she can’t tell if it’s currently worse than usual.

“No, I mean really sick,” the Kid says and then smoothly vomits a puddle of puke onto the floor between his feet. The other kids jump back, making various yuck sounds, and Abigail starts looking around for a nurse, but the Kid is not done. He’s stumbling around the play area with the spew coming out of his mouth in steady waves, seeping down his pajama front and splattering across the books and toys. Lei and Simon’s abandoned playing cards are quickly glued together in a chunky heap. Everything in this room has been made to be as wipe-clean as humanly possible, but even the highest quality molded plastic fittings and heat-sealed laminates can’t hold out against this tidal onslaught of regurgitation.

The Kid keeps barfing until one of the nurses comes over, yanks his central line out from under his pajama top and pushes the contents of a syringe down it. By this time he’s gone a color so strange even Abigail can see it doesn’t look right, a sort of fluorescent green. The drugs start working straight away though, and within moments the Kid’s stomach has stopped emptying itself through his mouth and his complexion is starting to go back to whatever its usual shade is.

An attendant comes with a wipe-cloth to take care of the mess. But when he sees the full extent of the Kid’s spectacular ralph—with splatter down the back of the wall heaters, books gummed shut, and solid food wedged into the gaps in the colorful plastic chairs—he throws them all out of the play area and declares it closed until it can be deep-cleaned.

“When will that be?” Abigail asks and he tells her he doesn’t know, that the station is short-staffed this week because of the meteor alert.

And so saying, he pulls down the quarantine shutters and seals off the play area from the rest of the ward.

Abigail likes spending time in the play area, even though being in there attracts attention to her and that usually makes bad things happen. Yesterday a nurse noticed her and took her away to draw blood, then a doctor noticed her and took her away to give her a shot, then another nurse noticed her and took her away to draw more blood. Abigail told the nurse she had given already, pulled up her sleeve and showed the fresh round Band-Aid in the crook of her elbow, but adults don’t like little girls telling them what to do, so the nurse put another needle in her vein and took more anyway.

Even the short amount of time she spent in the play area today pre-puke must have been enough for someone to notice her because there’s an orderly by her bed with a wheelchair, waiting to take her away.

The orderly is talking to someone, and when Abigail gets closer she realizes it’s her mother. It’s the afternoon, so she would normally be at work. Abigail is delighted to see her for about half a second, before she remembers to be suspicious.

“Mom, why are you here?” she says, warily.

Her mother takes her hand. “Honey, we need to go next door. It’s time for your treatment.”

“No,” Abigail says. “No, I don’t want a treatment. I had one a couple of days ago. I don’t need another one.”

“The doctors say you do,” her mother says. Abigail notices that a doctor and a nurse are hovering nearby.

“It’s horrible!” she shouts. “I don’t want it! I won’t let you!”

“You’ve done very well so far with the treatments,” says her mother, who is being very calm. “But you need to have the rest so you’ll get better. There are only a few more left.”

“I don’t need any more. I feel fine,” Abigail says.

“I know you do honey, because the treatments are working. But you remember how you were when we brought you here.” Her mother sits there holding Abigail’s hand while she screams and cries, but because Abigail does remember the time a few weeks before when she nearly died, she eventually lets them put her in the chair and wheel her down the hall to the elevator.

The elevator is opposite the nurse’s station. You have to turn a key in a lock to go to the roof, which is the easiest way to get to the building next door. Abigail, her mother, and the orderly get in the elevator, but then there’s a pause. They’re not going anywhere. Abigail’s throat is sore from crying and she doesn’t want to ask what’s going on, but she hears the orderly patting his pockets. He can’t find his keys. He hesitates, maybe thinking about going back to find them, but instead when he thinks she isn’t looking he takes a coin out of his pocket and uses that to turn the lock.

Orderlies don’t like to waste any time. The instant the elevator doors open he’s pushing the wheelchair into the covered metal walkway that links the two buildings’ roofs together. Between the elevator and the walkway there’s an instant when Abigail gets a glimpse of the open roof and the view over the station. She twists in her seat, trying to see more, and says, “Can I take a look at the roof, please, just for a second?”

“Sorry,” the orderly says, and keeps pushing. Her mother says something about how it’s dangerous to be out on the roof just now and maybe there’s somewhere else they can go later.

Abigail always wants to spend time in open spaces. Her favorite photograph is from when she was too young to remember. It was taken just after she was born, a little while before they came to live here on the station. Her parents are in the garden at her grandmother’s house. She’s in her mother’s arms. There are trees and soil, clouds in the sky and mountains in the background, and a hint of blue from the ocean.

She used to pester her parents constantly with questions about living on a planet. How did it feel to live in a place with a horizon, and seasons, and wind? How did the air smell in the morning, and after the sun had gone down? And whenever she could she got them to take her to the station park, the reservoir, the butterfly garden. Anywhere with open space or water or plants.

Then she had to come here to the hospital, and spend months trapped in well-scrubbed little rooms with polished floors, breathing ultrafiltered low-particulate air until it made her want to scream. She had started to forget how it felt to dream of a bigger world.

But that was before this morning, when she learned how to get up to the roof, which is the biggest open space of all.

In the treatment room, the nurses do all sorts of things to try and distract her, but she ignores them all. She just wants to sit, red-eyed and miserable, and watch the bag of glowing yellow fluid. They hook it up to a vein in her arm and the bag shrivels as it slowly empties itself into her.

It’s as horrible as she remembers. She can feel the stuff crawling around under her skin. When the bag is empty the orderly takes Abigail back to bed and her mother kisses her goodbye and goes back to work. She spends a few hours just lying there, not eating or talking, staring at nothing. But by dinnertime she’s sitting up a little and paying attention to what’s going on again.

The Kid and his father are sitting in the corner sketching together, Lynn is lying on her bed inhaling medicine through a face mask, and Lei and Simon have assembled a new deck of cards as well as a table of random junk and are playing a game they insist is Tri-Dimensional Cribbage.

One of the Vampires is examining Lei’s arm, looking for a place to put a new IV. Everyone started calling these nurses Vampires because the first thing they do when they meet you is look at your veins, and also because the Kid can’t pronounce the word phlebotomist. Lei had a growth spurt last year that has left him incredibly clumsy, and he can’t seem to go a day without smacking his IV on something and knocking it loose. The nurses always think he’s on the verge of being discharged, so they keep putting these flimsy little IVs in his arms and the back of his hands, instead of something more long-term like the Kid’s central line. Lei’s arms are covered with poultices to soothe the places where old IVs got inflamed and had to be taken out.

The Vampire manages to find a vein for the new IV, puts it in and leaves, muttering darkly about needing to use a vein in Lei’s foot next time. Abigail thinks that would last about an hour and a half tops.

“You know what I’d do if I was in charge,” the Kid says. “Whenever there was a meteor alert I’d use the meteors to build stuff, instead of sending space ships to blow them up.” He has drawn a picture to illustrate this idea and he shows it to his father and the others. In the drawing, the station looks like a cake slice with ice cream scoops attached to the bottom, floating in space that’s full of rocks and angels. Some of the rocks are flying into the scoops, catcher’s mitt style.

The Kid’s father comes to visit every evening, without fail, when he gets done his shift at the station turbines. They always sit together like this, sketching or doing jigsaw puzzles, the Kid wizened and tiny in his pajamas and his father broad-shouldered, stocky and shiny bald in his overalls.

Abigail is thinking about living on a planet again, and after visiting hours are over she starts showing Lynn her favorite landscapes. Lynn has something like five younger brothers and carries around a permanent air of Sensible Older Sister. This really got on Abigail’s nerves until a couple of times when the facade cracked and Lynn just lost her shit and started screaming and shouting because of some totally minor inconvenience. After that she felt like she could relate more to Lynn as a person and they started being friends.

Lynn is a white girl with straight black hair usually tied back in a ponytail and whenever she’s on her feet she drags an IV stand around with her. She is also incredibly skinny and no matter what the doctors try, like sticking a feeding tube up her nose overnight, she never puts on any weight. Abigail, who has always been a short, thick girl, was a little envious until Lynn showed her how you have to suppress the gag reflex when the feeding tube goes down your throat. After that, Abigail stopped daydreaming about what it would be like to be that thin.

“When I get to a planet I’ll visit here,” Abigail says, showing Lynn a picture of a desert, “and here,” a snowy mountaintop, “but I’ll want to end up living here,” a house by the sea.

“I hated living on a planet,” Lynn says. “I never knew when there would be a smog alert, or the pollen count would suddenly shoot up, or there would be a heat wave, and I would get sick. It was horrible.”

“I think living on a station is horrible,” Abigail says. “The air smells the same every single day. It always smells of nothing. Everything is the same all the time. It’s so boring.”

“I like boring,” Lynn says. “Boring and predictable is good.”

Simon says, “I don’t think station life is predictable. It’s like we’re floating through space in a big glass soap bubble. What’s predictable about that?”

“I keep hearing the nurses talk about how this is the biggest meteor shower they’ve ever seen,” Lei says. “If one hits the station and smashes it to pieces, that won’t be very predictable.”

“Well, I’m not worried,” Lynn says. “I’ve never heard of that happening.”

“I bet they’d keep it quiet if it did happen,” the Kid says. “But I heard about a station where something hit the gravity controls and everyone was floating for a month.”

“See, I think floating would be much worse than pollen,” Abigail says.

“No, because pollen happened all the time and floating never has. But if it ever did happen it would probably make me feel pretty sick.”

“It would probably make me be pretty sick,” the Kid says.

“How would that be different from every other day?” Abigail asks.

“’Cause it would be zero-gravity puke,” the Kid says. “Floating everywhere!” He’s lurching around the room zombie-style making barf noises when one of the nurses comes in to turn out the lights and tell everyone to settle down.

After breakfast, Lei and Simon’s epic card game continues. Simon keeps pretending to forget which game they’re playing, shouting “Snap!” and “Gin rummy!” at inappropriate times. He’s obviously enjoying how much this annoys Lei, who starts shouting, “Why can’t you take it seriously?” But Abigail notices that he takes it seriously enough so it doesn’t start feeling like a waste of time, and Lei keeps playing.

All the same, the game is done before lunch. A group of nurses and orderlies descend on Simon’s bed and pack up his things so they can move him next door, to the adult hospital. They say it’s to make things easier for his medical team, so they don’t have to keep sending him over there. Simon complains, but it gets him nowhere. He’s gone within minutes.

There’s a big empty space where his bed and locker used to be. It hits Lei the hardest. “We all have to go next door sometimes,” he says to a nurse. “How come they aren’t moving the rest of us over there too?”

“They probably will,” the nurse says. “They’re trying to find room over there for everyone so they can close this building until the alert is over.”

Lei cheers up a little when he hears that, and for a while he brightens whenever he sees any adult he doesn’t recognize walking up the hall, but it always just turns out to be some military person who is there because of the alert. By the next day he has settled into a semipermanent sulk. “I wonder what Simon’s doing now,” he says at lunch, chewing on a mouthful of hospital toast.

“You should write him a message,” Lynn says, not looking up from her book.

“I’ve been trying. I can’t think of anything to say. It’s not like anything ever happens here worth telling him about.”

“Just tell him you love him and you miss him!” Abigail says.

“Yeah, very good,” Lei says. “This is why it’s useless to ask for suggestions from girls.”

Abigail and Lynn exchange a look and shake their heads.

Lei’s mother comes to visit and soon she is also shaking her head. “I don’t like to see you this way,” she says. “Being in this hospital environment for so long is not having a good effect.”

“Mrs. Xiao, the hospital has a little garden we can go to with adult supervision,” Abigail says. “You could take us down there for a while if you think it would help.” The garden is nothing special, basically just a couple of flower planters and some park benches with memorial plaques, but at least it’s a change from the ward.

“Yes! Excellent idea,” Mrs. Xiao says. “We will go on an outing. Is everyone able to walk? Okay Lynn, I will get you a chair.”

The nurses don’t like the idea of patients leaving the ward during a staff shortage, but Mrs. Xiao is not interested. “Nonsense,” she says. “It is all very well to give these children medicine, but if you want them to be healthy you cannot neglect their happiness.” Mrs. Xiao is small and unassuming, but she runs a community center somewhere in the Amidships and she is used to getting things done. The nurses don’t know what hit them. A wheelchair is quickly found for Lynn.

As they’re leaving the ward a doctor comes to examine the Kid, so he has to stay behind, but Mrs. Xiao takes the others down to the garden. Almost. The entrance is closed and locked. “Please swipe your staff ID card to proceed,” the entry console says.

“We will find someone with a card,” Mrs. Xiao says, but there is no one. Even the shops and cafe are closed today.

“We just want to sit in the garden for a while and look at the flowers,” Abigail says to the console.

“Unfortunately, the garden is closed due to the meteor alert,” the console says. “Please return to your ward and watch one of the many excellent nature documentaries available on the view screen of your play area.”

Even Mrs. Xiao’s legendary powers of persuasion have no effect on a computer. They have no choice but to turn around and go back to the ward.

They get back just as all the nurses are leaving. They’re needed elsewhere in the station so they’re leaving the janitor in charge, the head nurse tells them. He can help with most nonmedical things, and if there’s an emergency he knows who to call.

“What happened to moving the rest of us to the adult hospital?” Lei asks.

“We ran out of time,” the nurse says, and vanishes into the elevator.

The second after she’s gone, the janitor stands up from behind the nurses’ station and goes to sit in the toilet with his newspaper.

The hallway is empty. The shutters are still down on the play area. And Lei looks so miserable Abigail can’t stand it. It’s finally time. She says, “Lei, if you want we can go see Simon in the other hospital.” She tells him about the broken elevator lock.

At the thought of seeing Simon again, Lei actually smiles. “This is brilliant,” he says. “We could do it.”

“I’m not hearing this,” Lynn says, slouching lower in her bed and hiding behind her book.

“I could take some drawings with me,” Abigail says. “Nobody pays any attention to a kid carrying an art project around a hospital.”

“Okay, actually I am hearing this and it sounds incredibly dangerous,” Lynn says. She has gone into full-blown Big Sister Mode. “You’re both here for medical treatment. You can’t just go leaving the hospital because you’re bored.”

“We’re not leaving. We’ll be in a hospital the entire time,” Abigail says. “If either of us needs a doctor while we’re over there we’ll be surrounded by them.”

“Not while you’re up on the roof. And by the way, it can’t be safe to be up on the roof during a meteor alert.”

“C’mon Lynn,” Lei says. “If a meteor ever did hit us it’s not like it would do any good to be inside a building. But that’s not going to happen anyway. All the adults have disappeared because everyone who can fly a spacecraft is out there firing lasers at rocks instead of down here doing their usual job.”

“The janitor’s going to ask where you are, eventually,” she says.

“Just tell him we didn’t see him at his desk so went looking for him.”

“I don’t like lying to adults,” Lynn says.

“You could come with us instead, and then you wouldn’t have to lie,” Lei says.

“I’m coming with you,” the Kid says.

This catches everyone off guard. They look over at the Kid. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed with his shoes on, laced up, ready to go on an adventure.

“Oh no, honey,” Abigail says. “No, you can’t. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sick of getting left behind while people do fun stuff,” the Kid says. “If you try I’m gonna scream and scream until the janitor comes to find out what’s happening. And I’m gonna tell him.”

There’s no way they can take the Kid, with his weird coloring, his central line and his totally unpredictable vomiting habit, traipsing around unknown hospital wards, but the Kid refuses to hear it. “If you’re going, I’m coming with you,” he says.

Lei tries to bargain him down and manages to get the Kid to say that he’s not really interested in going to the other hospital. What he wants to do is get out on the roof for a close-up look at the Lid.

“You know how when you’re walking on the street during the day the dome over the station just looks blue?” the Kid says. “That’s not what the Lid looks like from up close, like on the roof of a big building like this. You can see right through it. We can look at all the meteor alert ships up there.”

Even Abigail, whose parents have always worked in places where they make laser cannons and defense shielding and who is pretty jaded on the subject of spaceships, has to admit that sounds like it could be pretty cool.

“How about if we took you up to the roof for a few minutes before we go across to the adult hospital?” she starts to ask, but she’s cut off by the sound of Lynn sighing and unhooking herself from the IV stand.

“I’ll come up there with you,” she says. “If I don’t, someone’s just going to end up falling off the building or getting stuck in an air vent or something.”

Lynn’s wheelchair has vanished, so she has to walk with them, slowly, to the elevator. Then Abigail turns a coin in the lock and seconds later they’re on the roof.

The first one to move is the Kid, who zips through the still-opening doors shouting that he wants to look at the ships. Lynn and Lei follow him out, yelling to stay away from the building edge, but what he actually does is head for the center of the roof and stop dead, staring straight upward.

He’s not in any danger, so before Abigail goes after him she wants to have a moment alone in this high, open space. The elevator entrance is protected by a metal overhang, and once Abigail gets out past that she can see that the Lid looks just like the Kid said, with a clear view through to the blackness of space. But right now she’s more interested in what she can see of the city.

There’s a vent stack near the edge of the roof, so she climbs up on it to get a better view. The vent goes all the way down into darkness but it’s covered by a thin wire mesh that creaks and sags as she steps onto it. Now she has a clear view, but before taking it in she first closes her eyes and imagines that instead of the usual still, stuffy air of the station she feels wind against her face, and drops of moisture. Then she opens her eyes, following the curve of the Lid as it changes from the overhead midnight black to its usual perfect summer blue as it extends into the distance, ending in a haze at the far station wall. She feels the change in her eyes as they relearn how to focus on something far away after weeks of being constantly brought up short by the walls and ceilings of hospital rooms.

If Abigail was on a planet now, the blocky grey maintenance shutters clapped down over the tops of buildings would be thunderclouds. The service drones gliding across intersections would be massive insects or large birds. The rooftop pools would be the oceans and lakes she swims through in her dreams.

She takes a moment and breathes deep, then turns, jumps down and goes to join the others.

Lynn is starting to look a bit peaky, unhooked from her IV and having to walk around after the Kid, who is more animated than Abigail has ever seen him. He’s looking up, pointing, talking about all sorts of technical space stuff and just about bouncing on the spot with excitement. When Abigail looks where he’s pointing, the first thing she notices is that she can see the structure of the Lid: an intricate honeycomb mesh around huge transparent panels. And through the panels, in the distance above the station, where the Kid had hoped to see a few spacecraft, there are instead hundreds of ships, all in different sizes and designs, wheeling and diving and swooping, joining formation and breaking off and pulsing with blasts of laser fire.

“It’s… ahh,” the Kid says. For a moment he can’t complete the sentence. “It’s what I wanted.”

“It’s amazing,” Lei says.

“I can’t look up for too long. Makes me feel dizzy,” Lynn says. “But it’s pretty cool.”

“Is that supposed to happen?” Abigail says, pointing. One of the smaller ships, designed to look like a metallic dragonfly, has gone into a spin, its long, thin wings whipping through the surrounding space, only missing nearby craft by what seems from this angle to be inches.

“No! He must’ve hit some space debris,” the Kid says. “I hope he can straighten up.”

But instead two other ships get onto the dragonfly’s tail and blast its wings off, leaving the body of the ship spinning like a top, now a tiny pellet instead of two sets of whirling blades.

One of the severed wings veers off out of view. The other drops directly toward where Abigail is standing. It’s laid out flat, a rugged triangle of molded metal broader than the hospital rooftop.

It happens fast. Lei watches hypnotized as the wing falls at them, then once it’s only slightly above the Lid he shouts “Oh shit!” and dives to the ground, taking Lynn and the Kid with him.

“It’s okay! It’s going to burn up on the shield!” Abigail shouts, left standing there alone with the others at her feet. As she says it, a bolt of light bursts across the sky and the wing, big as it is, totally vanishes.

There’s dead silence for about a second and then shrapnel from the burn-up starts pounding off the Lid, whamwhamwham, whamwhamwham. Abigail and the others have their hands clapped to their ears and the sounds keep coming, occasionally building up to an eardrum-bursting whamwhamWHAMWHAMwham. Everyone’s shouting at the top of their voices but no one can hear a word.

Finally it tails off and there’s only the occasional plink and thud from above. The Kid is the first back to his feet. “That. Was. Cool,” he says. He still has the same strange coloring as always, but aside from that he seems like a different kid.

Lei is up next, nursing his hand. “I think I hit my IV,” he says.

Lynn gets up last. She’s breathing heavily and moving slowly. It looks like it’s taking a lot of effort for her to stay on her feet. Abigail catches Lei’s eye and jerks her head in the direction of the elevator.

“I think maybe we should head back now,” Lei says. “That’s probably enough—”

Then a maintenance drone whips by his head, the flame of its blowtorch only inches away from his face. It’s so unbelievably dangerous that it takes him a moment to register it actually happened. “What the hell?” he says. “Right in my face! Those things are supposed to have safety settings.”

“Unless it’s on emergency mode when no one’s supposed to be up here,” Abigail says, looking up. “Could the Lid have got cracked?”

Dozens more drones are flying up over the edge of the building, going at top speed instead of making their usual slow, cautious movements. Many of the drones have equipped sharp tools or gas burners. “Back to the elevator, now!” Lei shouts. “Stay low!”

Now Abigail looks up and sees steel shutters telescoping out of the honeycomb mesh down toward the roof. “They’re going to seal off this part of the Lid!” she shouts.

“Go go go, get off the roof!”

Lynn makes it about ten steps and then she stops. “Not going to make it,” she says. “Need to leave me.”

“We’ll carry you!” Abigail says. “Lei, take your side.” Lei is maybe twice Abigail’s size so it’s a pretty lopsided lift, but together they manage to get Lynn off the ground. It’s just as well she weighs almost nothing. They carry her a few steps, then Lynn takes a couple of steps without them, then they lift her again. The Kid keeps pace with them, sneaking glances back up at the Lid whenever they have to stop. By the time they get to the edge of the roof, the shutter has reached the elevator overhang, but they duck under it and they’re on the safe side when it comes down and seals off the damaged section.

Lynn has overexerted herself. She’s taking great heaving, rasping breaths but even so she can’t seem to get enough air in. She contorts herself over a railing, trying to give her lungs as much room to expand as possible. Lei asks if he should go and get a doctor but she just holds her hand up to indicate no, unable to get any words out.

Finally, after a couple of minutes of this, her breathing slows and she starts to have a coughing fit, and they can see things are returning to something more like business as usual. The coughing takes another few minutes, enough time for Lei to get in the elevator and check out what’s happening on the ward while Abigail stands with Lynn and the Kid walks around with his hands in the air holding imaginary space ships and making whoosh noises.

When Lynn is just about done coughing, Lei reappears. “Janitor’s still in the toilet,” he says, shaking his head. “That must be some dump. Anyway, we’re good to go.” He’s gently massaging his hand as Abigail guides Lynn into the elevator. “I’ll probably need to call a nurse once we’re down there. I need them to take this IV out.”

The Kid, walking in last, says “I need to draw a whole bunch of pictures.”

“I need to lie down for a couple of days,” Lynn says.

To Lei, Abigail says, “Sorry we didn’t make it across to the other hospital.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “At least we did something for a change.”

“Put it in your message to Simon,” she says as the doors close.

© 2018 by Stu West

Born in Scotland, Stu West studied, variously, Film, Biology, and Creative Writing at Glasgow University and spent a decade working in biotechnology. He has written horror scripts for Imperium Comics and his fiction has appeared in Fireside Magazine. He lives in Ottawa with his Canadian wife and their two cats.

A House by the Sea
by P. H. Lee

Would you believe me if I told you that they all live together in a house by the sea?

It would only be fair, if they did.

They can’t live in the City, of course. Can you imagine? You’d be walking somewhere, maybe proceeding past the parks and public buildings, perhaps accompanied by a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, perhaps on your way to an orgy or a debate or to watch television, and you’d see one of them, and you’d know (of course you’d know, not that there would be anything different, not anything you could point to specifically, there’d just be something, that look—maybe it’s their shoulders?—that look that people have when they’ve spent their childhood locked in the basement for the sake of a utopia). And once you’d seen one of them, of course you’d spend the whole day thinking about it. You’d think about that one awful field trip you took as a child, seeing them locked in a basement, mewling and promising futilely to be good, and you’d spend the whole rest of the day feeling unreasonable and guilty and ashamed. You would get no joy out of the orgies, or the parades, or the philosophy, or the remarkably good television.

And would that be joyous? Would it be the happy city we live in, the happy life we enjoy?

No. Obviously, they can’t live in the City.

So, if you’ll believe me, they live together in a house by the sea.

It’s not a big house—it’s not a mansion—but it’s big enough for all of them to live in comfortably. Everyone gets their own room, and there are enough bathrooms even if some of them are touchy about sharing (some of them are touchy about sharing). They have a library and a living room and a television that doesn’t get all the channels. Outside, there is a garden, and a little trail down the cliffs to the beach.

Do you believe it? Does it seem unreasonable? It wouldn’t be too much to ask—don’t you think?—for them to have a house to themselves with a garden and a library and a television that doesn’t get all the channels.

What did you think happened to that child in the basement? What did you think happened when that child grew up?

Would it help if I told you there are a surprising lot of them living there, in the house by the sea? If you think about it, there must be. It has to be a child, crying alone in the basement that no one talks about. A baby crying in a basement is just a baby crying. An adult crying in a basement probably did something to deserve it (not that there are any prisons in the City, of course, but still).

There is, in fact, a very narrow range of suitable ages. Three-year-olds are much too young, and by twelve, honestly, how innocent could they be? Four through ten is just about right. Right now, in the house by the sea, there are nine of them, each separated by more or less seven years. The youngest is fourteen years old, the next twenty-two years old, then twenty-seven years old, and so on. The oldest is in her sixties.

Once a day an old woman comes out to tidy up, cook a meal, and stock the freezer with burritos in case someone gets hungry in the middle of the night. It isn’t her job, of course. In the City, no one has a job, except the sort of job that is meaningful and personally fulfilling, like medicine or writing novels. Still, she comes out from the City every day. Who can say why? She is an immigrant; she has her own story.

Each of them has their own routine. One of them wakes up before anyone else, walks the little trail down the cliffs to the beach, and dives into the cold gray morning ocean, alone and without fear. Another one gardens. One is writing his fourth novel. He still finishes them, revises them, sends them off, and every publishing house in the City returns them unread. Two more spend their days in the library, reading the encyclopedia out loud to each other. One watches the news. She remembers back before they had a house, and she has strong opinions about municipal politics. She makes every one of them vote, every year.

Some of them just sleep all day. Sometimes, especially when they’ve just arrived, they don’t even leave their rooms. They cry and spit and punch holes in the walls. Most of them come out eventually, but some don’t, and that’s okay. No one bothers them, except sometimes to offer them a burrito.

They don’t leave, although they could. Why would they?

Do you believe it now? Can this really be how they live out their lives, so close to the City that they can hear the bells clamoring and the processions proceeding? Can they really live together, in a house by the sea? No?

Let me tell you this, then. There used to be a doctor—a nice man with a real white doctor’s coat, who still lives in the City—who came out to their house every Wednesday to check up on them, but that didn’t work out, because he kept feeling uncomfortable and trying to euthanize them. So now, whenever one of them gets sick, a woman comes in on the train from Vallcoris. She doesn’t have a doctor’s coat. She just has a sweater. She doesn’t know about the basement, she doesn’t know about anything, not really. She just takes their pulse and asks them to cough, and leaves them with prescriptions, and no one tries to euthanize anyone.

Is that enough to convince you? Is it still too impossible, that they might just live together in their own house and their own time?

Should I tell you, then, about how they die? You see, it used to be, whenever one of them died, some nice people came out from the City to take the body away. But they were so upset—so apologetic and mumbling as they refused to meet anyone’s eyes—that now no one bothers calling the nice people from the City. Instead, they bury their dead in a small plot behind the garden. They get the old shovels out of the shed, pick a spot in the garden, and begin to dig. Each of them digs, some just a shovelful, some working the whole night, sometimes together, sometimes alone. By the next day, the hole is deep enough to be a grave. They don’t say anything. Not one of them needs instructions on how to mourn.

Can you believe me now? Can you believe that they live their lives and die their deaths in some semblance of peace? Can you believe that their lives are more than the basement we locked them in?

Would you like more? What more would you like? Would you rather imagine them suffering, even away from the City, away from the basement, even in their own house by the sea? Would you like to hear about screams, or nightmares, or the new one, beating herself bloody against the walls? Would you like to imagine that the house needs extra mops because, sometimes, even though they hate mops (and all of them hate mops), they can’t sleep through without a mop or two to be terrified of?

Or is that not it? Are you missing something else altogether?

Would you rather hear about marches, political protests, public shaming and human rights laws? Even though we both know that never happened and we both know that it never could happen, would it comfort you, to imagine them fighting back? Would you rather hear that they all walked away from the City and never came back? Or do you prefer to pretend that they might someday return—returning, not like you did when you were fourteen and walked away and then slunk back two weeks later—not in shame, but in anger, with tank columns and cluster bombs and chains of command and theories of legitimate violence?

Believe those things, if it makes you happy. I, though, will believe that they live alone, together, in a house by the sea.

© 2018 by P. H. Lee

P. H. Lee’s fiction has also appeared in Worlds Without Master. In addition to their writing, P. H. Lee has worked as a game developer, tutor, graphic designer, and administrative assistant. Their hobbies include translating the Chinese classics and reading Wikipedia. They live together with several other people, far from the bells of the city.

Disconnect
by Fran Wilde

Even in her dreams, Izze always felt pulled in too many directions.

“That’s part of your problem,” Severin said when she called him while drinking the morning’s first cup of coffee. “You sleep wrong.” His voice sounded far away, pinned beneath a screen.

“That’s not the problem. All the tests have said it’s electromagnetic, or the Big Heat of ‘37, or genetics, or all of the above. Or none of the above. One said ‘anxiety,’ but screw that one. None have said ‘sleep.’” Izze stared over her mug at the glowing square where her former mentor’s eyes blinked back at her, younger by the minute. “Besides,” she finally admitted, “I’d prefer not to sleep at all.”

Sleep was when she lost things.

Sleep was when her minor joints—the really painful ones—moved around and went on adventures in ways science couldn’t explain, any more than it could tell Severin why he was youthing and re-aging. Any more than it could give anyone answers, really, after the biowars, and especially not after the Big Heat.

“There’s a woman in this sleep study who says we can dream our own reality,” Severin replied from the elevated bed in his room at University Hospital. A band of sensors crossed his brow.

“I’m not doing the sleep study with you, Severin, no matter what you tell me about it.” Izze’s room was lit by the brightest bulbs she could find. The kind of lights that put shadows in the dumpster.

“They suggested I ask you is all. See if you want to try to work out new methodologies.” Severin smiled at her fondly. “You’re done helping people, then.”

“Yup. For all values of people that mean researchers.” Izze pulled her hair back into a ponytail and took another long sip of coffee. “I’ve tried plenty.” She wiggled her foot, the one toe misshapen but not painful. “And I figure I’ve done more than my share.”

Severin blinked, his head pillowed in the hospital’s linens, the room dark, but his laugh bright. “I suspect that’s fair.”

Ten university health studies. It was kind of fair. A batch of inconclusives. She’d wanted answers. Science was all about answers. She got hypotheticals, all while finishing her doctorate, which was awkward. Once the department ended tenure for new PhDs, Izze had stopped agreeing to the studies. But she still adjunct taught for the University, and she still used University Health equipment.

So far, her things hadn’t gotten much worse. Only her smaller joints and bones went missing—no major ones yet, no major organs either. And University Health hadn’t come to take the equipment back, and hopefully wouldn’t, as long as she kept making the rental payments. Izze almost felt lucky.

She kept herself together and in coffee beans by teaching at three different schools. And sometimes by singing—the resonances were supposed to help her joints. And always by talking to Severin.

They’d spoken most days when he was her mentor in the Physics Department. About office politics. About how solitary academic life could be.

Now? They still talked. Just a little more hurriedly. Izze couldn’t afford to be late to any more of her classes. And they never knew how old Severin was going to be lately, any more than Izze knew where her bones would be when she woke.

Today, he was younger. Sometimes his memory was as young as his cells, and he barely recognized her. Not today, though. Today he was pushing her.

Izze stood up and yanked her work jacket over taped-up joints, leaving the chat window open.

The tape stretched and pulled against her skin. A button popped loose from a sleeve and chimed metal against the Faraday-cage-wrapped wall of her small bedroom. Small because that’s all the University Health studies would allow.

Small because she didn’t need much. Just a net, for holding herself together.

Mostly.

This morning, she’d woken to find that a tiny joint in her right foot had been impossible to retrieve. Best she could tell from her equipment, it was out by Kepler 90b.

Casting a net all that way, around several gas giants, was beyond her range.

Plus, unfortunately, also that morning, Izze had hit snooze twice. She’d been dreaming about gathering her bones with her fingers, pressing them back into place through sheer will; about gathering students for her classes in the same way.

Once escape velocity is achieved, no further impulse need be applied for it to continue in its escape. Izze thought, practicing the opening of today’s lecture for two out of her three schools. Teaching helped keep hold of what she knew, and who she was.

She made another coffee. The machine jammed. “Come on, coffee,” she sang. Everything worked oddly inside the hacked and modified Freer-Faraday cage, but until Izze was fully awake, she didn’t dare leave its confines.

Couldn’t afford to lose anything else.

Including the cage.

The modifications she and Severin had made to the cage weren’t standard, and if University Health ever did take the machine back, Izze knew they would not be happy. There were the regrouping sonics, for one, which helped Izze sense where her joints had gone and pull them back. There were containment resonances too. She and Severin had enjoyed applying their research time to the problem, as well as their imaginations, but she’d been shocked when it had actually worked.

Severin hadn’t, not really. “So many things work differently when superheated,” he said, sagely. As if Izze hadn’t been alive during the Big Heat too. She almost remembered forests.

Still, no telling how long anything would keep working. Everything changed, all the time—Izze, job reliability, Severin—everything. She couldn’t be too safe.

Since everyone now was so convinced her joints were moving because of electromagnetics, the cage felt like a safety net. She was going to keep it as long as she could. And it did seem to be helping some. At least, it was keeping things from getting worse. For the time being.

But now Severin was implying her dreams were part of the problem.

Who the hell knows, really, Izze thought. It didn’t keep her parts from disconnecting while she slept. Fending off sleep, fending off electromagnetism just made it all less frequent.

Finally, with a grinding noise, the coffee machine spun around and spat out an espresso. The scent of burnt beans filled Izze’s small room. She would drink the beverage anyway once it cooled.

“In my case, I think it’s the other way around. Reality affects my dreams.” Izze tried to sip at her coffee. Still too hot. “Reality: no more full professorships. Dream: not having to run all over town trying to hold students’ attention. QED.”

Severin looked away from the screen for a moment and played at his plastic ID band. The embedded bio-chip that monitored his sleep cycles glinted in the gaining morning light. “You’re too frenetic. You can’t be in so many places at once, Izze. It’s not good for you.” The plastic snagged on the cuff of his robe, from which Severin’s thin wrists protruded. The hair on his arms had once been white. Now it was brown. Izze noticed a fresh bruise on the top of Severin’s hand.

You can’t be in so many places at once, Izze.

Didn’t she know it. But how could she possibly control that? “Did they take blood again?” She couldn’t conceal her concern, even though she didn’t really have time to linger, or worry.

Severin nodded. “They wanted to see if my blood was getting younger too.”

Izze winced. “Looks like they took a lot.” Studies. Knowledge was a hungry maw, lined with teeth called studies.

“Maybe I can dream up more blood.” Severin’s smile was sad. He watched Izze through the screen. “Research studies are all I’ve got left, Iz. No one else has answers. Your classes are my entertainment. That and your singing.”

“I know.” This could be me someday, she thought.

“Everyone keeps telling me to relax and enjoy the youth, but I don’t want to run out of time without having done something…” Severin gestured in the air. “Meaningful.”

Izze eyed the bruises on her friend’s hand. “Do you ever want to leave the study?”

Severin nodded. “Sometimes. The more tests they run, the more stress, the younger I get.” He shrugs. “I think they’re seeing how far they can push it. When I’m less stressed, I get older again.”

Like most of her graduate students at the three colleges where she taught, Severin looked twenty-two at the moment. But in reality, the professor was seventy two. He’d lived through all the biowars. After the Big Heat, well into his tenure, he’d started youthing and back again, like a few dozen others who’d been on the front lines of both. At first, when Izze began studying at the University, it had been hard to see. And Severin had been good at hiding things.

But he’d been aging mostly in reverse now for twenty-three years, and it was speeding up.

“So, leave.”

“I signed the forms, Izze. It’s all legal.”

Izze had been three during the Big Heat. Most people had barely noticed the wars, since they moved so slow, until a lot of the big woods had gone, and people started getting sick in strange ways. But Severin was in physics, so he’d been right in the middle of things.

“I get it, I’m just not convinced this study has your best interests at heart.”

“Dr. Rand has great credentials for unusual war and environmental syndromes. He’s exploring sleep variations. The university is fully backing him. He wants to meet you, Iz. And the others participating want to meet you too.” Severin twisted the blanket between his fingers. “I told them how we figured out how to use sonics to guide your joints back. Rand said you’re so young, and you were just an infant during the Heat, you could really make a difference.”

Izze looked at her friend, trying to ignore the irony. “No thank you. I’m not going to be anyone’s lab rat anymore.”

“Not even for science?”

That was a low blow and Severin knew it. As a physics PhD student and now professor, Izze had done so much for science that now, science was all she had. And science had helped her too. Her and Severin’s cage hacks allowed Izze to pull personally resonant objects back from escape trajectories. She could hear her joints groan and twinge when they were nearby, and when they were farther out, they resonated, kind of like stars. Her bones seemed to listen, and she could hear them too. And if you could hear something, you could find it.

And if you could keep something in, or out, you could also reverse purpose and pull things to you, Severin had reasoned. Her joints resonated back to her, as Severin had hypothesized when they made the sonic adjustments to the cage, plus the electromagnetic amplifications and reversals.

Izze’s hearing in the cage was sharp. She could hear her bones, no matter how far away they got.

Once she figured out how to find things, Severin had helped her pioneer several different methods for limb retrieval. “If escape velocity is the speed at which the sum of an object‘s kinetic energy and its gravitational potential energy is equal to zero, then recapture velocity is the reverse. All you need to do is calculate the reversal and inflict that on the object, using the Freer-Faraday cage’s inverse properties.” He’d grinned like a madman when he’d tacked her name onto the tech.

It hadn’t been exactly that easy. Izze had modified a lot of calculations. And the Faraday cage, once she’d gotten out of the university study. She’d added visualizers and grabbers to the electromagnetic nets, and cast them wide, like a fisher, each morning, for parts of herself.

Sometimes this was harder than others.

A week ago, her left talus and calcaneus had made it all the way to the Oort Cloud. So far away that she’d almost missed them, even with all her equipment. Singing the bones out from the tinier rocks and grit had taken a long time, but she hadn’t given up.

Still, singing to your dislocating bones through some kludged equipment in a modified Faraday cage? She’d hate to do that with someone else around. It was too weird.

Izze didn’t know many people besides students, especially after tenure was cancelled. Her mornings sometimes began with a search of nearby planetary orbits and black holes for various joints and limbs. That sort of thing could be dangerous for a partner or a pet, couldn’t it? What if she sent parts of them into orbit? And couldn’t bring them back?

So she lived alone. She had to. Science was all she had.

But now she had to rush coffee with Severin, which she hated to do, in order to get to her first class on time. She’d pull the toe joint in later, or she’d get by.

Severin didn’t miss a beat. “You’re pale. What shifted?”

“Just a toe. Nothing big.”

Severin had come running when both Izze’s hands had tried to make a break for Jupiter. He’d helped catch them with the electromagnetic nets before they got too far. Until Izze learned to work the inputs on her handmade Faraday retrieval rig with her feet.

It didn’t hurt as much now as it used to. The first time one of her shoulder blades disappeared, she’d screamed until her neighbors pounded on the wall. Tape helped. And wine.

But that little toe was still on the loose.

She‘d have to go to work a little wobbly again, that was all.

She grabbed a day-old bagel from the kitchen.

“Bye for now, Doc,” she said, waving.

He waved back. “Maybe I’ll see you in class. Maybe I’ll dream my way there.”

“Sleep well,” Izze said, then bit into the bagel.

When the bagel jarred her jaw so hard that it wound up in the hallway outside her apartment, Izze decided she‘d had enough. Waking up to find parts missing was one thing. Having it happen while she was awake and not being able to get those parts back, plus being later than she could afford, was completely another. She dealt with her jaw and then ran for the bus.

From the bus on the way to her first university, she phoned her doctor.

“Again?“ Dr. Morgani said and upped both her meds and the experimental Freer-Faraday cage’s power. He knew she’d made adjustments to the cage, but hadn’t told the University. She trusted him. He sent her his bills directly. “You should come in, okay?”

“I have class,” Izze said. “I need to pay my bills.” But she made the appointment.

“When instructors are more than fifteen minutes late, students can leave,” Bob informed her at the door to her classroom. “Especially adjuncts.”

“We’re all adjuncts,” Izze said.

“Sorry.” Bob was a legacy kid. He sang in the a capella choir, got gentleman’s C’s in most things. Tended bar at the Liquid on weekends. Izze suspected he’d only signed up for special studies in Physics because of the cute boy—Severin—attending by robo-view from front row. Robo-Severin had no time for Bob. He was there to keep his memory sharp.

Still, Izze liked Bob, despite the adjuncts crack. “Good thing I’m only fourteen minutes late,” she said. She gestured, “go on then,” with one of her crutches, emblazoned with stars. Back into the classroom he went.

Izze’s ankle cracked like a tambura as she descended into the lecture theater. Stairs. Always stairs. “Who knows what solitons are?” She asked the class.

They all should know. If they’d done the reading. The room was quiet.

Severin, via telepresence raised his hand. No one else. “They’re perfect waves,” he said. “They don’t disperse, they’re balanced so they don’t change shape.”

Izze smiled. Her old professor still had perfect timing.

“What mediums?” she asked. “Someone else besides Severin.”

Twenty students in the class. Nineteen silences. Izze sighed. She reached for her professor voice. “In 2002, a singular disturbance crossed from magnetopause to magnetosphere at 8 kilometers per second. A perfect electronic wave.

One hundred seventy years earlier, a scientist, John Stuart Russell, observed ‘a well-formed heap of water,’ traveling in a singular fashion down a Scottish canal, well after the boat that created it had stopped moving. More than a mile after, to be exact.

Solitons have been observed in optics—traveling thousands of kilometers—and in biological systems.

From space to neurons, these singular waves that do not easily dissipate, appear as if charmed out of the substance that forms them, carry on, and then vanish.

So.”

She said, looking around, “Where do they go when they’re gone?”

No one answered.

“Yes, Bob?”

She’d sort of expected him, after that class. Severin lingered on the teleprompter, waiting for Izze, maybe. Cute.

Bob glanced at the screen, then back at her. “How long can a soliton hold its form?” he asked.

Izze had watched Severin change for years, occasionally his face sloughing, his skin shifting texture. Once, his fingers grew so soft, it hurt to hold a pen. The university had grown concerned. But Severin had no family left, just work. And Izze. So he’d fought to stay on.

And then he’d started getting younger. At some point, he might disappear, if the researchers weren’t careful.

Izze tried to focus on solitons. Severin stayed silent.

“It depends,” she said finally. “It’s something we’re researching.”

Bob left after realizing Severin wasn’t going to talk to him after class, no matter how smart the questions. Izze shuffled her papers together, then looked at the screen.

“They give you time off for good behavior?” Her. “Did you sleep at all?”

“They said they’d let me watch your class if I helped them with a few additional experiments, before and after.”

Izze didn’t like the kind of reward systems University Health did sometimes to get study participants. Employment bonuses. Equipment. “What now?” He looked far younger than he had an hour ago, actually. She mentally flipped through the names of doctors who she might call to get Severin out of anything that was harming him.

They shared a couple of physicians at University Hospital. The kind with enough supervisory overlap to gum up a prescription, or an invasive test. Or a study.

The amount of time she’d spent getting tested after the first joints disappeared and she’d found them in the kitchen one morning, then further afield, in the school library another day, wasn’t something Izze wanted her students knowing. Severin knew, of course. He had a time differential that earned him some extra trust. He’d taught her, then mentored her. Now she was teaching him. Sometimes.

Long after the first disconnections, he’d still helped Izze. They’d figured out the singing when four finger bones went to the Kuiper belt. The bones had moved fast. “Good to catch them before they get too far,” Severin had joked. His voice had crackled then, well-sanded with age.

“They roped me into the McKensie study as well as the sleep study,” he said glumly, but with a high pitch and a youthful laugh. “Since I was already there. If I do it, I can keep my emeritus status.” Most Emeritus Professorships had gone away just like tenure.

But Severin had been hanging on to his. Even though right now the professor looked under twenty-one, just.

Izze looked twenty-nine. And was. Most of her. Plus or minus time for certain bones to travel in space notwithstanding.

That one damn toe, which was still out there, would be younger than she was when it returned. That annoyed her.

Still that wouldn’t get her to do the studies. The university had some leverage over her—but not that much. She made a couple grand a semester here. Enough to pay for the equipment they loaned her.

But they had Severin’s pension tied up in the research study now. Izze’s eyes ached thinking about it.

At the top of the lecture hall, Bob coughed. She turned and looked at him. Severin’s robot made a small sound. Bob shrugged and left.

“You should tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

“I don’t know. Something. That you were teaching classes before he was born?” That you’re disappearing and leaving me behind.

“Why?” Severin shrugged, then he grinned. “His fascination is one-sided. I’m not adding to it. Besides, it’s good to have a hobby.” He took a deep breath. His age seemed to shift right before Izze’s eyes.

“About what we were discussing, Severin… the study. I’m worried you shouldn’t have done this one.”

“You may be right? But I signed their papers,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean they own you. Or it shouldn’t. You need to quit it, Severin.” She looked at the clock. She had to be all the way across the city in an hour for her own doctor’s appointment. Impossible to do that if she lingered.

“It’s too late for that. They need data, until they can extrapolate models from doctors’ records. They can make a sideshow case of me for grant money if they want. Hey, I’ll be immortal. You can make a song.” He laughed.

Izze growled under her breath and her wristbones shifted ominously, possibly just from the frustration. Humor, for Severin, was like singing for her. It helped him keep things together. Still, she hated the need for it. Calm, Izze. Stay calm.

None of the studies had helped Izze keep herself together. And now this one was tearing her friend apart too.

“I didn’t know the university sleep study was driving a new grant,” Dr. Morgani said. “I just knew Dr. Rand’s team was getting interesting results.”

Izze sat on the exam table, fully clothed. Morgani didn’t make her change unless he needed to see a specific part. She’d slid her shoes and socks off and laid them carefully on the chair next to the table. She swung her left foot back and forth, impatient.

Morgani looked at Izze’s foot and then helped tape it tight. “I don’t always agree with his methods though.”

Dr. Rand was University Health through and through, Izze knew from talking to Severin. Dr. Morgani wasn’t affiliated with the University. That’s why Izze liked him.

But he was holding back now.

She squinted at him, “You don’t usually have an opinion.”

“I can’t have much of one this time either.” He paused and picked up a vid report, not looking at her. “Rand has powerful friends in the industry. Just be careful, okay?”

He set Izze up with more tape and gel for the pain, extra braces, and an admonishment to try to sleep more carefully. “And maybe try to work fewer places? You’re running yourself ragged.”

“You try to teach these days,” Izze joked. “It’s not me that’s ragged.”

She pulled her shoes and socks back on, her joints clicking like they wanted to disappear. Next gig was uptown. She could walk or take a cab, but the cab was too bumpy, the walk too far.

Izze gave in and took the underground. She loved it down here, everything encased in tile and tunnels. Very deep too, so her ears popped as the train rattled.

She had to be careful: too much shaking loosened everything. But she loved the feeling of speeding away from a central station. Of shooting out into the darkness.

And she loved being on time. She looked at her watch as the underground lights slowed, then stopped beside the train car. Arriving: University Way.

Too bad the elevator at the far end of the station was broken. (It almost always was). Izze struggled with the stairs. She would arrive to class a professional combination of sweating, breathless, and exhausted.

Exhausted and late wasn’t new. That was every day ending in “y” lately.

As she came out of the tunnels, looking up to see the arch of blue sky, and beyond it, plenty of room for objects that can achieve escape velocity, Izze wished she had more coffee.

Her com buzzed.

Two messages from the sleep study, including a personal one from Dr. Rand. One from her Dean. None from Severin. Great.

The second university where she taught had a great view of the river. Wide rooms set in a former warehouse, the city college had taken over more space as students realized physics was their way to the stars. And Izze’s class was a road bump on that trajectory.

Behind her translucent podium, before the large screen, Izze watched the class filter in, students trickling through the rows of seats, sorting themselves into more attentive and more tired.

She knew she had two single parents in the room. And one student working through a healthcare fight—not an illness, a lingering debt from a parent’s illness, which their private insurance had passed on to the heirs. A lot of students who needed the credits, but couldn’t afford the time. They came anyway. She wanted them all to succeed, felt a little bit of how much they were fighting against the gravity of their own lives to be here.

She handed back test results, making sure to make eye contact with each student (all 100 of them) as the rankings went up on the board. There were the usual mutters, but a few (a young mother seated in the second row, nursing her son; a girl all the way in the back; two boys—one an ESL transfer from the community college, and both former students of hers elsewhere who had followed her here)—all made various small happy sounds. It was like a wave that built fast, then fell silent as others groaned.

Izze wondered what these students would make of her soliton question, so she asked it.

One young man in the back raised his hand. “Will we be tested on this?”

It was a valid question. “Would you think about it if it wasn’t on a test?” She shot back before she could stop herself.

This was why her reviews were mixed. She could hear them voting right now.

“It’s a thought problem,” she said. No one responded. “For extra credit.” There, that got their attention.

Same hand shot up again.

Izze imagined it lifting the boy up through the ceiling and into the troposphere, then back down. “Yes?”

“Participation credit too?”

Why not. “Of course. What’s on your mind, Lucas?”

“Maybe solitons are something repeated across medium—the medium DOES matter though. You don’t see them in static objects as much. You see them in fluids, transferences. I bet you could make one with sound.”

The boy deserved all the credit he was milking. Izze grinned and glanced around the room. “Can you all expand on this?”

Several students nodded and then bent to work.

The class was vibrant. The school had tried to run classes remotely for a long time, and video worked pretty well, as long as somewhere along the way, the students connected, and the teacher with them.

But in-person still worked best for retention, this college had decided. The room, once Lucas took the lid off, blossomed into conversation. Izze sat back and listened to the ebb and swell of thesis and counter thesis.

The city college students were sharp as tacks. She made notes for the recruiters again. Hoping to get them interviews. Placement.

When the discussion ended, she dismissed them with, “500 words on solitons across various mediums, by Thursday,” and the groans cascaded.

“No one asks for writing anymore, you can’t scan it,” Lucas said.

“I’m asking. Participation.” She grinned. She wanted to revel in the discussion a bit more. “Plus you have a test on Monday.” More groans. “Remotely,” she added.

A small cheer.

And she packed up her classroom and moved on. One more class today. This one from home.

Izze walked the last leg of the circuit she made across the city. She mentally rehearsed her lecture for the evening. Objects will move away from each other, continually slowing… She didn’t see the cat.

Soon, she was sprawled on the wet sidewalk. Her hand and knees weren’t broken, but parts sure were slipped from their joints. As in, at least one kneecap wasn’t anywhere near her body.

There wasn’t any pain. She’d slipped her knees so often they practically had their own luggage.

Where her pisiform would be was floppy space; one side of her hand hung useless. She pulled a brace from her bag and stuffed her fingers in it.

Pulled the velcro tight. She’d sing her wrists back when she made it home.

Then she grabbed another brace for her right knee. That was all the braces the doctor had thought to put in her bag that morning. She had nothing for her left knee.

“Are you okay? Is something broken?”

“No, just lost. Where’s the cat? I tripped on a cat.” Izze said, hiding as much of the pain as she could from the stranger. Most people thought joint wandering was really scary, and some even thought it was catching. Izze hated those encounters. And because her limbs wandered so much farther than most, she had more of those encounters.

The stranger stayed where she was. When Izze focused on her, she saw the woman held the cat.

And was wearing a medical coat. From the University.

Izze pulled herself to her feet with one good hand on her cane, and hobbled to the nearby bench, shaking off the stranger’s assistance.

“She just scooted out the door,” the young woman said. “I’m Marley.”

Marley had splotchy skin and a weak handshake, which Izze was grateful for. Crusher handshakes were terrible. But she squinted. “I need to get to my class,” she said.

Marley nodded. “I understand, I do. But you should have this looked at.”

“I’ve got my doctor on speed dial. Oh!” Izze raised her com to her ear. “There he is right now.”

There was static on the other end of the phone, which Izze engaged in rousing conversation. “Yes, I know, I should be more careful. Yes, I’ll come back in tomorrow first thing. Yes, I’ll let you know where they went this time.”

She “hung up” and rolled her eyes. “We do this all the time.”

Marley squinted. “You’re Izze Freer. You’re supposed to be in my professor’s study. Dr. Rand.”

Izze coughed. “I decided that I didn’t want to do it.”

Marley’s eyebrows shot up. “But it’s important! You could help everyone else who has something like what you do…” her voice trailed off while Izze just stared at her.

“I said I didn’t want to do it.” She was so angry that she had to keep saying this.

“Okay,” Marley said, cuddling the cat and looking uncomfortable. “Do you want me to call a car for you? You can’t take the subway like this. The elevators are broken.”

“I’m an adjunct. I can’t afford a car.”

Marley laughed. “Me neither. You know the study pays well, right…”

Izze got to her feet and prepared to walk away.

“Wait! I won’t bring it up again. I feel responsible.”

“Call the car.”

Izze got home in time to find her online classroom empty. A second warning from the dean on her email. “Shit,” she said.

She messaged Severin. “Who is this?” came the reply.

“It’s Izze—from the university.”

A long pause. Then: “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

Izze drew a deep breath. “How old are you, Severin?”

“Eight.”

Slowly, and quietly, in the bath, Izze relaxed until it was time to cry.

And very slowly, she took her right wrist in her left hand and twisted until every bone popped, but didn’t escape. For a moment, for a change, she felt in control of something. Even if it was letting go.

Back in class on Tuesday, Izze wasn’t surprised to see that Bob had skipped.

“We all find comfort somewhere, I guess,” the line from a song popped into her head. A line that must have been far out somewhere in the cloud, a standing wave of words.

Izze had no time for comfort. She’d found her wrist bones that morning in the garbage floating around Mars, knocking on the car someone launched into orbit for marketing purposes.

The bones sounded tiny and white. She collected them by singing in the dream she’d been having of space, pushing like a wave, rolling but not breaking apart, until she found the part of herself she’d misplaced, and caught it up, and rolled back. Severin’s suggestion. Something she’d been practicing.

Severin had showed her how to do this. And he was disappearing. Forgetting everything they’d learned together.

But Izze remembered. Maybe it was time to try some of his wilder theo-ries. She could do things in her dreams she didn’t know waking. Severin had said she could reach out and grab her reality. Maybe he was right.

But what she wanted to grab was Severin’s sleeve, to tug him out of the study, out of the hospital. That, he wouldn’t let her do.

Izze closed her eyes and prepared to dream the way her mentor had described.

Inside the modified cage, she tried to picture Severin, picture herself finding him and letting him out of his room. But when she felt her bones starting to shift, she panicked.

Izze jumped out of bed with a gasp. The air in the cage smelled electric, like lightning and panic. She took a deep breath and made some coffee.

Marley was waiting outside Izze’s apartment the next day. She wasn’t wearing her lab coat.

“I’m not doing your study. I’m done with studies.”

“I know.”

“So why are you following me?”

“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

No one had asked Izze if she was okay since she’d moved to the city. She’d moved here expressly so no one—not relatives, not friends—would ask her if she was okay.

And this… researcher… was crossing into personal territory. But somehow, Marley seemed to mean it.

Izze couldn’t stop herself. “Thanks, but—”

“Nevermind,” Marley said. She turned on her heel and walked back toward her place.

“Wait,” Izze said. She felt weird, like all her bones were stretching apart. Why was she reaching out?

“Why? You said ‘thanks, but.’ I know what that means. I’m the lab coat. Not a person.” Marley stood there, hands in fists, chin up. But she’d stopped walking.

“But I’m fine. I’m always fine.” Izze had found all her parts, she’d pull-ed herself together for class. She always did. And Marley wasn’t wrong.

But she’d reached out to check in. That was something.

Izze raised her chin too. “I’ve got class at the University. You can walk with me, if you want. Just don’t ask me about the study.” It was an apology, of sorts.

Marley didn’t say anything, just fell into pace beside Izze.

The next class in the lecture hall, Izze prepared for the stairs by wrapping braces on both knees and ankles. Taping both feet. She’d be fine. Her joints had settled and she’d finally found her toe joint, so she didn’t want to risk them getting loose again.

Putting everything put back into place was always a job, even with the home reassembly kits and braces courtesy of University Health. Izze couldn’t do what she did—live, work, walk with a new friend—without that kind of thing. She’d recover the joints, close her eyes and press hard and—somehow without leaving a mark—they’d be back where they belonged. Quantum dislocations, Severin had called it.

Electromagnetic joint dysplasia, the university had written on her equipment rental documents. Periodic reassessment required.

She hated owing someone, but she couldn’t afford to buy her freedom.

So when her messages blinked, and the cage wouldn’t turn on until she answered, she knew it was University Health.

“We just need you to come in for a minute,” a receptionist said. “After your class, for reassessment.”

Great. Izze juggled her office hours in the lecture hall as she waited for her students. She would have scheduled coffee with Severin after the appointment. But he’d stopped answering her at all. “Fine.”

Bob returned to this lecture. Late. Izze had just asked her students to think about possible connections between different study areas—why are solitons a consistent idea—the same form moving through all these fields. He took a seat, already listening and thinking about the problem. In the face of an otherwise silent room, Bob answered. “The medium they travel through isn’t the issue,” he grinned. “It’s the balanced shape of the wave, the perpetuity of it.”

“Very good,” she nodded. Keep it up Bob.

Bob’s classmates took notes. Bob didn’t look at Severin’s empty screen and neither did Izze.

After class, Bob tried to catch her, but Izze didn’t want to be late for the required reassessment. And she didn’t want to answer questions about Severin. She crossed the big university lawn from the academic side of the school to the medical buildings, went through several sets of doors and metal detectors, up an elevator, and into an office. Buildings were kind of like modified cages, she thought as she settled into an overstuffed chair that would be difficult to get out of. It smelled like lemons and patience.

The room seemed to breathe patience. Even the data screen in the waiting room, set to detail all the things that might go wrong with your body and how you could check for them, spoke with a patient tone.

Sometimes it seemed like a larger percentage of hospital space was dedicated to waiting than it was to healing.

While she waited, Izze thought about how, in her dreams, she could reach out and pull back pieces of herself without machinery. Just her. How getting each mislocated part back where it belonged felt so much easier in dreams. In reality, she had to use the university’s system.

When she woke up to pieces shifting or missing? When she had to use the Freer-Faraday cage and the visualizers? That was when Izze felt the grind of being ill. Being different enough that the University kept asking her to come in for studies, like she studied solitons and galaxies and students.

The data-screen’s simulated clock ticked, the announcer spoke calmly about generational Big Heat effects, and Izze got used to the lemon smell of the waiting room chair. No one else came to sit down. She was going to be so late to her next class, but she couldn’t miss a reassessment. She called the second university to find someone to cover her class.

Finally, a nurse took her to a room where she put on a gown and waited some more. In here, the smell was peppermint. Another clock ticked, maddeningly, but Izze couldn’t find where they’d hidden it. Worse than a mosquito buzzing in your ear, Izze thought: the sense someone was taking your time, and you couldn’t see the clock.

She felt her eyes closing. The cushions of the exam room bed looked so comfortable.

“Wait! No.” Everything about this was wrong. She’d been so used to waiting, she hadn’t seen the trap closing.

The reassessments didn’t usually go like this. Usually, a nurse took her diagnostics, asked her about her joints and bones, and then signed off on the rental again.

Izze slid off the bed and shucked her gown. She was buttoning her jeans and tightening her braces when a new doctor pushed the door open without knocking.

“I didn’t realize you were here! You were so quiet! Welcome. I’m Dr. Rand.” He held out a friendly hand, but clutched a clipboard app on his tablet with the other. The clipboard: a universal symbol of a study.

Izze froze. She wanted out. Now. “I’m leaving. I still have that right.” She hadn’t signed anything.

The doctor sat down in the chair with a sigh. “Don’t you want to help advance knowledge? Help others in the future like yourself?”

No. Izze thought. I’ve done so much of that already. “Advance knowledge? Of course. My knowledge. What I understand about me. I’m tired of advancing yours.” Izze realized she’d like to have the same rights as the doctor: To be late. To not have to wait on people. To decide for herself what she got to do. “Severin told me he can’t leave.”

The doctor scrawled on the tablet, didn’t look at Izze. “Once the study is signed, no, you’d have to stay here for the duration.”

“I have too many classes. Maybe after the semester’s over,” she stalled him. “You got me in here unfairly. I’ll file a grievance. I’ll tell your assistant what you did. Turn my equipment back on.” Marley might or might not help in reality when it came to her boss, but she was a useful threat now.

Amazingly, Dr. Rand nodded and tapped the app, then closed it.

“Done. But we’ll talk again, after the semester’s over.” The doctor closed the door hard behind him, letting her hear the latch slide home one more time, but not lock. When Izze tried the door, turning the handle with her braced hand, she felt the latch move within the wood. And then she was free.

As she walked back through the corridor, Izze looked for Severin’s room. Behind glass, a nurse held a young boy’s arm, as the boy let her take another vial of blood.

Izze touched the doorknob. This was what Severin had wanted. Right? To help?

But not like this.

“I’ll find a way to get you out,” Izze whispered to the door. The boy turned to look at her, as if he could hear through the wood.

His eyes looked old, set in such a young face. The taupe walls of his room, the smooth curves of his medical bed, his hairless arms and collarbone. Everything had a sheen of newness, except Severin’s eyes.

“I’ll find a way,” Izze promised.

That night, Izze didn’t drink any coffee. She made one call. “I need a favor—maybe. To help out a friend.”

“I can’t interfere with a study subject,” Marley said.

“I understand.” Then Izze turned off the modified Faraday cage and waited. This was the first time she’d slept without the cage in years. It was risky. The results might be… very disconnected. If she made a mistake, she wouldn’t be able to work for a while.

She’d grabbed a pamphlet on active dreaming from the sleep study. She’d read it several times. Now she just held onto it for luck. “Objects trying to escape,” she whispered.

Without the hum of the cage, she could hear her bones creaking. She tried to fall asleep while thinking of her fingers on the doorknob in the medical building. Of the doors and detectors, and different kinds of cages. Different ways to escape.

Maybe being several places at once was all right. In dreams, at least

When she fell asleep, she dreamed her hands fled her wrists. Not just the bones. The whole shebang. That was alarming, but she willed herself not to wake up.

She dreamed her hands gripped a doorknob. Felt it turn.

She felt her fingers touch the cool metal bed in Severin’s room. Shook him awake with a gentle touch. She dreamed she heard the door latch click inside the wood as one of her hands unlocked the door. The other hand passed Severin his clothes, which were far too big now. Then the hand slipped the data chipped wristband from his arm.

The boy was very young now. He was not afraid. His old eyes watched Izze’s hands in the dream. “I didn’t know anyone could do that,” he whispered. “So cool. Show me how.”

Izze dreamed her hands rested on her friend’s shoulders as he walked—scampered, really—out of his room and into the night. A ten-year-old boy with the eyes of an octogenarian. Izze felt relieved to see him in there.

Then she began to sing to them—to her hands, to the boy, to the nights where things went missing. She began calling them back to her.

When someone knocked on her door later, Izze woke. It took some doing to get the door open with her foot, but she managed.

Outside, Marley held a boy by the sleeve. “I found him waiting for a bus when my shift ended. Not from the study, or he would have had a wristband. He says he has something of yours.”

Izze stepped back so that both of them could come inside her small apartment.

The boy passed Izze her hands. “How did you think to do it?” He asked. He waited until she’d turned the cage back on with an elbow.

“You told me how, once,” she said, resetting a hand very carefully.

Severin nodded. “I think I remember.”

She watched Marley looking over the Freer-Faraday cage, eyes wide. “We modified it ourselves. Severin and me.”

“Maybe I could help out here, sometimes? If you need a kind of research assistant?” Marley’s fingers brushed the air over the controls.

“Maybe. You’ll need to know how to work the Freer-Faraday cage and the reattachment tools…” Izze paused. She wasn’t sure if she needed the equipment as much. Maybe only in emergencies.

“How do I keep my funding?” Severin asked.

Izze had no answers. “You don’t need your emeritus funding if you stay here. At least for a little bit. And maybe Marley’s right. She can help us out now and then.”

Marley grinned. “I’d like that.”

“No more studies?” Severin sounded almost gleeful. But Izze recognized the look in the boy’s eyes. His memory was older than his body.

“Not now, at least.” Not until you’re better, Doc. “And I’ll go teach. We’ll keep it together, for as long as we can.”

Severin shook his head. “Might not be that long.”

“Might be time enough,” Izze said.

By the time she was ready for class, Severin was asleep on her bed. Inside the cage, he looked slightly older.

“I’ll be back after my next shift,” Marley said. “We can’t all be in three places at once.”

And that gave Izze an idea.

With one hand, she prepared a keyboard and a recorded lecture. “Maybe I can put being scattered to good use.” The rest of her went to the door.

“I’m off to teach—early this time.”

© 2018 by Fran Wilde

Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been nominated for three Nebula awards and two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and include her Andre Norton- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017), and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, io9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

This Will Not Happen to You
by Marissa Lingen

I got sick.

This will not happen to you.

They have an antifungal now. They know how to kill all the little spores when they start to creep into your tissues, your lungs, your eyeballs, your liver.

I didn't know quite what was happening to me.

This will not happen to you.

All the signs and symptoms are well known. You've been educated. Even very young schoolchildren are aware. The weeks of wondering if you should go into the doctor, if you would be dismissed as a hypochondriac. If you were just tired, just achy, just having a cold, just fighting off something. Then the months of going from doctor to doctor, wondering what it was that you had, wondering if it would ever go away. That's a thing of the past now.

It turned out not to be reversible by the time they figured it out.

This will not happen to you.

We understand all of it now, and of course you have all the coverage you need, all the care, and you never go outside the reach of doctors, not on vacation, not for work trips, not for family emergencies, not for any reason. The paperwork will never get fouled up. No one will ever decide that you're an exception. Everything will get delivered on time. Every step of the treatment, all the correct assessments, in the correct order. All of it. Nothing is irreversible any more, because we live in the future. Certainly not anything that happens to your own personal body.

The first set of prosthetics failed.

This will not happen to you.

The places where they reinforced my legs, my fingers, my eyes: the metal collapsed and the synapse connections lost coherence. My legs stopped under me while I was trying to be a good citizen, fetch my own medicines and unguents from the pharmacy after fetching my niece's birthday present. So her present broke on the dingy off-white tiles of the pharmacy. I had carefully picked out just the right box of plastic building bricks, and it was crushed under me and the bricks spilled out while I twitched and drooled and all the advanced electronics, mapped into my own nervous system, turned on me.
I couldn't see the bricks, because the places where the prosthetics had mapped into my eyes were shorting out, but I could feel them under the nerves that still worked, in my biceps, in my hip, in my ribs. And I could still hear the startled cries of the other shoppers, the alarm of the pharmacy techs, like a flock of angry birds. Those nerves still worked too. The fungus hadn't eaten those. The malfunction hadn't taken them.

Definitely won't happen again, though.

The second set of prosthetics hurt. At every moment, on every day, they hurt.

This will not happen to you.

I dragged myself from one part of my life to another, every second of it pain. A good day was a day when I could focus on my work, which was supposed to be teaching music theory to college students. The pain dragged out my rhythms, changed my mode, made every third beat a dropped one. The prosthetics were supposed to be built to my body, and instead they worked against it. All the places where they were supposed to fit to my damaged nerves, they found the damage.

They have based research off those like me. It's been peer reviewed. It's very reliable. They have learned quite a lot. The odds of a neural mismatch that bad have gone down, and everyone knows that if someone says that it's 95% odds, that means no one you know will get it. Because surely you don't know twenty people. You are not one in twenty people. Surely.

The final set of prosthetics are cold. At every moment, on every day, they chill me.

This will not happen to you.

Because you have never been sick and you have never been too late and you have never been permanently damaged and you have never been through two prior generations of prosthetics for all the things that the newfangled tech, slipping in along the fungus-damaged neurons, can't quite do for you. The last set, the set that lets you walk and see and breathe evenly, it will not keep you cold at every moment. You will not have a flask of tea like a lifeline. You will not wear a ski vest in May, a cardigan in July.

The silver shine in your eyes, that your mother swears is so beautiful, will not feel like ice when you look in the mirror. And you will never see the cracked-ice glaze of tears that she tries to hide when she says it, and brings you another blanket at the family picnic in the August heat.

And none of this, definitely none of this, will happen to you.

Unless the spores change again.

Unless the technology changes again.

Unless anything, anything at all changes.

But what are the odds that the world will change in your lifetime?

So this will definitely, totally, completely not happen to you.

( Editors’ Note: Marissa Lingen is interviewed by Sandra Odell in this issue.)

© 2018 by Marissa Lingen

Marissa Lingen is among the top science fiction and fantasy writers in the world who were named after fruit. She has many opinions on Moomintrolls. She has been known to cross international borders in search of rare tisanes. Her personal relationships with bodies of water are intense though eccentric. She lives atop the oldest bedrock in the US with two large men and one small dog, where she writes, if not daily, frequently.

Reprints Introduction
by Judith Tarr

The easiest part of being Reprints Editor is knowing that other editors have loved all the submissions, and each one has passed that first (or second or third) set of eyes before it came to me.

It’s also the hardest part. So many wonderful stories. So much lovely writing, strong characterization, ingenious worldbuilding. And I can’t take them all. I could have accepted a dozen, but I only had room for two (with sincerest thanks to those Kickstarter backers who pushed the campaign so far above its original goal that there could be two instead of one).

In the end, I chose two stories that spoke clearly to me about disability, but in very different ways. Both are written from the heart, from lived experience. Both are powerful and evocative and beautifully written.

SL Huang’s near-future science fiction story, “By Degrees and Dilatory Time,” is deceptively quiet, dispassionate, as it details the process of adapting to an adult-onset disability and the assistive devices that will, as best they can, replace what the protagonist has lost. It’s a tour de force of subtle emotional impact, and it struck me as deeply true in its arc and outcome. Yes, I thought as I read and reread it. Yes, this is how it feels.

“Listen,” by Karin Tidbeck, forays into the far future, into a universe full of the descendants of human diaspora. In structure and theme it’s classic science fiction: strange new worlds, characters both familiar and alien, diplomats and translators and the founding of colonies. Tidbeck takes all of these elements and transforms them into something rich and strange—but still profoundly and poignantly human.

In both of these works, disability is integral to the story. There is no story without it. It’s not played as tragedy or as inspiration porn. It just is, and the story is about how one lives with it, adapts to it and makes the world work in and through it.

Huang’s and Tidbeck’s stories stayed with me long after I read them, and made me want very much to share them with a new set of readers. I’m pleased and honored to present them here. I hope they speak as clearly and powerfully to you as they did to me.

© 2018 by Judith Tarr

Judith Tarr… hates writing bios of herself. She would rather write historical fantasy or historical novels or epic fantasy or the (rather) odd alternate history, or short stories on just about any subject that catches her fancy. She has been a World Fantasy Award nominee for her Alexander the Great novel, Lord of the Two Lands, and won the Crawford Award for her Hound and the Falcon trilogy. She also writes as Caitlin Brennan (The Mountain’s Call and sequels) and Kathleen Bryan (The Serpent and the Rose and sequels). Caitlin published House of the Star, a magical-horse novel from Tor, in Fall 2010. The paperback appeared in November of 2011. She is dancinghorse on LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter.

By Degrees and Dilatory Time
by SL Huang

“On the bright side,” said Zara, poking at his glasses a week before, “this means you get new eyes.”

But I don’t want new eyes, he thought.

The surgery isn’t bad, as surgeries go. The one he had when he busted his knee ten years ago, as a teen, was much worse. Or maybe it was worse because of what it had meant: that he’d never go out on the ice again.

That had been his identity, and he’d had to forge a new one from the fractured shards of cold and steel and sharpness. It had taken years, and he still wasn’t sure the new version of himself wasn’t brittle in places—the fault lines barely below the surface, just waiting for one tiny tap by a ball-peen hammer to make the whole construct shatter.

His eyes, his eyes have never been his identity. It won’t matter to lose them.

He tells himself that over and over. Through the days following his diagnosis. On the night before the procedure, as he stares at himself in the mirror one last time, and the image blurs. In the hospital just before, as his surgeon squeezes his hand with her gloved one, and the broad white lights of the OR fade out, the last visual he will ever truly see.

He’s told everyone else the same thing. It’s not the worst thing in the world, Ma. It’s not like I’m an artist. Dad, don’t worry—at least we have all the options we do these days, right? It’s not that big of a deal.

He tells himself one more time as he lies in bed following the operation, his world swallowed in darkness behind the bandages, a dull ache prickling through his face like it doesn’t know where it wants to hurt. This is just a bump in the road.

In a year it won’t even matter.

Cancer.

His doctor said it gently. It was part of a full sentence, even. “We found cancer cells.” Later he wondered if she sat there and practiced her delivery before she made calls like this, pronouncing the words with such gravity and care, like she knew how fast he was about to fall and wanted her voice alone to reassure him she could catch him.

Cancer.

The word stalled out in his brain, and his world went sharp and too-bright—the gold tiles of the kitchen, the bright blue ceramic of the fat penguin salt shaker, a drooping rose Zara had laughingly given him when they’d walked the gardens the week before. He wasn’t sure what he said back into the phone, only that his doctor must have asked him to come down to the clinic and talk to her in person, because he had. She talked to him and talked some more and kept talking, and then gave him a lot of pamphlets. Diagnosis, treatment options, recommendations. Everything in that same comforting voice, that gentle-calm-grave-understanding one.

After the operation he’s blind for three and a half weeks. His parents offered to fly in and take care of him, but the thought of being waited on was worse than the fear of being helpless, and he said no. He’s stacked food and water by his bed and run a string to the bathroom. Zara’s on speed dial, and she checks in on him twice a day on her way to and from work.

He’s too tired to be much company, but she stays longer than she has to anyway, sitting on the floor against his bed and watching TV while crunching popcorn. She translates anything visual with the snark of someone who’s turned media cynicism into an art form: “Now they’re turning down the dark alleyway! Ooo, I wonder what’s going to happen now.”

The shows she picks are the type of awfully written crime shows where they narrate almost everything they’re doing anyway—“Look, Boss.” “What is this?” “It’s the DNA results. It says the suspect is his father”—and he finds he doesn’t mind, for once. The white noise of the television and Zara’s voice wash over him and the smell of buttered popcorn fills his nostrils, and he drifts in and out of sleep without ever closing eyes that no longer exist.

Zara’s response was the best one, when he told her his diagnosis. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry we as scientists haven’t fixed this yet. That we haven’t fucking solved it. We should have a cure.”

She was so angry. At the world. At her scientific brethren. At human progress.

With anyone else he might have said, “It’s not your fault,” but he’d known her too many years not to know what she meant.

“See? This is why science is amazing,” she’d effused to him through high school, as she helped tutor him through chemistry and physics. “Look what we understand, look what we can build! How freakin’ cool is that? This is why I want to do this forever. It’ll be like diving into the greatest unexplored frontier.”

He always had to admit: when she said it, it did seem cool. He liked seeing the world through her eyes.

It’s almost a month before he goes for his implants. The sockets went in with the surgery, twined delicately into the optic nerve. Now he has to have the eyes fitted to the interface, fitted and calibrated and a lot of other words his surgeon and ophthalmologist and the biotechnician used and he’s sure he won’t fully understand until he experiences them.

He’s feeling better, mostly; at least, he has the energy to sit up for more than an hour at a time, which he counts as a victory. He’s spent the weeks listening to more audiobooks than he can count and wishing he could at least get on his computer and game. Once he had Zara sign on for him, and he just lay with the headphones on, letting his guild’s banter wash over him, but not seeing what they were laughing and shouting at hurt too much for him to do it again.

He still has mild headaches that drift behind his eye sockets and wake him in the middle of the night; he can’t tell if it’s pain or discomfort or a psychosomatic phantom. His doctor assures him he has no symptoms of rejection or infection or any of a dozen other complications that are possible but not overly likely.

Zara drives him for the final procedure. “I can’t wait to see them,” she says. “Are you excited?”

“Eh,” he says. ‘Excited’ isn’t the word he would use.

“We gotta go to the bar next week and give them a test drive.” Her words have grown wicked, slick with innuendo. “Metallic eyes are so hot. I bet the guys will be all over you. Can they give you ones that literally smolder?”

“I don’t think so,” he says.

Zara’s right, of course. There are people who do this electively. Get their eyes replaced, for aesthetics or enhancement or to do careers that require what only artificial eyes can give them. It costs a pretty penny, and he’s seen them stalking around and cocking their eyebrows as if to show off the unearthly sheen. Some of them choose inhuman colors, artistic ones, heightening the alien illusion as if to better show off their improved orbs.

He can’t for the life of him imagine why anyone would do this by choice.

His cancer was rare, they told him. Even rarer for it to be in both eyes, still rarer to be so aggressive. It felt like a great bitter joke at one point, that out of all the people in the world he had beaten every probability, but instead of a lottery jackpot he’d won cancer.

Despite all the pamphlets and flowcharts his doctor had given him, her recommendations had been very sure. Caught early. We don’t think it’s metastasized. We can get it all with surgery. Your prognosis will be excellent.

It hadn’t been a choice, not really. Not when his eyes were replaceable. They’d give him new ones, better ones. Gone the dorky glasses and astigmatism. Gone the squinting and blurriness. Gone the eyestrain when he stared at a screen for too long. His gamer friends even told him enviously how the new eyes would make his skills take off. “You could level up,” said Yoshi, breathless. “You could go pro. All the professional gamers are enhanced.”

He thought back to his youth, to coming out of a double axel and the edge slicing the ice with his body in perfect equilibrium, and flying, the scenery whirling past in an exhilarating blur. Enhancements weren’t allowed in competitive sports. Sports were about pushing the human body, training to your limit, exploring the edges of what humanity could do. Like Zara said about science, except physical.

There was no point in nailed timing and glorious extended lines if you hadn’t sharpened every edge of that move a thousand times, yourself. The summer before he’d gone to college, he’d had a second, far easier surgery, when the technology had come out to give him a different kind of new knee. Strong. Flexible. A knee he could skate on, if he wanted, but not compete.

He’d never gone back on the ice.

He’s awake when they put the eyes in. They offer him something to sedate him a little, if he wants it, but he says no.

The sensation is strange. Loud. Like they’re snapping bones in his face, even though he knows it’s just the instruments and the metal crunching against the socket. There’s no pain, but he’s still not sure he made the right decision turning down sedation.

The moment when he can see again is sudden and without fanfare. One instant it’s darkness, the next his left eye is filled with doctors poking sharp metal things into his eyeball.

They warned him it would be “disconcerting”—he almost crawls out of his skin. He manages not to do more than twitch, though he does try to blink reflexively. It doesn’t work; his eyelids are being held open. It’s like a bizarre horror movie.

His ophthalmologist grins at him over her mask. “Hey, he’s back. Can you see us, Marcus?” She waves in his face like an exaggerated cartoon.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I can see you.”

His eye muscles twitch—he can’t help it. The focus moves, flicking from one object to the other. Doctor. Nurse. Ceiling. Is it just his imagination, or is there some lag time?

It has to be his imagination. These eyes are better than human ones.

Then why does everything look so flat? The colors seem duller than he remembers, the light harsher. Maybe it’s just the room.

His right eye flares to life. It’s less startling this time.

Everyone assumed he’d be able to choose whatever fancy new features he wanted. “Get those superfast superspy ones,” Yoshi said, making slashing noises that came through the headphones as they joysticked through their screens together. He wasn’t sure whether the slashing noises were about the game or his hypothetical eyes. “Like that guy who does acrobatics with fighter jets. Whatshisname. I saw a documentary.”

“I don’t think you do tricks with fighter jets,” he answered. Or maybe you did. Suddenly he wasn’t sure.

Zara sent him studies on all the new developments. Research hospitals, the cutting edge, the conference in Singapore where they were talking about eyes that could wirelessly link up to your computer and smartphone and give you some sort of integrated heads-up display.

Insurance didn’t pay for that sort of thing, of course. And his doctor even explained to him that a lot of the elective enhancements people got needed to be combined with a fancier type of neurosurgery, with a lot of words about nerve and electrical integration that he didn’t care to ask her to explain. “For you we have to make sure to take everything,” she’d said. “Removing the cancer has to be the first priority. Once we do that, we’ll use the standard implantation type, which integrates with the optic nerve behind the eye.”

He nodded. Not having choices made them easy.

They give him a pair of dark glasses to go home with, and warn him he’ll be photosensitive for at least three days and to lie for as long as he wants or needs to with his eyes closed. The muscles will take time to adapt, they tell him; some discomfort is normal.

It’s less discomfort and more pain—sharp little flecks of it intermittently throughout the day, stabbing with his eye movement and over before he can do anything about them, and backgrounded by a fuzzy ache like the precursor to a migraine. He takes the doctors’ advice and lies with his eyes closed, but restlessly. This is supposed to be over. He’s supposed to be able to open his eyes now and move on with his life.

He goes back to work the following week, but takes frequent breaks to sit in a dark closet. His supervisor is understanding.

He doesn’t even try to game. The mere thought of the 3D visualizations makes his head ache.

He wonders if these feelings will ever pass completely, or if this is his new reality.

“What color are you going to get?” people kept asking him, as if that were the most important thing. Probably because it was the most obvious feature to others, the bright array of metallics that the enhancers and transhumanists showed off so proudly.

He wanted as close to his old color as possible. Dark brown, unremarkable except that it was his. His lovers had always told him he had nice eyes.

They couldn’t do brown. Only brighter colors. Something about the way light reflected in the lenses inside—brown was too dark. The physics would have allowed for a light beige, but no one wanted light beige, so it wasn’t even in the palette they gave him to choose from. To be fair, he wouldn’t have wanted light beige, either.

He wanted to say something stupid about his ethnicity at that point. But I’m Thai. Like that would be news to them. Like that made him different from everyone else with tan skin and black hair and dark complexions who would want brown eyes if they could get them. Like stating his ethnicity would change what was technologically possible.

He chose the darkest color he could, a deep, vibrant blue. In any other context, it would have been beautiful.

“I still don’t think I’m going to be up to going out this week,” he tells Zara, when she prods him to resume their relationship as perpetual drinking buddies.

He hasn’t tried a mirror yet. He doesn’t know what he looks like. But it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t want the staring, the fascinated questions from people who assume they’re making small talk. The silent judgments from people who assume he did it for enhancement.

He also doesn’t want people to know this part of him before they know his name, to see it splashed across his face without him choosing to tell them. Doesn’t want to try to meet new people when this will inevitably and painfully be a conversation starter, his new acquaintances stepping on a landmine they don’t even know is there. “I like your eyes.” “I had cancer.” “. . . Oh.”

He foresees some awkward silences coming up in his dating life.

He wonders if this would have been easier if he’d been in a relationship when it happened. If a boyfriend looking at him like he was just the same would have made him feel so. Or if that person looking at him ever so slightly differently would have magnified every feeling of alienation.

He’s started wearing sunglasses outside all the time, now.

He began paying attention to the transhumanist movement after his diagnosis. Zara knew about it, of course, and had her typical libertarian stance. “Hey, as long as they’re not hurting anybody.”

He read up on some of the politics online. People wanting to modify themselves. People wanting to modify their children. Other people claiming the right to hate and condemn them for it. It struck him as just as senseless as most politics.

The idea that he’d be entering this world involuntarily—the enhancers’ realm, the political imbroglio—disturbed him. That he’d have to claim a stance, take a side, defend the technological advances by virtue of their medical purpose. Be grouped with the believers by default.

He shut his laptop. He had enough to worry about—he didn’t want to deal with this, too. Not yet.

He assumed, from the beginning, that the new eyes would be better. Of course he did; that’s why people chose to get them sometimes.

But they’re not. They’re just different.

Sure, in every objective sense he can see better. No glasses, and once the photosensitivity dies down, the detail he perceives is startling, especially texture. His vision is better than perfect. But the impression of flatness has persisted. His doctors tell him that no testing has shown anything less than normal depth perception, so maybe it’s all in his head—but doesn’t all vision happen in your head anyway? If it’s in his head, doesn’t that make it real automatically?

Despite the perfect vision, he constantly feels like he’s seeing everything through a slightly dull filter, like someone fiddled with the brightness and contrast settings on his monitor. Nothing he can pinpoint, but it drags at him. Sometimes, some three o’clocks in the morning, he wants to claw out his new eyes and scream.

Sleeplessness.

The bouts of insomnia and anxiety started before his surgery. It wasn’t nerves; he trusted his doctors. Instead, he would wake from cluttered dreams and stare into the darkness.

He’d stretch his eyes wide, willing the pupils to dilate, to suck in as much as they could possibly see.

Then he’d turn on the light and let the flash burn his retinas, let the purple splotches appear and his eyes tear up, wanting to hang onto the feeling.

The first time he looks in the mirror, depression smothers him, like tentacles wrapping thickly around his heart.

He’s been mentally preparing himself for the color, for the metallic sheen. But the shape of his eyes is different. He hadn’t expected that. They look wider to him, perpetually surprised, slightly goofy. He hates it.

Maybe the effect will diminish. The skin around the implants is still red and a little puffy, as if irritated at the interlopers. He knows how it feels.

He’s never thought of himself as vain. He’s always been decent-looking, but was arrogant enough to believe it didn’t matter. That he didn’t care. That appearance isn’t what’s important.

Until now, when he looks at his face and sees a freak.

Now he realizes he is vain, has always been vain, and maybe there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.

He feels a sudden stab of guilt and empathy. He’s only been able to tell himself he’s indifferent to his looks because he’s been lucky enough to be satisfied with them. He closes his eyes, shutting away the image in the mirror.

He’d cry, but his tear ducts are gone.

“Look out!” Yoshi bellowed in his ear the week before his surgery, as a troll burst through the wall. On the screen, his avatar ran.

Life and death, he thought. Such a simple decision to make.

His had been simple, too. “You’re so strong,” his mother kept telling him. “Your father and I talk about it, how brave you are.”

Brave? Why? The doctor had told him he had cancer, and this was what needed to be done. What would they have expected him to do instead? Say no?

Life and death. It made things easy.

His avatar ran around the corner and dropped its hands to its knees, panting.

My days are like yours now, he thought at the computer-generated character. The troll swings its club, and so we duck and kick and run.

But it’s not the fighting that’s the hard part, is it?

The pain improves, the headaches lift. He’s doing dishes one day when it strikes him he’s forgotten about his eyes for the last few minutes. He hadn’t realized that until now he’s been constantly aware of them, a low-level hum of discomfort, of difference.

As the days go by, it happens more often, for longer stretches. He’s surprised sometimes when he catches his face in the mirror—his self-image is still one in which he has human eyes, and when the reality reminds him, his mood twists into depression.

But even that changes. The first time he looks in the mirror and doesn’t notice his eyes, he realizes it happened five minutes later, and it jars him.

The human mind is infinitely adaptable.

Cancer.

When other people said the word, it was this huge, ominous, grave thing. People died of cancer. People lost loved ones to it. People wrote sad books and movies about cancer, and somebody always died and it was always tragic and noble and had important messages about the meaning of life.

Having cancer was different. He didn’t feel particularly tragic. Or noble. Or enlightened.

It was just shitty.

He was fortunate to have a good prognosis. He’d slog through it and out the other side, and life would go on.

Life goes on.

His friends and colleagues get used to his eyes far faster than he does. For a while he watches for them to be still looking, still gossiping, still curious, but eventually even his paranoia has to admit that he’s yesterday’s news. The realization is somehow both relieving and depressing. After all, he still has to deal with his new eyes, and now he has to deal with them alone.

He starts seeing a therapist once a week. She’s a very pleasant person who listens to him ramble and asks him gentle questions that make him feel less stupid. He’s always more at peace after his sessions with her.

He starts forgetting to wear the sunglasses. He finally signs back on to his gaming group and his friends greet him with whooping cheers for about thirty seconds before they’re all focused on the game again. Their lack of continued concern is somehow both liberating and slightly disappointing. He files that away to talk to the therapist about.

A good part of the time now, when someone does a double-take at him on the street, he doesn’t remember why until he thinks about it.

“This is just something I have to get through,” he told his parents once.

He hadn’t thought that statement would be so full of raw truth.

A year passes.

He remembers thinking last year that in a year none of this would matter. He was both wrong and right about that: it matters, and it doesn’t. The cancer changed him, but he adjusted. Nothing is radical. Nothing is revelatory. But nothing is inconsequential, either.

It’s just . . . life. Like everything else.

He’s started dating again. There haven’t been as many awkward silences as he feared. It turns out he can say, “I had cancer in my eyes, but I’m okay now” and then smile and change the subject. Zara turns out to be right that his eyes probably attract more people than not, and he’s learned not to mind.

He thinks about going to a rink and trying skating. Just for fun. Who knows, after all these years it might be more pleasant than painful. Zara offers to go with him. “I’ll fall on my ass so much I’ll make you feel great. Instant moral support.” He smiles. He doesn’t have to decide anything now.

He starts struggling to find new things to talk to his therapist about, and they drop to meeting once a month, then as-needed. He keeps her card taped to the fridge.

Sometimes he sees transhumanist rallies on television, or chances across articles on the Internet. He’s still not sure how he feels about them. He’d say he’s indifferent, but as a man with a fake leg and fake eyes, he’s one of the media-dubbed “cyborgs” already.

Well, screw it. He’s indifferent. It feels satisfying, somehow, to claim his right to have no political feelings about the technology in his body.

At night he sleeps well. And in the morning, he opens his eyes and goes about his day.

© 2015 by SL Huang. Originally published in Strange Horizons. Reprinted by permission of author.

SL Huang is an Amazon-bestselling author who justifies her MIT degree by using it to write eccentric mathematical superhero fiction. Her debut novel, Zero Sum Game, is upcoming from Tor, and her short fiction has sold to Analog, Nature, and The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016. She is also a Hollywood stuntwoman and firearms expert, with credits including Battlestar Galactica and Top Shot. Follow her online at slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.

Listen
by Karin Tidbeck

Mika only visited Aino Korhonen ahead of time because he was in an upward swing. He had awoken with a longing to see people, talk to them, to be surrounded by life. All the interesting markets and people were up the spokes, so that’s where he went.

Aino’s workshop lay in an artisan quarter on the third spoke, close to the hub. The little space was almost entirely occupied by a large table covered in patterns and scraps of cloth. Fat rolls of fabric jostled each other on shelves on the walls. Aino stood at the table, a lanky woman with skin and hair the color of pale sand. She looked up at Mika with grey eyes, straight at him, not gently sideways like normal people. Mika fastened his own gaze somewhere by her right shoulder.

“Mika Johannisson,” he said in Swedish. “I’ll be interpreting at the meeting with the ambassador.”

Aino was still looking at him. “What do you want?”

Wha’ doo’o wan? Her consonants were partly smoothed away, the vowels rounded in a musical arch.

Mika smiled at her. “I was in the neighborhood. Just curious, is all.”

“Well. Watch, then,” Aino said.

She pushed herself off the table and over to the wall to fetch a roll of fabric, and her thin arms and legs folded in the wrong direction. In the low gravity it resembled a strange dance move. Mika watched as she plucked the roll from the wall, put it on the table, measured out a length of fabric, cut it off. He took a step forward.

“Can I touch the fabric?”

“If your hands are clean.”

Mika rubbed the material between his fingers. It felt uneven and alive. People paid good money for Aino’s clothes. Wearing hand-made clothes by an exotic woman who spoke a minority language was authentic and refined. Light trousers and tunics in muted shades, long shawls and plaids, clothes made to wear in layers for protection against hot days and icy cold nights in a place that wasn’t the controlled climate of Amitié.

“Where do you get your fabrics?”, he asked. “It’s not printed?”

“I have contacts.”

“This is exciting,” Mika said, not quite sure what to say next. “You’re exciting.”

“Am I?” Aino asked dryly.

The words flew out. “Were you born that way?” Mika bit his cheek.

“No,” Aino replied. “Were you?”

“What do you mean?”

Aino pointed at Mika’s left hand, which was drumming a nervous triple beat on the tabletop.

Mika laughed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

Aino smiled crookedly. After a long silence that felt awkward to Mika, but looked natural to Aino, she said:

“What are they going to ask me?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Mika said. “I’m just the interpreter.”

“They can’t just be looking for information about Kiruna. They could find that out for themselves.”

“The most current information comes from the Kozlov reports,” Mika replied, “and they’re very incomplete. Also, they can’t land without a permit. Not before the paperwork is done. That’s why they’re starting with you. You’re the first one to leave the place in a generation.”

“Hm,” Aino said. “I suppose that’s how it is, then.”

Mika left with a triangular shawl over his shoulders. The fabric was unfamiliarly raspy on his neck.

The next day was worse than the one before. Mika had only gotten four hours of sleep but still felt energized. He had been building music in the evening, then turned to the game he was currently playing. He spent half the night on the steppe as the explorer Gunnhild, the part where she meets the warrior Bård. It ought to have tired him out, but not this time. Eventually he forced himself to unplug and took a sedative to relax. In Mika’s dreams, Gunnhild defended her caravan over and over again. Each time, the caravan perished because Bård never came. Gunnhild’s companions gave her replies that were pure nonsense, and when Bård finally showed up their love story was interrupted by song-and-dance sequences.

When Mika got up to have breakfast, he still had an imaginary dialogue with Bård going in his head. The food had no taste. He shouldn’t have gotten himself overstimulated. Interpreting would be hard work today. If Mika didn’t take better care of himself, work would be even harder tomorrow, and the day after, all the way up until the crash came and he wouldn’t be able to do much at all. He could have chosen medication, but he wasn’t qualified for any other type of work. His choice was between interpreting or unemployment, and unemployed people weren’t allowed to stay on Amitié. So here he was, unmedicated, employed. And it was still worth it. Every word from the ambassador’s mouth made it worth it.

The thirty ambassadors claimed to come from an early colony. They were looking for a new home, they said, one that fit them better. No one could really contradict their story; at the start of this era, everyone who could had launched themselves into a galaxy that was absolutely lousy with habitable worlds. No one really knew how many ships had left and where. People showing up from distant places with strange modifications wasn’t unheard of.

These ambassadors had named themselves for celestial bodies and phenomena. They looked more or less like baseline humans: neither short nor tall, neither slight nor heavyset, most of them with olive-colored to brown skin and dark eyes and hair. The abnormal thing about them was their speech.

The general consensus was that they spoke an archaic form of English. In the moment they spoke, they were completely understandable. But as soon as they fell silent, any memory of what they had said disappeared. The listener had a feeling of having heard something wise and profound, but exactly what, they didn’t know. Communicating by text didn’t help, as the ambassadors’ written language resembled that of children. It was very obvious that sound was a vital element of their communication.

A very small number of people could understand them and relay their words. Something about the way their brains were wired gave them a sensitivity to the language that others didn’t have. It had its drawbacks, however. The same sensitivity that made Mika an interpreter also made him sick. But it was only without the medication that he could listen.

It was typical of the interpreting company to make Aino come down to the main office, instead of booking a conference room in the spokes or visiting her workshop. Down here, she was clumsy and seemed to be in pain. She sat hunched in her chair, tightly wrapped in her muted shawls. Ambassador Oort arrived dapper as usual, in a nondescript teal suit and short hair slicked flat against her skull.

“You’re here,” she said to Mika.

Those words held the fact that Oort was glad Mika was there, that she had looked forward to their meeting, and that she would remember their encounter with warmth. The message went through him like a warm whisper, and he stopped drumming his fingers against the tabletop. He was here and only here, now.

Aino reacted like everyone else at first. She looked awed as the ambassador spoke to her, then confused when the words disappeared from her mind. Mika repeated Oort’s words, a formal greeting. Aino kept her composure better than most and replied to the questions Mika relayed to her. Was she typical of her kind? What was her village like? What did she do all day? What did the others think of her? Why did she look that way? How did they get their voices? Aino replied.

That the villagers used their children as incubators for large insects. That their throats were then modified during this process so that they could communicate when the moons that bathed Kiruna in soundwaves drowned out the frequency of human speech. That Aino looked like she did because the incubation sometimes had terrible side effects. That she was cast out because she reminded the others of what they did to their children. That she had taken the biologist Petr Kozlov’s place on the shuttle to Amitié. When the ambassador asked Aino to demonstrate her voice, she let out a series of trills, like a little bird.

Aino asked why Oort’s people wanted to settle on Kiruna specifically. Oort replied that the moon’s sound environment seemed to fit them.

“That sound environment doesn’t fit anyone,” Aino replied.

Oort smiled.

Sleeping was even more difficult that night. Mika’s thoughts ran in circles, a long cavalcade of conversations and snatches of music and ideas and all of a sudden Mika was sitting up in bed composing a new piece; the foundation was a sequence that had been going through his head, adorned with a filigree of frail triplets that he gently dropped over it, an abstract choir that welled in from the sides and enveloped the little cupola he had built, and suddenly the alarm went off and it was time to get up and go to work and he wasn’t tired in the least despite sitting with the music piece for four hours but he made himself take a shower and eat something because that’s what healthy people did.

Émile had left him because of this. Mika couldn’t blame him. It could hardly be easy to put up with someone who one month would stay up all night, talk incessantly and always want sex, and the next month couldn’t get out of bed or even respond. Émile couldn’t.

“Oort is more important than I am,” were his parting words.

Maybe it was true. But Mika’s skin ached to be touched.

“We would like you to come along as an informant when we reconnoiter,” Mika translated to Aino the next day. “You have knowledge of the community that we don’t.”

“What do you need me for?” Aino said.

“We need help interpreting and negotiating on site,” Oort replied.

“What’s in it for me?” Aino asked. “I left for a reason. I don’t want to go back there. They treated me like dirt. I was heavy and in pain. I can be light here.”

“We can cure you.”

“I don’t need curing,” Aino said. “It’s just the wrong place.”

“What do you want then?”

Aino shook her head. “I don’t want anything. I’m content.”

“Petr Kozlov,” the ambassador said, “isn’t doing very well.”

Aino squinted at her.

“He wrote about you in one of his reports. I got the impression that the two of you were close.”

Aino averted her eyes. “Maybe,” she said. “It’s none of your business.”

“He was badly hurt trying to incubate,” Oort said. “He wants to go back to Gliese, but no one will fund the trip. We could ship him home.”

Aino was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: “I thought he would be alright.”

Oort shook her head. “He wasn’t.”

Aino’s mouth twisted. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Well,” she said, and her voice trembled slightly. “I suppose I’ll go with you.”

Mika kept stable on the trip. Maybe it was because he spent most of the trip in stasis. Maybe because during his waking hours he was linked up to the ship only, and not to an entire station. Maybe it was because Oort stayed in her cabin and didn’t need him. Maybe it was because staring at the projection of the approaching gas giant and its three moons gave him a kind of calm. When they eventually landed on Kiruna, he felt almost normal. The sensation evaporated in the terrain vehicle they took from the little spaceport.

Everyone was so slow. The grim local with his slow and clumsy driving, the phlegmatic ambassador, Aino who seemed dumb as a post and who thought for ages before replying. Oort told him to breathe. Breathe how? He breathed as well as he could. Why did Oort speak so slowly?

They drove through a burnt mountain landscape where little succulents hung on to the slopes. As they gained altitude, the world grew a little greener, although the flora mostly consisted of brush and grasses. The angry little sun was stalked by a bright yellow satellite, the moon that drowned out birdsong. In not too long it would be replaced by the other moon, the one that canceled out human speech. Kiruna was almost in tidal lock with the gas giant but had a very slight wobble; sometimes the planet peeked over the horizon to drown out all sound completely. The result was a world where sound was almost never whole. Why people had chosen to live here was a mystery. Mika supposed they couldn’t afford to leave.

The village was nestled in a highland valley next to a thin river, a gathering of about thirty whitewashed houses with roof terraces. The sound of flat goat bells echoed between the mountains. As the car drew closer, people came out of the houses to look. They mostly had the same coloring as Aino, ashy blonde and tanned pale gold, with long faces. The car came to a stop in a little square in the middle of the village, and Mika and the ambassador got out. The crowd that quickly filled the square looked at them in silence. They stared directly into Mika’s and Oort’s eyes, just like Aino did. It felt like being caught in searchlights. Oort spoke.

“Honored townsfolk.”

Oort’s voice rang out deep and round in this atmosphere. It sent shivers along Mika’s ribs. The villagers understood the scope of what the ambassador said: that they truly were honored, revered, that she came to them like a supplicant, and their faces softened. Then her words disappeared, and they raised their eyebrows as Mika repeated the ambassador’s words.

“Honored townsfolk. I am here to determine whether I and my people can be your neighbors. We might settle in these mountains.”

Not a request, an assertion.

They spent the afternoon in the village elder’s house. They spoke of Kiruna, how things worked, how sound worked, what the villagers subsisted on. Oort didn’t ask about the voices or the incubation process.

Aino sat in a corner with her crutches across her lap. The villagers had refused to look at her or speak to her. Aino had made no attempt to communicate with them. Everyone pretended she wasn’t there, at least until Oort insisted on mentioning her.

“Aino Korhonen has been very useful to us as a source of information,” she said.

“I don’t know anything about her anymore,” the village elder said to Mika, twining a leather string between her fingers.

She had been fiddling with that string ever since they arrived. Mika wanted to tear it from her hands and throw it at the wall.

“You bloody well do,” Mika said.

The village elder raised an eyebrow. Oort lay a hand on Mika’s arm. Mika clenched his teeth.

“I apologize,” he said. “Those weren’t the ambassador’s words, they were mine.”

The ambassador regarded him in chilly silence.

“She has been very useful to us,” Oort said, “and you should be proud of her.”

The elder nodded slowly. “Well. That is indeed good.”

“We would like to see Petr Kozlov,” Oort said. “He has provided us with valuable information.”

“Kozlov,” said the elder. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“That means he’s here, but she hasn’t looked at him,” Aino said from her corner. “Ask her where his house is.”

“Where is Petr Kozlov’s house?” Oort asked.

“It’s the house that used to belong to Aino Korhonen,” the elder replied.

The man stood in the opening of the little whitewashed house, looking at Mika and Oort with a frown. He must have been beautiful once, in a squareish sort of way. Now he was thin and pallid, his thick red hair faded; his tawny eyes were sunk deep in their sockets.

“Petr Kozlov?”, Oort said.

Petr blinked. Mika translated. Petr stared at Oort and nodded.

“We can help you leave,” Oort said. ”Thanks to Aino. You remember Aino, don’t you?”

Oort stepped aside. Aino stood a few paces behind them, leaning heavily on her crutches, almost turned away from them. She looked sideways at Petr. Petr put a hand over his eyes and gasped for breath. Aino slowly walked over to him where he stood in the door. He abruptly wrapped his arms around her and leaned his head against her chest. Aino dropped one of her crutches and put a hand on his head. Her sleeve hid his face.

Oort led Mika away.

The driver moved the car to the edge of the square, folded the seats down into cots and left for the night. Mika didn’t notice the change until a sudden cry pierced the air. The villagers were singing.

It sounded like birdsong, sequences and trills so high that a human throat couldn’t produce them. Mika opened his mouth and tried to speak. He could feel his throat vibrating against his fingers, and hear a very, very faint sound of his own voice, but that was all. Oort smiled at him when she saw him try. For a moment it sounded as if she was chuckling, but he must have misheard.

The high-frequency noises began to prick his ears. Every noise put him more on edge. They came shooting at him like bright yellow flashes, they burrowed behind his eyes. He found earplugs in his toiletry bag, but they didn’t help in the least. The cries began to fall silent a couple of hours after sunset, but by then it was too late. Sleeping would be impossible. Mika started the Gunnhild game locally and left for the steppe and Bård. He gripped Bård like Petr had gripped Aino and imagined that they met again after a long time apart, that everything was forgiven, that they started over.

Aino came back to the car while Mika was having breakfast. Oort had left to reconnoiter on her own. Voices were audible again. Aino sat down in the door opening. She didn’t look like she had had much sleep. She accepted the cup of tea Mika handed her.

“He can’t talk anymore,” she said. “He tried to incubate and get the voice. He failed. And now he’s a pariah.”

“So is he coming with us to Amitié?” Mika asked.

“He wants to,” Aino said. “But he wants to be with me.” She squeezed her lips together.

“And you don’t want to.”

Aino shook her head. “He didn’t love me, he loved the intriguing outcast. It’s not me he loves now, either. Now he loves the savior. The one who doesn’t look away.” She sipped her tea.

“But didn’t you love him back?” Mika asked.

“I did,” Aino said, “but that’s not enough.”

She looked out across the valley. “Sometimes I think I should feel guilty for leaving him here. But then I remember that he didn’t really want me. It was the song and the village and this world.”

Mika refilled Aino’s cup.

“Is that what the ambassador wants?” Aino asked suddenly. “To have a voice? Is she here to do the same thing?”

“I don’t know,” Mika said. “It’s something about this moon. Something about the way sound works here. Exactly what, I don’t know.”

“You’re talking very fast,” Aino said.

“Sorry.” Mika cleared his throat. “I’m like that right now.”

“I can tell. It’s getting worse, isn’t it.”

Mika nodded. “I can’t take meds. If I do I can’t hear Oort anymore.”

“What is it costing you not to take them?”

“Everything.”

“And why?” Aino tilted her head. “If it costs you everything, what do you get in exchange?”

Mika made himself breathe more deeply, to construct longer sentences.

“You’ve heard Oort,” he began. “You’ve heard her speak, but as soon as she stops you can’t remember what she said, right? All you know is that she said something, and in that moment you understood exactly what she meant, it was so perfect, so precise. Right?”

Aino nodded.

“Imagine hearing that and then remembering it.” Mika shook his head. “Badly put. I mean, when Oort speaks, every sentence is perfectly constructed. The sound and the intent are coupled. Do you have an ear for music?”

“Eh,” Aino said. “Good enough for singing.”

“So imagine then,” Mika said, “imagine the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard, with a hundred under- and overtones in harmony, a music that contains everything, so complex that it never bores you, and listening to it almost makes you cry. And you understand why music exists. And when it’s over, you just want more.”

Aino waited.

“That’s what it’s like every time Oort opens her mouth,” Mika finished.

“But is it worth it?” Aino asked.

“Right now it feels like it.”

Aino looked at him with sadness. “You’re like Petr.”

Mika laughed a little too loudly and shrugged.

When they ran out of tea, Aino took Mika to the river. Being under such a wide sky again felt unreal. It almost swallowed him. All sharp noises were muted; it was just them and the mountain and the goats who came to see if they had anything edible. They recognized Aino. Mika sang one song after the other, and Aino listened, and there was a sad cast to her features but that was probably for Petr’s sake.

When dusk fell, Oort still wasn’t back. The mountainside on the other side of the valley caught the last of the sunlight. In the village, the meager outdoor lighting came on. Doors and windows closed to the dry cold.

“We should go looking for her,” Mika said.

“Go talk to people,” Aino said. “They might have seen her.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

Aino gave him a crooked smile. “They won’t talk to me, and you don’t want to walk at my pace.”

“No, that’s really not,” Mika started, but Aino interrupted him:

“Yes, it is.” Then she pointed. “There. There she is.”

There she was indeed: the ambassador was standing on a rock shelf above the village.

Aino frowned. “What is she doing up there?”

“Is there something special about that place?”

“We don’t go there. Other than when it’s time to… ” She touched her throat. “Don’t go up there, Mika.”

Mika went up there.

Ambassador Oort stood on the edge of the shelf, looking out across the valley. A small flock of birds circled overhead. Occasionally one of them dove towards the ambassador, but veered away at the last second, as if not finding what it expected.

“It’ll happen soon,” she said when Mika walked up to her.

Mika caught his breath with his hands on his knees. “What’ll happen soon?”

“Soon we’ll see if this is the right place,” Oort replied.

She turned and looked at Mika, and her face was tense with nervous joy.

An eerie light swelled on the horizon.

“There,” the ambassador said. “Now.”

A second horizon overtook the first as a glowing sliver of the gas giant rose and absolute silence fell. Far away, Mika could hear the faint rush of blood in his ears. Ambassador Oort opened her mouth and sang.

She sang, and the song made Mika’s eyes tear up, it dug a hole in his belly. He opened his mouth to join her, but his voice left no trace in the air. The ambassador’s deep voice filled the world. She turned to Mika, and her eyes shone in the light of the gas giant. Suddenly Mika understood everything, more than everything. Creation spread out in front of him like a map.

The ambassador sang a low note and swept her hands sideways, as if opening a curtain. And the world slipped sideways. An untouched, verdant landscape, another sky where strange stars were coming out, another gas giant glowing a fiery orange. The ambassador’s tinkling laugh.

When Mika came to outside the village, and they took him to the spaceport and sedated him, and he crashed on the shuttle and the darkness took over and everything slowed down to a crawl.

Hands, brain, tongue. The sluggish pointlessness, the sleep, the dreams about the shelf. As they helped him to his room on the station. Visited him and made him swallow pills. Long cool hands on his forehead. As he floated to the surface, and had a sudden moment of clarity: that was Aino sitting on a chair next to his bed.

“Are you awake now,” she said.

Mika nodded mutely.

“Oort?” he asked.

Aino shrugged. “Somewhere on Kiruna. They all went there.”

“I saw something there,” Mika said. “On the shelf.”

“What did you see?”

“I don’t remember,” Mika replied. “But I understood everything.”

“They said you had a psychotic break.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

“Maybe so,” Aino said. “But you were crazy nonetheless.”

“Petr?”

“He’s on his way to Gliese now,” Aino said. “Where he belongs.”

The treatment supposedly healed the damage the repeated episodes had made. Still, Mika was left a little more stupid, a little slower, a little duller. Aino let him help out in the workshop every now and then. Working with his hands was calming.

They never spoke about what had happened or not happened. They cut, basted and hemmed in silence. Sometimes someone came in, and Mika caught himself listening tensely, but the customer always spoke in a normal voice.

Neither the music nor being Gunnhild with Bård did anything for him. A different longing clawed at him, one that couldn’t be satisfied. A longing to be back on the rock shelf, to see what ambassador Oort was showing him, to remember what it was. To see the world swept aside.

© 2016 by Karin Tidbeck. Originally published by Tor.com. Reprinted by permission of author.

Karin Tidbeck is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Malmö as a freelance writer, translator, and creative writing teacher, and writes fiction in Swedish and English. She debuted in 2010 with the Swedish short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?. Her English debut, the 2012 collection Jagannath, was awarded the Crawford Award 2013 and shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel debut, Amatka, was published in June 2017 by Vintage. She devotes her spare time to forteana, subversive cross-stitching, and Nordic LARP.

Nonfiction Introduction
by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

The notes that I wrote myself when I started the journey of editing Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction are clear. The words I gave myself were about envisioning a future free from eugenics, about confronting the implicit biases of our genre, and I’m pleased to say the authors in the nonfiction section have torn those walls down in ways I never could have imagined.

Despite a history of thinking about how to make the future better for everyone, science fiction has relentlessly left disabled people behind. These essayists have re-envisioned the genre beautifully. Ira Gladkova’s essay on Miles Vorkosigan explores how the disabled hero has done more than just create representation for physically disabled readers, and John Wiswell discusses the intricacies of disabled exclusion in his Infinity War essay.

Fran Wilde teaches us how to write our stories, explaining the importance of point of view and perspective to a disabled narrator. “In Design a Spaceship,” Andi Buchanan beautifully disrupts the narrative of no disabled people in space, leaving no room for anyone to disagree with the image of wheelchairs on a spaceship. Marieke Nijkamp reminds us that eugenics has no place in a future that we build together.

In the science fiction that we write, we are envisioning new worlds, new futures, new beginnings. Each of the authors in Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction’s nonfiction section has done their part to show you the world they want to live in, and that they already belong to. We belong to the stars, to the spaceships, to the scientists and time travellers. We belong to new worlds and places no man has gone before.

We couldn’t wedge every single disabled perspective into this issue, though we tried. Not every disability is represented here, but we encourage you to dream past the borders that you’ve been given by this genre in the past. We encourage you to see Deaf astronauts, imagine blind scientists, give voice to wheelchair-using time travelers, and hand new tech over to neuroatypical hackers in cyberpunk worlds. We hope you’ll see this issue not as an ending, but as a starting point for a re-envisioning of a genre that has left us out for too long.

I’m incredibly proud to have worked on this issue with my co-editor Dominik Parisien. Together we’ve worked hard to create a writing and editorial environment where disabled creators (including ourselves) could flourish. Where we could imagine beyond the borders of what we’ve been given, and where, if we needed it, there was always someone to catch us and support us as we worked towards our mutual goal.

Welcome to the future. Welcome to OUR future, the one we all hope someday to have.

© 2018 by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a deafblind speculative fiction writer and editor. Her nonfiction work can be found in The Boston Globe, Fireside, Uncanny, and Tor.com. She is the managing editor of Hugo Finalist magazine Fireside. She holds an MA in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College. When not working, she can be found volunteering for disability justice at the grassroots level. She lives in New Jersey.

Design a Spaceship
by Andi C. Buchanan

Design a spaceship. Or a space station, if you prefer. Imagine an artificial planet, or a galaxy.

But start with a spaceship. Start from nothing except the vacuum of space. Sketch it with a freshly sharpened pencil across the blue-green lines of graph paper, or model it in three dimensions, dragging your mouse to shape components to your will. Research and make notes as you go, a form emerging from details and words. Picture it in your mind’s eye.

Now make it habitable.

Most people have similar ideas about how to make a spaceship habitable. Our designs usually start with oxygen. Then we add water and light and food. Most people stop there.

Or, at least, they think they stop there. In truth, nondisabled people assume everything else. They assume their hands will grip the controls easily. They assume the chairs will hold their bodies, that the noise levels will be tolerable for their ears and their brains, and that they will be able to move from one end of the ship to the other without barriers.

You cannot make those assumptions. You’ve never had the luxury of assuming everything will work for you, that you will always be welcome.

Maybe you’ve always imagined a world where all their assumptions are true for you as well, where each house and library and shop and bus—and yes, spaceship—is as welcoming to you as it is to anyone else.

Maybe you’ve never dared to imagine. But it’s time to start.

People will tell you it’s unrealistic. Ignore them. If faster-than-light travel is a given, then you can sure as hell have a corridor you can roll along smoothly with a wheelchair and never have to worry about being caught out by a flight of steps or someone having left the recycling out halfway across its width. If they can imagine a time when food comes from a protein synthesiser on request, you can absolutely have a world where you can be sure to find something to eat without needing to check or worry, without you have to tighten with anxiety and hear the frustration in their voices as you ask, again, are you sure. And if they can imagine environments for silicon-based life forms¹ and methane breathing aliens², ships filled with water to be crewed by sentient dolphins³, then they can imagine spaces for people like you.

It’s easy, when you start making these comparisons, to let this become an us-and-them game. Look at those aliens with their alien sector^4 full of fancy atmospheres. How about a little less for the aliens and a little more for the hard-working, tax-paying humans, huh?

Ignore those sentiments. They’re designed to tear us apart, to pit us against each other. Only the powerful win when we start fighting. Learn from what you see instead. Learn that if space can be built for aliens, it can be built for disabled people like you, that this is not a zero-sum game, that your frustration is reasonable but that any advance made can help you get there faster.

Remember that if Sector 12 General Hospital^5 could have been built to accommodate aliens who breathe chlorine, oxygen, or methane, who communicate through the production of sap or through ripples in their fur, who need different gravitational levels, who have two, four, or twenty eyes, then spaces can be build that accommodate us.

Remember that those who live in the Alien Sector of Babylon 5 call the rest of the ship the Alien Sector. Remember that you, the writer, get to choose the words here. Remember that normal is defined by the world you live in, and that it is not static or immutable, that it can be challenged.

Remember that right now you’re designing a new world to live in.

You don’t have much to go on. You don’t know much about spaceships, and you haven’t seen many people like you aboard the ones you have seen.

Maybe you caught a glimpse of a crewman using a wheelchair aboard the USS Discovery (for once, played by a disabled actor, George Alevizos). Maybe you have read your way through every book of the Vorkosigan saga, recommended to you every time as if there’s nothing else out there.

Mostly, if you see people at all like yourself, you see them with advanced technology. You see Geordi LaForge^6, his visor providing superior, but nonidentical, vision to that of the other human characters. You see Luke and Anakin Skywalker with their prosthetic hands. Or, if they don’t use assistive technology themselves, then technology is used to rid them of their impairment, to grow replacement legs in days^7 or to enable them to exist in a virtual space.8

Maybe you can imagine yourself using technology like that. You think about how it could enhance your senses, aid your mobility, calm your thoughts. You wonder who would have access to it in this future, perhaps, or if it’s really as good as it seems, but it seems a positive sign to you.

Maybe, instead, the thought worries and frustrates you. Assistive technology is a good thing, of course it is, but you’ve seen so many miracle solutions that are unusable, painful, or exhausting, that work no better than what you’ve learned, perfected, and shared with others, that you’re sceptical. How will they treat you if you can’t use this technology? What if you don’t want it? Is it all just a way to make them more comfortable with you?

You’re wary, too, of these people who can imagine the intricacies of hover chairs but can’t even give you accurate information as to whether there are steps into a building, who won’t turn the music down on request. How can they imagine what these futures will be like for you when they can’t understand what you experience now?

Otherwise, the stories are all about medicalised experiences. Disability arises from injury, intentional or otherwise, or from plague. It’s something to be fought and overcome. It’s something you experience alone, and the answers you look for are changes in your body, not changes in the world.

You probably like some of these stories, find they have edges you can tug at, find you can wrap them around yourself and they fit in more places than they don’t. Maybe some of these stories make you angry, and others you simply laugh at. Even the worst of them assure you that there will be a place for people like you in the future, that you will not be abandoned on a dying Earth, that you can live, that you can fight—for your government or against it—that you can work, that you can build new worlds. That you can explore ocean planets and desolate moons and caves of crystal, planets where the plants are sentient or the very world itself is alive and conscious, that you can fly through space itself, your hands clenched as you steer, or as a passenger, lying on your bunk, watching the stars through your tiny window.

It’s a low bar to aim for; simply being allowed to exist in the places other people do, and you hate that you feel you have to take consolation from the mere possibility of existing when others take it for granted. But right now that future is still open, and it is your future just as much as it is theirs.

You think about these stories when you design your ship. You think about the technology you will have available, and how those who use it will live in your ship. You think about the medical facilities you will have on board, wonder if they are equipped only for emergencies, for normative people facing an abnormal event, or if they will work for people like you.

Maybe the discussions of medical ethics resonate with you. Maybe you dream of that speed and ease of diagnosis, of being believed even when you report symptoms they haven’t heard of before, symptoms that don’t even seem to come from this world. Maybe you would do anything for a cure, maybe you would fight against it with everything you have. Maybe, like for most of us, perhaps, the truth is much more complicated.

Tell these stories with your spaceship, on board your spaceship. But don’t accept that these are the only stories to be told about us.

It’s a lot of work, designing a spaceship. And maybe you love it, feel like it’s what you were born to do; maybe once you start the ideas flow fast, each answer producing three more questions. But maybe you have other things you’d rather be doing; maybe you stumble over the shapes and the numbers, and you see how other people just have the spaceships designed for them, without needing to do all of this work, and you’re already so tired.

You may still have to design this spaceship, even though you shouldn’t have to, but do not let them make you think you have to be grateful for being allocated this patch of emptiness, for being permitted to find a way to exist. Don’t think, when I said to design your own spaceship, I meant you must think it is okay that you have to use every last piece of your precious energy to cobble together a ship from old parts. Don’t think that this means you must carve out your own space because you will never belong in theirs, that you have the right—grudgingly offered—to fly and breathe and eat, but not to pilot and explore and maintain and repair and upgrade.

You can fly alone if you like, and you can fly alone if you have to. But we’re not just designing spaceships here, we’re designing whole universes. Universes where you make that choice rather than it being made for you.

There are people who have looked for this spaceship before. There are people who have designed this sort of spaceship before, or something that comes closer to it. You are not starting with nothing after all.

Sylvia Tilly^9 is allocated single quarters and nonstandard bedding to enable her to serve aboard the Discovery with a respiratory condition. These low-tech, entirely realistic accommodations are refreshing (though you could be forgiven for wondering if they would have made the effort had she not been the best theoretical engineer at Starfleet Academy).

Xandri Corelel^10 thinks to build a relationship with the spaceship she serves aboard (and is rewarded with coffee!) because she is autistic, not despite it. The ship is not so much designed to meet her needs as chooses to. There are strips of satin sewn inside her sleeves, making even the smallest of spaces well designed for her needs.

The Guildhall on Tiananmen Station^11 is described as spartan with heavy use of contrasting colours and precisely spaced chairs because many of the Guild’s members have “visual handicaps or other sensory distortions.” It’s noted that assistive technology is available, but many choose not to use it.

Starting from nothing doesn’t mean bringing nothing with you. Your spaceship can take you to new planets, but you’ll always remember this one. It’s a planet that may be cold and inaccessible, sometimes violent, but you cannot separate yourself from it entirely, and perhaps you don’t want to. You can bring your pain and anger or leave them behind. It’s your choice. But bring your communities. Bring your lessons hard learned. Bring the love they told you that you couldn’t feel, and the art they told you that you could never create.

Do not think you cannot live in new worlds just because you bear the scars of the one you came from.

You’ve designed spaceships before. Or if not spaceships, then wide-open planets with space and clear air and firm ground beneath your wheels. You’ve redesigned your house so you don’t fall climbing out of the shower, you’ve redesigned the train network that takes you to work. You’ve been imagining them all your life, asking over and over: how could this be better?

You’ve realised before now that the social model of disability carries a promise within it: there could be other worlds than this one. A promise that how things are is not how things will always be. It invites us to imagine not merely the removal of specific barriers, but whole other worlds. What would a world look like that did not disable you? What would a world look like that did not disable anyone?

You think about how the Hani^12 ships are designed to be operated by those with claws, how when humans pilot them they have to use prosthetics. You think about disability as a product of our society and environment, the implication that different societies would disable different people in different ways, or not at all.

So often, when you look at the spaceships designed by others, you find yourself there only by metaphor. You find experiences that skate so close to your own that you clutch the edges of the book, emotions you didn’t know you had rising inside you, and yet they will not name them, they do not show people like you. Your humanity is stripped away in the worlds you’d love to go to. You exist as alien, you are identified with robots and telepaths, you are locked away inside analogies. You find representation of yourself and the worlds you could inhabit, dissections of how you live in the world you do inhabit, so often in science fiction, and yet you are so rarely there directly.

You’re torn in how you feel about it. These are the works you love the most, those that saved you, those that helped you understand both yourself and the world around you, that gave you words and stories for experiences you could not put into words and stories—and yet you’re most invisible where you find yourself the most.

It might be because they hate you. It might be because your stories bore them. But perhaps it’s because you’re dangerous. Perhaps it’s because if you can imagine a different world, if you can design a spaceship, you’re not just going to accept how things are here.

You’re going to believe, instead, that this is not the end of history. That this is not the way it’s always been, and it is not the way it always will be. That it is not the only way it can be.

Even to people like you and I, who have so much to gain, that’s a terrifying thought. But it’s a beautiful kind of terrifying.

So: design a spaceship. Design yourself a spaceship.

You have the vacuum of space. Everything else is up to you.

Footnotes
¹ Doctor Who (television series): Season 14, Story 2 “The Hand of Fear” (1976).
² The Gaim from Babylon 5 (television series), among many others.
3 Startide Rising. David Brin. New York: Bantam, 1983.
4 Babylon 5 (1994-1998).
5 Hospital Station. James White. New York: Ballantine, 1962.
6 Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).
7 The Orville: Season 1, Episode 5, “Pria” (2017).
8 Star Trek: Season 1, Episode 16, “The Menagerie, Part II” (1966).
9 Star Trek: Discovery. Season 1, Episode 3, “Context is for Kings” (2017).
10 Failure to Communicate. Kaia Sønderby. Going To Mars, 2017.
11 This Alien Shore. C.S. Friedman. New York: DAW, 1998.
12 The Pride of Chanur. C.J. Cherryh. New York: DAW, 1981.

© 2018 by Andi C. Buchanan

Andi C. Buchanan is a writer, editor, and part-time space lobster based near Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Their work is published or forthcoming in Apex, Kaleidotrope, Glittership, and more. Andi is also the editor of Capricious magazine, a freelance web developer, and likes cheese and dinosaurs. Their website is at andicbuchanan.org or you can find them on Twitter @andicbuchanan.

The Linguistics of Disability, or, Empathy > Sympathy
by Fran Wilde

In September 2017, Uncanny Magazine published my short story, “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand.” It’s a story that deals with being different and disabled in the first person, and in some particularly angry ways. Afterwards, I had some interesting conversations about why I wrote it in the first person. The comments included: The story makes people uncomfortable. It has a very strong voice. People might not want to picture themselves as inside the character. It’s too scary.

One reviewer addressed the story without ever mentioning the narrator. I heard afterwards: a story like that may be more popular when written in the third-person point of view.

But for my purposes with the story, writing third-person point of view felt a lot like sympathy does, when it is misapplied.

Many of us are taught young that sympathy is What One Does When Shit Happens. Hell, there’s a whole aisle of cards for that.

For my story, I didn’t want my readers to feel sympathy. I wanted to invoke empathy. To demand it. I wanted readers to feel what the main character felt, to imagine being her. I wanted them to experience her anger as well. And that, for many, was uncomfortable.

Expressions of sympathy, heard or said, can include many things—including comments about strength, of inevitability, of inspiration. They often hit the ears of the hearer with a different kind of impact than the speaker meant them. Often, such expressions aren’t a way to express support. They’re a way to establish distance.

“I think you are so strong.”

On the sliding scale of sympathetic statements after sharing bad news, or a tough day, or venting about a bad doctor or a tough outcome, there are highs and lows. The best of them can act as a bridge toward a bigger conversation. The worst can act as a wall that separates the lucky from the unlucky.

“I think you’re an inspiration.”

Some of these statements have the benefit of being non-helpy and non-advice-ridden. But they’re kind of useless except as filler that makes the speaker feel good about themselves (and sometimes a little superior), while doing little for the recipient.

“I don’t know how you do it.”

When I was younger, someone close to me got a tough diagnosis, and I was frightened for them. I wanted to comfort them, and the tools I had were inadequate. I turned to sympathy, saying, “I’m so sorry this is happening,” because I wanted to say something.

“(I think) It is God’s will.”

It was a statement that opened the door to more discussion, and that was good. Sometimes sympathy is useful like that.

“I wish this wasn’t happening to you.”

Other times, I’ve said something that has, in retrospect, been not only useless, but actively drawn a line of demarcation between me and someone else, and I wish I hadn’t. I’ve said, or thought many of the following: how brave. How strong. I don’t know if I could deal with whatever this person is dealing with.

“I feel your pain.”

But.

Beneath sympathetic phrases lies a chasm of distance, and it’s easy for both the speaker and the recipient to fall in. And once you’re in it, it’s hard to climb back out.

“I want you to call me if I can ever help.”

I’ve heard someone say, “How did this happen? You did everything right.” In a culture of sympathy, that’s the bargain we’ve made: there’s a line drawn between people, between I and you. It’s a feeling related to that fear of “this could happen to me too.” There’s also a little bit of curiosity. If you, the person experiencing the problem, could just tell me a few more details about this thing that is happening, I am certain that I could feel more sympathy towards you.

And that’s freaking dangerous.

And although sympathetic statements often start with an “I”—I think / I wonder if / I’m so sorry / I feel your pain—they leave a residue of “how can I avoid this,” or ward it off behind for the listener to mop up. Especially if the listener resists sharing more details. Then there’s resentment, a feeling that a kind outreach has been batted away. Even if this desire for details and the resulting resentment of the other person, so that the speaker can feel better, is based in fear.

“I’ve heard whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

It’s the kind of fear that paints good health as a result of good behavior, good genes, or good morals instead of just luck. It’s the kind of fear that renders illness and disability as a reckoning, and worse, as a kind of pity porn that those dealing with a diagnosis are expected to reciprocate for everyone who gives them their time.

“I want you to tell me everything. Don’t worry, you won’t gross me out.”

Sympathy contains the kind of fear that is often an undernote to the life of someone with chronic disabilities. That it’s something you did, a set of fail points that someone else can see, evidenced by what is happening. That’s the chasm—the distance. That’s the ugly underside of sympathy.

“This could be a blessing in disguise.”

Sympathy doesn’t necessarily see the person. It sees the problem and speaks to it. It takes as much as it offers. And it doesn’t offer much besides the speaker’s presence.

“Think on the bright side.”

But look at the difference between the statement above and the statement below.

“Is there anything else you want to share with me?”

Empathy listens. Empathy might not say much, and when it does, it could be an action, not words. Empathy (unlike the American healthcare system) understands that disability and illness is not an either/or. It’s a sometimes. It’s a thing that happens.

“You’re making a whole lot of sense, this is infuriating.”

Empathy can be uncomfortable. It means instead of looking at a person, projecting your feelings onto them, you need to try to understand what the person is seeing. Feeling. Experiencing empathy is often easier than having to be grateful for sympathy.

“That does sound really frustrating.”

The origin of the word sympathy is sym-pathos, or “feeling-with.” For empathy, it is em-pathos, or “feeling-in.” In the current era, especially when it comes to disability, while empathy has maintained that interiority of feeling, of being within a circle of support, sympathy has almost become a kind of taking. A feeling-for. In its worst instances, sympathy becomes a kind of chest-thumping grandstanding, where the act of feeling sympathy is more important than whatever has happened to create that pathos, that feeling that could be given any number of prepositions: with, in, for, to. There is a sense of otherness to sympathy. A sense of warding, sometimes. A silent phrase on the end of the statement that distances the speaker from the thing being said and the person they’re talking to.

“I know you like [apples], I’m going to leave some here in case you want them later.”

Empathy sometimes doesn’t even get expressed in words. It is actions. It’s the delivery way a community quietly (or loudly) comes together to support someone, without expecting anything from them in return. It is the person who sits with you silently until you are ready to speak.

“I’m listening.”

In its best forms, an empathetic community would be populated with doctors and nurses as well as family and friends. It’s incredibly empowering to have those gatekeepers to feeling better talk as if they’re on your side, rather than in opposition.

“Want me to come by and walk your dog/feed your cat this week?”

Empathy is a matter of standing in the place of or with versus speaking to or for.

“How are you feeling about things?”

In the linguistics of disability, the difference between empathy and sympathy is a matter of prepositions.

“You’re right. This totally sucks.”

It’s a matter of trying to see things in first person versus third.

And that’s why writing in the first person is important to me, especially in science fiction and fantasy, and especially with stories like “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand.” It might not be pleasant, but doing so is a way to provide that perspective which so often is othered, distanced, and given sympathy, not empathy. To narrow the gap between one point of view and the next.

© 2018 by Fran Wilde

Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been nominated for three Nebula awards and two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and include her Andre Norton- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017), and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, io9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

The Body to Come: Afrofuturist Posthumanism and Disability
by Zaynab Shahar

Last year, my queer platonic partner gifted me the graphic novel version of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. For us, this gift served as the meeting place of our passions—a book that bridges her love of comics and graphic novels with my love of gut-wrenching, meaty speculative fiction. Upon receipt, I made an effort to read the novel before reading the graphic novel to see the translation of prose to imagery. PhD life took over though, and instead of finishing the novel first, I found myself curled up one evening carefully making my way through Damian Duffy and John Jennings’s graphic novel adaptation.

Reading the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred was nothing short of difficult for me. Watching Dana’s evolution from subject to circumstance to active abolitionist reminded me of watching Cicely Tyson’s tour de force performance in “A Woman Called Moses” as a child. “A Woman Called Moses” is a biographical TV movie chronicling Harriet Tubman’s journey to founding the Underground Railroad. In both Kindred and “A Woman Called Moses,” the disablement of black women’s bodies is central to the plotline as Dana and Harriet endure acts of physical violence at the hands of their slave masters. Experiencing the disabling effects of bondage are the catalysts that propel both Harriet and Dana to seek liberation—for themselves and others. Through Dana and Harriet’s perspectives, both narratives reimagine life during antebellum slavery, particularly the possibilities and difficulties associated with liberation from bondage. Reimagining presents a language of fugitivity—freedom from antiblack violence and the spectre of white supremacy that looms over both plantations Dana and Moses are entrenched in.

Yet for all the speculative possibilities these stories present, I realized a language about disability is largely absent from what it means to seek liberation from bondage, despite its centrality to both stories. By and large, Kindred and “A Woman Called Moses” are not discussed as slave narratives whose protagonists are explicitly named as disabled black women. Subsequently, the disablement Dana and Harriet endure is often belted under the frame of antiblack violence as an explanation as to why they sought freedom from bondage, but not what it means for disabled black women to be architects of fugitivity. When disability is named, it is usually done by black disabled folks who are trying to assert disability as integral to the terrain of black struggle. Such a reluctance to explicitly name Dana, Harriet, and other figures of slave narratives as disabled not only highlights the absence of a language around disability and afrofuturism, but the implications of such silences in terms of how the future is envisioned as a space of black liberation.

So much of afroturism’s liberatory potency and radical imagination comes from the ability of black people to be the architects of their own futurity. Florence Oyeke says as much when she suggests that, “afrofuturism dares to suggest that not only will black people exist in the future, but that we will be makers and shapers of it, too.” One way black futures are crafted is through declaration: the act of naming the existence of black people in the future, the roadmap to which is charted in afrofuturist works. An example of this is Alisha B. Wormsley’s billboard declaration, “there are black people in the future.” This declaration was born out of frustration not only from noticing the absence of nonwhite faces in science fiction films and television shows, but also the rapid demise of the black American neighborhood. Both Oyeke and Wormsley demonstrate the power of naming within the afrofuturist imagination, its significance in shaping the terrain of possibility. Naming a future that’s free from different manifestations of antiblack violence means determining a different relationship with time.

Temporal difference not only shapes the creation of narratives, but also the body-minds at the center of those narratives — what body-minds exist in the future and the stories told about their becoming. Representations of afrofuturist body-minds are very much a function of what people desire to make visible, absent, or marginal within the schema of narrative construction. It’s often when I encounter body-minds in afrofuturist works that I’m left wondering about the shaky existence of black disabled body-minds in afrofuturism and the general absence of language around disability. Too often I look at what constitutes a body-mind in the afrofuturist imaginary and am left wondering, “which black people are in the future?”

Take, for example, the prevalence of the posthuman in afrofuturism. On the one hand, there is the posthuman cyborg, most famously Janelle Monae’s alter ego Cindi Mayweather. Monae’s android persona is an example of how cyborgs in afrofuturism aren’t automatically understood as disabled subjects the way they might be for crip futurists, crip cyborgs, or Donna Harroway’s cyborg manifesto. Monae doesn’t use any language around disability to describe her conception of androids in relation to Cindi Mayweather. Instead, Monae understands Cindi as the mediator between flesh and hand, “the oppressed and the oppressor.”¹ Similarly, Kristen Lillvis notes the dual symbolism of Cindi’s “Digital Auction Code” (DAC) featured on the Electric Lady album cover artwork. The DAC represents the branding of enslaved Africans at the same time it marks her liberation from bondage — Cindi is not for sale.² The lack of language naming Cindi as a disabled cyborg suggests that while it’s possible to interpret her as such, cyborg and disability are not inherently synonymous in afrofuturism. Similarly, there’s the afrofuturist posthuman with supernatural abilities. In Parable of the Sower, Laura Olemina’s hyperempathy distinguishes her from other characters. As Sami Schalk notes, hyperempathy is understood as a condition as a result of a birth defect.³ In an interview with Juan Williams on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Butler explains that Laura’s mother was addicted to the small pills. As a result, Laura is born with hyperempathy.4 The question in interpretation becomes whether hyperempathy is understood as a disability and based off what criteria. Schaulk uses the example of Williams assertion that Laura isn’t disabled. In response to an ableist remark William’s makes, Butler asserts that she never said Laura wasn’t smart, to which Williams concludes that intelligence cancels out hyperempathy as a form of disability.5

When considering existing conceptions of afrofuturist body-minds, I wonder about the seduction of the posthuman. The trend of afrofuturist posthumanism points to a particular consciousness around the possibilities of black bodies in the future. Lillvis understands afrofuturist posthumanism as a form of consciousness that responds to the conceptual construction of blackness that occurs because of the Middle Passage.6 Thus, afrofuturist posthumanism provides a space to think about black identity independent of white supremacy.7 Building on this, I understand the prevalence of the non-disabled afrofuturist posthuman as a way of envisioning black bodies outside the spectacle of antiblack violence as opposed to “facilitating its objectifying qualities.”8

Afrofuturist posthumanism is a way black people have explored the effects of the Middle Passage on flesh, consciousness, and time.9 It names how the enduring legacy of antiblack violence is enshrine through the marking of black body-minds through enslavement. It names the process of how violence marks the black body-mind as non-human, and how non-human status justifies the continued subjugation. As Zoe Samudzi and William Anderson note, the marking of the flesh is about personhood as much as it is about the social status of the enslaved African.10 At the same time, afrofuturist posthumanism names how the afterlife of slavery perpetuates black suffering, it also provides a view of black futures free from white supremacy. As Ytasha Womack notes, afrofuturism flips conventional thinking about blackness on its head by rejecting stereotypes, dystopian fatalism, and hopelessness often associated with black characters. Instead, afrofuturism demonstrates that within the terrain of the speculative, fatalism is not synonymous with blackness.11 Black suffering is visible, but it is not an entranchant condition.

If afrofuturism is about envisioning black futures free from violence and suffering, then to paraphrase Lillvis, new types of consciousness around the black body-mind must emerge.12 The black body-mind undergoes a conceptual shift — from enslaved to liberated subject. It is no longer a site of fatalism, but a site of possibility for the future. In this way, if blackness is ascribed the status of non-human under white supremacy, then the afrofuturist posthuman is an attempt to envision the black body-mind as one that is “fully human.” Afrofuturist posthumans are creative visions of the body-minds to come, the body-mind that is free from violence that is no longer the spectacle of suffering on the world’s stage. The body-mind to come is the afrofuturist posthuman that enjoys the humanity of the black human that doesn’t currently exist.

But like any attempt at worldbuilding or futurism, omitting disability from schemas of afrofuturist posthumans has consequences. If alternative worldbuilding means imagining better futures, then the afrofuturist posthuman as predominately non-disabled demonstrates the complexity of mapping an emerging conception of humanity onto the black body. In linking disablement primarily with enslavement or past history, disability is symbolized as a vestige from an oppressive past to be done away with. Disability gets understood as part of what makes black people non-human under white supremacy. In making these links, it fails to interrogate why an emerging consciousness around afrofuturist posthumanism assumes that excluding disability inherently facilitates the transition from non-human to post-human in black futures. It fails to interrogate how a future without black disabled body-minds is symbolic of black liberation from white supremacy.

Subsequently, it fails to ask why the black disabled body-mind isn’t already considered post-human. What are the underlying assumptions about the relationship between black liberation and posthumanism that would justify the exclusion of black disabled body-minds? What about black disabled body-minds provokes anxieties about the overarching status of “non-human” assigned to black people under white supremacy? In many respects, linking disability to past oppression is ironic given that afrofuturism attempts to move away from conceiving of black body-minds as sites of fatalism. For all its liberatory aspirations, afrofuturist posthumanism has yet to envision disability as part of an emergent consciousness of black body-minds conceptualized independent of white supremacy. It has yet to engage a vision of the future where the presence of black disabled folk signals to a vision of liberation from violence exists in multiple manifestations.

The presence of black disability in afrofuturist posthumanism doesn’t have to connote to the sort of fatalism afrofuturism seeks to avoid. It can represent the liberation of the black body-mind, a radical shift in existence where one doesn’t have to be able-bodied to have a chance at surviving into the future. The black disabled body-mind can explore the abundant possibilities for the world to come, in our body-minds to come.

The black cyborg, as an explicitly disabled cyborg, can signal the onset of a new world where advanced adaptive technology isn’t cost prohibitive and thus financially inaccessible. The black disabled cyborg can also signal to a world where adaptive technology is given to black disabled people as part of reparations for histories of violent, non-consensual medical experimentation. The presence of the black disabled cyborg can usher in a world where black disabled folks finally reap what white supremacy in medicine has sown at the expense of our ancestors’ pain and exploitation.

Similarly, the inclusion of black disabled body-minds in the future can be represented in the physical restructuring of society. The predominantly black neighborhood Wormsley’s billboard highlights the disappearance of can be redesigned to fuse accessibility with the tenants of self-sufficiency, environmental, and economic sustainability that have become cornerstones of black liberation movements. Black neighborhoods can re-emerge, victorious in the fight against gentrification; replete with accessible and sustainably designed infrastructures and community resources.

In essence, the presence of black disabled body-minds in afrofuturism can tell the story of how our people overcame antiblack violence, accounting for our multifaceted presence in the future, our thriving, as opposed to our extinction. “A Woman Called Moses” and Kindred are examples of this, the power of the black disabled imagination in carving out pathways to liberation. The disablement both Dana and Moses experience plays a role in their choice to seek freedom from antiblack violence. It not only gave them an idea of the world they didn’t want to live in, but the world they did want to live in. It plays a role in how they seek to change the present to affect the future, and how they sought to accomplish liberation. The existence of their narratives show how black disabled body-minds are powerful architects of black futures, one that can truly be understood through an evolving language of afrofuturism that accounts for disability it all its complexity.

Post-script:

In the process of finishing this piece, another black man became a hashtag, marking yet again the omnipresence of police brutality and the spectacle of antiblack violence. On July 15, 2018 Harith Augustus was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago. In the aftermath of his death, residents of South Shore gathered at the site of his murder to to protest not only the death of a beloved community member but the continued presence of policing within their lives. As a resident of South Shore, I have witnessed my community’s anger, heartache, and grief in many manifestations. In the process, I witnessed Chicago Police Officers violently attack residents of South Shore and others who had gathered in solidarity.

During the South Shore Uprising, I quickly scanned the crowd. Among us were black people in wheelchairs (both manual and electric), using adaptive devices not unlike my cane, and elders being accompanied by their familial caretakers to safety. In the events that have followed thus far, I’ve noticed an array of black disabled folks from the community in attendance. Black disabled people have made themselves present as the community of South Shore demands justice for Harith Augustus. We have been present as our community outlines its vision for the future in chants, moments of silence, and impassioned speeches. We are part of the vision of a South Shore that is free from the violence of policing, a neighborhood that is abundant with resources to take care of everyone. Our hopes and dreams are bound up in the future of this neighborhood. So it only makes sense that as our neighbors are dreaming up black futures, they don’t see our existence as indicative of an oppressive past but instead dream of the possibility of us in the future.

Footnotes
¹ Andrews, Gillian “Gus.” “Janelle Monae turns rhythm and blues into science fiction.” io9, July 21, 2010, https://io9.gizmodo.com/5592174/janelle-monae-turns-rhythm-and-blues-into-science-fiction
² Lillvis, Kristen. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2017, 58
³ Schalk, Samantha Dawn. Bodyminds Reimagined: (dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, 91
4 Butler, Octavia E., et al. Conversations With Octavia Butler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010
5 Schaulk, 91
6 Lillvis, 80
7 Lillvis, 85
8 Lillvis, 85
9 Lillvis, 79-80
10 Samudzi, Zoé, William C. Anderson, and Mariame Kaba. As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018
11 Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press, 2013
12 Lillvis, 80

© 2018 by Zaynab Shahar

Zaynab Shahar is a Ph.d student at Chicago Theological Seminary, specializing in comparative religion and gender/sexuality in Judaism and Islam. She holds an M.A in Religious Studies from CTS and a B.A in Jewish Studies from Hampshire College. Zaynab divides her time between organizing, academic scholarship, and writing. She has written about queer/trans poetics and black women’s poetics for Bitch Magazine and Autostraddle.

The Expendable Disabled Heroes of Marvel’s Infinity War
by John Wiswell

It’s the middle of the big Wakanda fight scene. Thor and Captain America banter about haircuts, M’Baku and Okoye crack skulls, and for a moment, Rocket Raccoon meets James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes. The audience is ready to laugh the second the raccoon eyes up the veteran. They know what’s coming.

Rocket compliments Bucky’s prosthetic arm, asks to buy it, and the audience tenses up.

Bucky says it’s not for sale and returns to battle.

Rocket mutters that he’ll steal that arm.

And the audience laughs. I don’t. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been wooed by Infinity War’s frenetic action and cosmic scope only to be yanked out by a joke or tragedy that’s at the expense of a disabled character. It feels like a gate built out of my own experiences, and the shared experiences of so many disabled friends who’ve been treated as pity cases and jokes.

Infinity War is a staggering achievement of crossover cinema. It’s the 19th Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film, referencing and continuing the stories of characters from across the decade of Marvel’s blockbusters. Vision ponders committing suicide for the greater good by asking Captain America why he once plunged into the Arctic Ocean. Gamora forces Peter Quill to take her seriously by making him swear on his mother. These moments are more powerful than most of the uses of continuity in the characters’ own series.

But when it comes to disabled characters, that continuity is wielded carelessly. They exist to suffer or be laughed at. In the greatest crossover in cinema history, disabled people are expendable.

War Machine

James “Rhodey” Rhodes is the straight man to much of Tony Stark’s comical narcissism. In Captain America: Civil War, Rhodey once again fought at Tony’s side in an attempt to lock up Bucky. In the melee, Rhodey wound up paralyzed from the waist down. Both that moment and Rhodey’s few later appearances in the film were all about humbling Tony. Tony’s feelings mattered more than Rhodey’s entire existence. It was a problem that intersected with the MCU’s long-running issues with people of color, and part of why Black Panther was so important.

In Infinity War, Rhodey gets one moment of relevance. He Skypes with General Ross, who is the very vision of patriarchy and military excess. Ross, Tony, and Rhodey used to be on the same side. Now Ross chides Rhodey for changing his mind.

Rhodey gestures to the mechanical leg braces that allow him to walk and says he paid the price for being on the wrong side. He uses the braces to “stand up” to the hologram of Ross, embracing a masculine stereotype. He’s proud of his punishment.

Disability is not a price you pay for being wrong. If you’re disabled, people will tell you that it’s a divine plan, or that it’s the result of your laziness and lack of ambition. Most of my own disabilities are the result of medical malpractice, not a moral failing on my part. We are not paying a debt by living.

Black Widow and Captain America interrupt this moment, and the movie moves on. Rhodey never corrects this horrible message. He never matters again. He was only included so that his disability could augment how righteous the abled heroes are.

Nebula

Nebula’s arc in the Guardians of the Galaxy films is one of trauma. As a child she was always pitted against Gamora by their abusive father and Infinity War’s main villain, Thanos. Every time Nebula lost a fight, Thanos cut off a piece of her body. In an echo of Rhodey, her disabilities were supposed to be representation of her mistakes. Now her adult body is mostly comprised of prosthetic parts. She’s a ball of mutilation and anger issues.

My favorite part of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is Nebula reconciling with Gamora. They have an over-the-top fight and finally spare each other, recognizing neither of them is the real problem. Thanos is. It’s sad, but in 2018 we still need reminders that the villain is the villain, not the people so hurt by him that they didn’t stop him.

The abled members of the Guardians begin Infinity War by running a mission and ogling Thor. They banter, they angst, and prepare a big fight scene against Thanos. They are real characters in this movie, in contrast to how Nebula is handled.

Nebula isn’t with the Guardians. She’s introduced into Infinity War as a failure. Thanos has already captured her. Her prosthetics, which mean mobility and freedom to real disabled people, are pulled apart to keep her helpless. The sight of her body splayed like so many Jenga pieces is perhaps the most viscerally upsetting single image in the movie. Then Thanos tortures her.

For a scene, Thanos is a stand-in for every sadistic physical therapist I’ve ever had. He reminded me of the surgeon who told my 13-year-old self that I didn’t need anesthesia for my biopsy, and then, with his scalpel inside my arm, chastised me for crying as his assistants held me down. These are not the things you want to think about during a popcorn movie, particularly not when the character never accomplishes more than crying. Nebula has more grunts and cries of pain than she has lines in this movie.

That’s because Nebula isn’t her own character in Infinity War. She and her disabilities are plot devices to further Gamora’s sympathy and story. Thanos isn’t even really torturing Nebula—he’s really torturing her sister by making her watch.

Gamora is the character.

Nebula is a disabled prop.

Like Rhodey, once Nebula has served her purpose for the abled heroine, she’s gone. It’s easy to forget she even survives the finale while standing behind Tony Stark.

Contrast that with Jim Starlin’s original 1992 Infinity Gauntlet comic, the inspiration for this movie. There, Nebula steals the Gauntlet from Thanos and begins his downfall. You can only hope that’s still to come, but you doubt it.

Thor and Rocket Raccoon

Rocket Raccoon has bothered disabled viewers since the first Guardians of the Galaxy film. His running gag has always been that he loves stealing prosthetics from disabled people. Is this an arm or a leg? Did he need it for an escape plan? Nah. Robbing amputees is just his hobby.

The audience always laughs, and I always feel kicked out of the movie. The director, writer, actors, and abled audience have this happy conspiracy to enjoy disability at the expense of my friends.

In Thor: Ragnarok, Thor lost an eye almost nonchalantly, not even pausing to reflect on his injury in the race to stop Hela. It was an awkward moment in a movie that’s mostly so funny. Was it a Norse cycle in which, having taken Odin’s place as the leader of their people, Thor had curiously come by his father’s disability?

It turns out that Thor actually lost an eye to set up a bonding moment with Rocket Raccoon in Infinity War. The two already got along and had a heart-to-heart about Thor’s habit of losing everyone he loves.

Still, Infinity War tosses in a scene where it turns out Rocket stole a prosthetic eye from someone and gives it to Thor. Neither of them cares who he stole it from. Thor pops it into place, and presto, Chris Hemsworth is handsome again, I guess because there was such a shortage of two-eyed hot men in this movie. His disability is erased. Perhaps once or twice you notice his eyes are different colors.

I immediately made mental notes of friends who I had to give a heads-up about this. I warned them because if you’ve lost an eye, this scene is not great. It’s a gross distraction from the charisma and determination of Hemsworth’s Thor, who has become one of the most lovable characters in the entire MCU.

Earlier in the movie, almost the entire Guardians of the Galaxy had a crush on Thor. He was supposed to be desirable while disabled. But they don’t let him stay visibly disabled because they know that’s not appealing to the audience. In this movie, visible disabilities are for people like Rhodey and Nebula—people who don’t matter.

Then Rocket says the eye was probably dirty and Thor should’ve washed it. Thor’s injury is resolved in a bad punchline.

The audience always laughs.

Bucky

Despite being central to the plot in Winter Soldier and Civil War, we never see Bucky’s mental illness dealt with. At the end of Civil War, he’s tossed into a Wakandan meat locker. We’re told the Wakandans will science him until he’s better.

He stays there until a post-credits scene of Black Panther, which establishes that his mental illness was erased off-screen. We don’t get a single minute of therapy or treatment. His decades of being serially tortured, abused, and forced to harm others for Hydra don’t matter. He is calm and conditioning his hair.

If you’ve been to trauma support groups, or A.A., or helped someone in therapy, you know the MCU has cut out the heart of Bucky Barnes. All of his growth is absent, and anyone who could have used the sight of a hero going through that is clearly not welcome in this fantasy. Our society hides the mentally ill, either in institutions, or in increasingly criminalized homelessness. So many veterans die without support.

This erasure is Bucky’s context in Infinity War. We get a brief glimpse of him contentedly farming in Wakanda with one arm. He seems as happy as he’s been since he was double-dating in the 1940s. Then T’Challa arrives, plunks down a weapons-grade prosthetic arm, and tells him to go fight. That’s enough off-screen healing for him. The arm is necessary to make him look “whole,” and to be wholly capable of violence. Because the movie is rushing to fit everything in, Bucky barely consents before T’Challa basically treats him like Hydra used to and sends him to battle. Bucky is still a weapon.

Bucky meets an end Hydra wouldn’t have minded: he dies with a snap of Thanos’s fingers.

All that work off-screen, all that trauma, and he’s gone.

Stephen Strange, whose controversial movie nevertheless was the MCU’s best attempt yet showing a disabled person attempting to recover their sense of purpose, also dies in that moment.

Falcon, who ran a therapy group for soldiers with trauma, dies in that moment. Falcon dies, and Rhodey walks right past him in an accessibility device.

Disabled characters should die in Infinity War. This movie kills half the universe; if none of us died, then we’d all be erased from relevance inside a protective plot bubble. If the ending of the movie works, then we’re angry for Bucky in the same way we’re angry for T’Challa and Peter Parker. Thanos winning is supposed to be upsetting. It’s Empire Strikes Back times infinity.

It’s a slap in the face because of everything else Bucky has been through, and how little Infinity War has thought of every other disabled character it has.

The MCU’s failure isn’t intentional; it’s from the lack of intention.

If Disney doesn’t grapple with these things, then it won’t get better. It’s why the rumor that Captain Marvel will be the “schizophrenic patient struck by lightning” mentioned in Dr. Strange’s movie worries me. I don’t trust the creative process of the current MCU to do justice to schizophrenia.

This isn’t about one movie, or the first movie in a two-parter. It’s about a decade of movies. Tomorrow’s another sequel. There are disabled consultants and disabled screenwriters who would love to help shape a more inclusive MCU. There are millions of disabled audience members who would be touched by better representation. All we’re asking is for Marvel to care.

© 2018 by John Wiswell

John (@wiswell) is a writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He has been disabled his entire adult life following medical malpractice at age thirteen. His work has also appeared at Fireside Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Robot Dinosaurs, Podcastle, and Pseudopod. As a child, the realization that The Iliad was a Greek Infinity Gauntlet crossover was what got him to jump to grown-up books. He’s eternally grateful to both Homer and Jim Starlin.

And the Dragon Was in the Skin
by A. J. Hackwith

(Content Note: This essay depicts the visceral experience of a panic attack, dissociative experiences, and discusses incidents of suicide and self-harm in the movie Inception, which may be disturbing for some readers.)

It is 2 a.m. and the dragon says my marriage is ending.

It’s right. I know it with a certainty. Like the shuddering heartbeat rabbiting behind my ribs when I wake up. It all makes perfect, logical sense, and I line things up as he snores lightly beside me. We will disagree, we will have a fight, and page by page, the book of my life will turn to ash. I can taste it in my mouth.

My breath hitches. The sheets stick to my clammy chest. It takes that to notice the feeling of ball of ants behind my eyes, twitching, biting thoughts. Perhaps not ants. Something with bigger claws and fire. Dragons. Everything feels certain, so absolute.

That’s another sign.

I want to act, need to act. I want to wake him up. Cry, fight, fuck, do something. But instead I close my eyes and bargain with the certainty of the dragon-thoughts in my head. So, my marriage is ending. Okay. If it’s true, if it’s so absolutely true, it’ll be true in the morning. Truth does not expire, and a real fire can burn me any time. The dragon-thoughts are not happy, but they satisfy themselves by gnawing on my bones.

Morning comes. My marriage is not ending, of course. I can’t see any fire, but I still taste ash.

Anxiety lies.

I need an anchor.

Cobb, the reality-plagued idea-thief in Inception, had an anchor. He had what he called, in a bit of Hollywood appropriation, a totem. Cobb’s totem was a small metal top that he could spin to confirm whether the world he perceived was real or a constructed dream. Only he knew the weight of it, the feel of it. Spin the totem, watch it go around. If it wobbles and falls, you’re experiencing the truth. If it spins forever, round and round, you have forgotten what the truth is. You’re in a dream.

Sometimes I wish I had such a thing, a way to find certainty. The dragon-thoughts of Generalized Anxiety Disorder mean the reality I perceive, the conclusions my observations come to, are not necessarily true. Conversations do not go as I remember them. I am among friends, not threats. I’m standing on steady ground, not open air. I am my own sci-fi hero, trapped in a malicious virtual reality, a dream run amok inside my head.

If this were a story, I would be able to realize that, and realizing that would be all it took. I could break free in a dramatic act of heroic will, never to be ensnared again. I would have my Neo moment. There is no spoon. Bullet time. Awareness of the matrix means it can’t hold you.

Bullshit.

Inception, at least, understands that much. If Cobb spins his totem and it never falls, he knows he’s in a constructed dream world. But knowing it isn’t real doesn’t collapse the world. Cobb is still there, forced to deal with the world as he experiences it. In fact, if he tries to act against the false world, it turns malicious. Like a bad AI, dragon-thoughts protect themselves. Knowing something isn’t power, not here outside the story. Knowing it’s not true does not free you from the construct.

(Cobb escapes his false realities by killing himself. That logic also sits there, a shadow behind the dragon. We know it’s there. Focus on your totem.)

It’s a different 2 a.m. and a different dragon. We are on vacation, on a cruise ship that creaks and groans in every disaster-movie-iceberg kind of way. The sound is inescapable. I’m dying. I know I’m not dying. I’m dying anyway.

The totem spins and I bargain with the faulty dragon-AI in my head.

Sometimes the dragon is quiet. The totem wobbles like it should. I grow comfortable with the world. Errant thoughts are easily put down. I stop checking my totem in the first place. It stays in my pocket. It isn’t easy to continuously question your own mind. The dragon counts on that, sneaking up when my spinning top has gathered dust. When the bargain comes hard.

I have my dragon. Cobb had Mal. The projection of his self-sabotage, his doubts. The dragon-thoughts he could not control. As much as I cringe at another mentally ill woman in cinema trope, Mal makes sense to me, both as a person and a projection. Mal the person struggled with an idea she couldn’t control. Mal the projection is Cobb’s way of coping with that.

It’s not a bad way to cope. Othering distances yourself from the thoughts. We’re making our own Mal here, you and me. We say anxiety is dragon-thoughts. A malfunctioning AI. A gibbering line of code muttering doom in your head. Because those things can be observed instead of felt, bargained with instead of succumbed to. If not defeated, at least not absorbed. Difficult problems, not internal failures.

We are fond of writing mental illness as a failure. You know how the story goes, don’t you?

You have a picture in your head of me by now, the woman who clutches her pearls over her marriage, the wisp of a thing that is reduced to tears by the creak of a boat. I’ve seen those movies too. Worried, hesitant Neville in Harry Potter. Fretful, fluttering Threepio in Star Wars, the classic anxious android. The uptight, nervous Hermann Gottlieb in Pacific Rim, or the legion of anxious scientist characters like him, that exist in a story only to naysay and hold the protagonist back.

Anxiety, in these stories, is simply a personal flaw. Nervousness. Cowardice. The sidekick, the minion, the weasley traitor. We are never the hero. Or if we are, our nerves are abolished with a good ol’ dose of protagonist bravery.

Anxious characters, in these stories, are never the quiet, competent ones. That ones working through the night, holding their own massive doubts and private doom dragons between their gritted teeth. They are never the friends who avoid parties but will take on a revolution for a friend. The mothers who smother their own screaming breath for their children. The guides who will ferry you across the dark space between the stars because they’ve learned to look their own shadows in the eyes. The characters, haunted just behind the eyes, not by dead wives or compelling backstories, but by the fight they pretend not to fight every day. Not the nervousness but the control issues, the hyper self-awareness, the exhaustion.

No one ever warned me about the exhaustion. The days when everything is bad and everything is so certain that you wake up like a walking wound. The floating anxiety that has no thoughts but the steel-barbed understanding that something is wrong. You can’t stop for it, can’t soothe it, can’t put it down, but it goes with you. Tucked in your pocket along with your totem.

I want to see more interesting stories. Where the hero doesn’t punch their way out of the faulty holodeck, the VR run amok. I want to see the stories that complicate that, the way my own story is complicated. When the fault in your code is you, intractable but not invalidated. When the dragon isn’t to be slain but bargained with. The corrupted AI that is lived with, encountered again and again, even collaborated with, talked softly to.

What do those stories look like, when the construct isn’t something to escape? When the totem keeps spinning but, hell, you gotta get on with the story anyway? When the mentally ill person isn’t a pitiful foible, or a weak-willed sidekick, but the hero?

Keisha, the main character of the narrative podcast Alice Isn’t Dead, deals with anxiety disorder. It’s represented fairly well throughout the podcast, but the crowning moment comes at the end of the first season. Keisha is confronted with the inhuman Thistle Man, the monster who’s taunted and destroyed her hopes at every turn. It is the culmination of all her anxieties experienced in the show. She is trapped, she is overpowered, she is afraid.

It’s in that moment Keisha has a clarity about her anxiety. That when you stop denying it, it’s possible to turn it into something useful. An energy to be used. She uses it, the panic and the certain dread and the false doom to shudder through her like lightning and fight. “I’m not afraid of being afraid,” she screams, and tears, shaking, at the Thistle Man’s skin.

I’m still afraid of being afraid. I’m not certain how to make my anxiety a weapon against anything but myself. But I appreciate what comes after. Keisha isn’t cured of her anxiety after that. There’s no miracle revelation. She rises, bloody and victorious but still so afraid. But for a moment, just for one ragged breath, the fault in her code was a weapon. I like to think the next time the dragon-thoughts came, the bargain came a little easier.

It’s the only totem I’ve found, my dragon and I. That there’s no separating where the anxiety begins and I end. At the end of Inception, Cobb doesn’t kill Mal. Not even as the world is crashing down on his head. Instead, he is… kind. Kind to the part of his mind that lies.

Cobb and Mal. The dragon and me. What stories can we tell when the dragon, the faulty AI, the broken holodeck, is us? Stories that look complicated, afraid, furious, teeth snarled and bleeding lightning.

It’s 2 a.m., and the dragon is stirring. Weigh your totem and let it spin. Don’t look at it. The story doesn’t go away. You don’t either.

© 2018 by A. J. Hackwith

A. J. Hackwith is a magpie of ink, bad ideas, and spite. She’s a queer writer of fantasy and science fiction in Seattle. A.J. is the author of two nonfiction books and writes sci-fi romance as Ada Harper. You can find her as @ajhackwith on Twitter and other dark corners of the internet.

Miles Vorkosigan and “Excellent Life Choices”: (Neuro)Divergence and Decision-Making in Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga
by Ira Gladkova

Making good life choices is hard. Making good life choices when you’re neurodivergent is damn hard. Perhaps the most relatable and engaging such struggle I’ve read is that of Miles Vorkosigan, from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. Miles and his “excellent life choices” entertain, astound, and horrify me even as they dig at something deep inside my bipolar, ADHD brain.

Miles Vorkosigan inevitably comes up in conversations about disabled characters in science fiction, but not because of his debatable life choices. Miles was born with brittle bones, stunted growth, and a host of other physiological complications due to his mother Cordelia’s exposure to a toxin while pregnant, and he enters young adulthood as a visibly disabled person in Barrayar’s militaristic, mutation-phobic society. However, his physical differences are only one facet of his life as a person with disabilities: he is also neurodivergent, displaying characteristics that the text calls “manic-depressive” and “hyperactive.” Many fans believe that Miles, like me, has bipolar disorder and ADHD, and these departures from the norm increasingly drive his characterization as Miles matures, adapts, and changes his body.

As the rare speculative fiction character who is both deeply privileged and markedly disabled, Miles’s ability to change his body is an important part of his narrative. Miles is a member of his society’s hereditary nobility, and over the course of his life, he is able to have numerous surgeries and other medical treatments to replace his brittle bones with synthetics, address injuries up to and including biological death, and ameliorate his many idiosyncratic reactions to medications and other substances. This is significant in a genre that, by trope and tradition, envisions disability in terms of choice: absent a lack of resources, no one would choose to be disabled when advanced technology or supernatural means can “cure” or “fix” them. However many resources Miles has, he never ceases being disabled; his world, life, and narrative continue to be shaped by his conditions. He is never entirely “cured,” whether by Miles’s own choice or by the limitations Bujold has set on the text.  Consequently, Miles’s depiction is in constant conversation with what his society—and the audience—considers normal; what about Miles can be changed, and what about Miles should be changed. Miles and Cordelia both make an active project of trying to address and change Barrayaran social norms, and part of Miles’s journey is in changing the way he thinks about people’s perception of him. Initially sensitive about his appearance and taking pains to make sure observers know it’s not due to mutation, Miles comes to see the value in forging a path for anyone who looks different, no matter the reason.

But that very preoccupation with appearance is what I want to talk about. Miles spends so much more time and energy working to normalize the way he looks than normalizing the way he thinks that he can come off as downright anosognosic when it comes to his own neurodivergence. It is only halfway through the series, when Miles makes a disastrous decision while neither manic nor depressed, that he truly grapples with how he makes decisions and weighs choices. Miles is clearly meant to be seen as nonnormative, and psychological treatments are explicitly available in his world. His mother Cordelia advocates therapy in cases such as trauma but doesn’t seek to pathologize Miles’s brain or suggest any form of professional psychological treatment. Other characters also comment on Miles’s mental state(s) but eschew the idea of therapy: “You mean psychiatric? Absolutely not. Real bad idea. If the psych boys ever got hold of him, they’d never let him go. No. This is a family matter.”  In other words, Miles may not be aware of his own neurodivergence, but the text explicitly is, and the way Bujold plays with Miles’s decision making is worth examining.

The narrative thrust of the Vorkosigan Saga is predicated largely on Miles’s many questionable decisions, and decision making is a classic casualty of both bipolar disorder and ADHD. In sharing those conditions, I find Miles fascinating as a protagonist—as subject rather than object. Although recent works like Mishell Baker’s Borderline and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts feature neurodivergent protagonists, Miles predates them by decades. Society, and by reflection literature, has long framed neurodivergence as a problem to be solved, as a topic rather than a subjective experience. It’s unclear how intentional Bujold was in her portrayal of Miles’s psyche vis-a-vis our pathologized categorizations of conditions such as bipolar and ADHD, but she has consistently captured how those conditions affect the ability to make decisions, and the ability to live with them.

Whether in a manic or depressive state, bipolar disorder can warp one’s ability to sort through priorities and consequences. Miles is a deeply strategic thinker, but his ability to prioritize is often hampered by hyperfocus. It’s generally only when the narrative gives Miles a moment to pause that he can reorient himself. Miles’s mantra is “forward momentum,” and his behaviour is often narrowly goal-oriented, both classic manic traits. When I’m in such a state, it can be supremely difficult to consider personal cost to myself and others and to not overcommit; I find Bujold’s depiction of Miles’s struggles with these issues realistic and nuanced. For a long time, I didn’t even realize I was hypomanic. I thought that was what being healthy felt like, because those were the times when I did not feel depressed. And hypomania was such a high: I felt that indefinitely precarious sort of invincible where I knew that right now, if I just kept going, I could do anything. If I didn’t stop. A moving target is hard to hit, but depression has deadly aim. Downright dirty, deathly aim. Miles’s obsession with being a moving target—for he has always known he can’t avoid being a target—speaks a language I know in my bones. Miles fears stasis, because to him stasis is death. This is emphasized when, around the midpoint of the series, Miles is killed and cryogenically frozen. It is from those ashes that the turning point novel of the series, Memory, arises, and it is there that Miles must learn an important lesson: there is a peaceful sibling of death and stagnation to be found in stillness. Eventually.

Miles’s struggle with decision making starts from his first book, Warrior’s Apprentice, where Miles’s spur-of-the-moment, goal-oriented decisions spiraled into dire consequences and sleepless nights doing research and actionable tasks. I, too, have gone on productivity binges where I barely slept for a week. In the process, Miles built a second persona that could accomplish everything and contain his manic energy: Admiral Naismith, separate from Miles’s staid “real” identity as Lord Vorkosigan. However, the mechanics of Miles’s mind are not a focus of the text for the first half of the series, where Bujold prioritizes Miles’s struggles with his physical appearance and limitations. This changes as the series goes on, and is neatly encapsulated in one of Memory’s early lines: “He’d worked with impassioned concentration, overcoming all doubts as to his physical disabilities, winning his way to premier status as Barrayaran Imperial Security’s most creative galactic affairs agent.” Having carved out a space for those who look like him, Miles finds that unexplored country yet remains, and it is within himself.

While most of the Vorkosigan Saga is about Miles’s choices and ever-shifting identities—student, soldier, admiral, spy, auditor, son, husband, father—Memory is the most concerned with examining his internal landscape. In the novel immediately prior to Memory, Miles, as Admiral Naismith, was killed, cryo-revived, and left with an idiosyncratic seizure disorder. In Memory, Miles makes the disastrous decision to cover up this medical condition with near-deadly consequences on a mission. He is subsequently fired, forced to abandon his covert ops identity, and must rebuild a self that can cope with his new life circumstances. The identity that he had poured all his ambitions and energy into has been forcibly cast aside, and the text chillingly frames this not just as Admiral Naismith truly having died, but as Naismith trying to get Lord Vorkosigan killed.

However, Bujold frames Miles’s decision as being made in a largely euthymic state. It is premeditated and conscious, involving both forethought and plans for mitigation. These are not characteristics of mania, and Miles does not display signs of depression at this time. For me as a bipolar person, this is a wake-up call: there is no me that is free of myself. The bad habits of brain built during mania and depression can haunt me even out of those states; my identity will forever be complicated by my conditions. Like Cordelia, Bujold resists pathologizing Miles’s decision making: he can make disastrous choices even when neither manic nor depressed, and the consequences must be dealt with just the same. Bujold uses just such a choice to set up the conditions where Miles begins to question that decision-making process. For once, he can’t blame anyone or anything except himself.

By situating Miles and his decisions in this context, Bujold provides a site for meditation on identity, decision making, and the brain as bridge between physical and mental. When Memory begins, Bujold carefully orients the reader to Miles’s physicality and appearance. She opens by describing Miles awakening from the disastrous mission-bungling seizure with its subjective aftereffects, mixing in descriptions of Miles’s nonnormative body. This is followed by outside and medical descriptions of the seizures, emphasizing that they do not seem to respond to standard treatments. Past this point, descriptions of Miles’s body and appearance peter off to be replaced by Miles’s subjective experiences, first of a seizure in front of his boss, then of a depressive catatonia in response to being fired. Continuing this pattern, the text increasingly concerns itself with Miles’s mental state, how he integrates his various identities, and how he brings himself not just to make good choices again, but to make choices at all.

In structuring Memory this way, Bujold marks it as a transition for Miles from one career to another, from one life stage to another (Bujold’s summary of the novel is “Miles hits thirty; thirty hits back”). She also communicates that he is at a point in his life where he must turn his preoccupation from his physical differences and disabilities to his mental ones. Again, the brain serves as both symbolic and literal site of mediation. The seizure disorder is described as a “damned saboteur lurking in his head,” and Bujold cannily plants the language of introspection early in the book where Miles thinks Imperial Security, his branch of the military, may need to do some self-scrutiny over the novel’s opening mission. ImpSec does end up performing an internal investigation into the novel’s unrelated main mystery, and this forms the part of the plot that is exterior to Miles’s head. When I read Miles using that language, I cannot help but think of the tendency of my bipolar and ADHD self to self-sabotage, of my neurodivergent self’s need for internal investigation and self-reflection. Miles sabotages himself over and over, to the point of getting himself killed. It chills me to contemplate this. But Miles, unlike us, gets a chance to recover from that fatal choice and do the work of considering his choices, his identities, and how they can be reconciled into a healthy whole.

Memory spends a lot of time in liminal states, with characters waiting or recovering. Or, as Miles learns over the course of the book, simply being. Liminality is a site of profound discomfort in our culture, but for me as a bipolar person, it is a state to strive for and explore: the in-between place, the shaky tipping point between one state and another. This, nurtured and contemplated, becomes that peaceful sibling: calm.

One of Memory’s most crucial moments comes when Miles returns to visit some characters who were part of a pivotal time in his twenties: subjects of his whom he aided at a moment of personal disaster for them. These people and their community are much less privileged than Miles, and Miles confesses to them how he squandered the enormous opportunity he’d won by luck and effort. During a quiet moment by a lake that was once a graveyard, the woman Harra tells him that there is no hidden secret to recovering after disaster. You just go on. And on the other side, you find… yourself again. Your life.

Miles asks her if that is a promise. She tells him: “It’s an inevitability. No trick. No choice. You just go on.”

Miles has many trials past that point in the book—most of the material plot, in fact—but the crucial nature of that conversation is emphasized when Bujold and Miles return to it in the closing words of the novel: “Harra Csurik had been almost right. It wasn’t your life again you found, going on. It was your life anew.”

Miles’s story not only gives me hope, but makes me feel seen. Over the course of Memory, Miles is surprised to discover within himself a calm center that has lain, if not undisturbed, then at least not extinguished, not frozen out. This center, this stillness, is not one he finds easy to access, but in his journey I see a reflection of my own.

As Miles begins to resolve his internal struggle, he also seeks treatment for his seizures and learns what causes them and how to manage them. He will never be cured; he must check his neurotransmitter levels daily and trigger seizures in controlled circumstances to avoid having them when stressed or when it’s been too long since the last one. In parallel, he learns to harness Admiral Naismith’s more useful qualities and discard his destructive ones. The cost and work of managing disabilities is acknowledged, and “fixes” are neither easy nor mandated. Miles does not stop having manic or depressive phases; his distractibility does not lessen. The obstacles society puts in his path decrease only marginally, and that in no small part due to his own efforts. But after the transition point of Memory, Miles begins to nurture his mental and emotional health, to harness his manias to a productivity that is not self-consuming, and to find tools to light the way out of depressions. This development is highlighted in the later novel A Civil Campaign: Miles does not cease making bad decisions, but he has learned how to prevent some and identify others much more quickly and has developed tools for recovering from mistakes.

For me, this is a healthy vision of life with a disability. It is not a slow freeze or a self-immolation, but a balance of self and selves. I’ve often struggled with seeing myself as a fractured broken assemblage, but I have been slowly discovering that the secret is not to snuff out these selves. There is no me that is free of myself. The challenge is to find that central self and nurture it; to use its strengths to temper other states and selves. Making decisions is still hard, but Miles finds, if not a map, then at least a light in the darkness.

© 2018 by Ira Gladkova

Ira Gladkova is a queer and genderqueer writer, artist, and vidder with autism, bipolar, and ADHD. They are one of the editors at the Hugo-winning blog Lady Business, where they analyze books, comics, games, movies, TV shows, and geek and fan culture from an intersectional feminist perspective. Ira has been, at various times, an internationally ranked competitive rock climber, a martial artist, a web developer, and a teacher. They live in the Washington, D.C. area with their partner, four cats, and a corgi.

Give Me Heroism or Give Me Death
by Gemma Noon

Pain and fatigue are everywhere in speculative fiction. The more dramatic the stakes of the story, the more likely you are to witness the protagonist dragging their broken, battered body through a slew of ridiculous challenges to succeed. From Frodo and Sam entering the caldera of Mount Doom to Ripley fighting evil aliens for her very life, pain is seen as noble, a challenge, something the strong and the courageous and the brave overcome to achieve their goals.

The hero, injured and bleeding, fights his way through the angry alien mob to achieve his prize.

Suffering is a noble act in speculative fiction. Pain has a purpose. Sometimes, it is a result of facing impossible odds, or it is a necessary price to be paid for the convenience of time travel or magic use. Fatigue is treated in a similar fashion; it occurs as a result of action and is usually shaken off by the strong and the brave. Heroes in speculative fiction can only achieve monumental success when their bodies are screaming at them to stop, when lesser mortals have quit. They are heroes precisely because they don’t let something as small and insignificant as pain or fatigue stop them. The message is clear: only the weak give in. Only the weak fail.

The heroine, a magic user, collapses from exhaustion only after her complex spell saves the day.

I was diagnosed with chronic pain and fatigue the same year I turned thirty. It felt like I developed a horrific bout of flu that just wouldn’t go away. It hurt to move, to stay still, to be hot or be cold. Headaches were constant, and sleep was broken and unrefreshing.

My reaction to the diagnosis was fairly typical of a career-minded person with a family to support: I ignored it and carried on regardless. That’s what the Strong and the Brave do, isn’t it? They don’t let something as trifling as pain or tiredness stand in their way. They grit their teeth. They gird their loins. They heft their axe and charge forward with grim determination. I did the same.

The protagonist, after enduring more than your average human can handle dragging themselves to that final battle, overcomes their pain and fatigue through sheer force of will to complete their final, heroic act.

Heroes, you see, get over it. Think of Captain Mal Reynolds, barely able to breathe as he repairs the crippled Serenity. Roland Deschain, reaching the Dark Tower despite the odds. That’s what science fiction and fantasy taught me—you keep going no matter what. You ignore the fatigue, and you push through the pain.

Until, one day, you can’t. Because you, dear reader, are not the hero of an epic science fiction series. You are not the archetypical noble warrior. You are human, and so am I.

During a pain flare-up, I sometimes lie in bed too exhausted to cry. Even the caress of my own clothes can be unbearable, and it feels as though needles have been thrust into my joints. My hands can ache so much that I’m almost willing to amputate them with a lightsaber just to make it stop.

As much as I hate to admit this, if my family was kidnapped by an evil sorcerer and the only way to save them was for me to go on some epic quest… well, I’d try, but if I made it past the front door without collapsing it’d be a miracle.

Chronic pain, by its very definition, is an ongoing, unrelenting pain—even when medicine, therapy, and lifestyle adjustments are religiously applied. Those living with it often face contempt or outright disbelief from society, particularly if their illness is invisible. Seeking medical help frequently results in accusations of drug addiction. An inability to hold a traditional 9-5 job can come with the label malingerer.

In science fiction and fantasy, our heroes do not need to lie in bed and hope for their medication to kick in. They don’t seize up and need help getting off the couch. They don’t walk, scrunched over like a thousand-year-old crone as they wait for their muscles to loosen up. Those with chronic pain are not heroes in our speculative fiction because we expect our heroes to overcome their physical limitations and save the day. Even Yoda, with his cane and his hunched back, is able to wield a lightsaber like a youngling when the need arises.

As time runs out, our hero searches for a way to climb the mighty cliffs of doom, knowing that somehow their broken and damaged body will not give out until victory is assured.

In speculative fiction, characters suffer for a reason. Their pain is a result of battling against whatever galactic evil is staring at them, or in a few cases, it follows them after a spectacular triumph. Heroes don’t get told, “Sorry, we don’t know what caused this, and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it.” They get biomechanical implants or healed by mystical waters. They can pinpoint the source of their pain to the work of an enemy or the result of some dramatic act. And more often than not, they are cured as a reward for their labors.

Or they die, and with that death we celebrate their accomplishments and aspire to be just like them. Heroes remind us to push through the pain even when it will kill us. Anything else is weak, and weakness is not acceptable. It is better to die a hero than live on as a frail, feeble shell.

If I want to see myself in speculative fiction, then, my only option is to die heroically at the end.

The heroine staggers across the room to the body of the dead villain, knowing that the world has been saved. She casts one last look at the child she has saved, before allowing her body to finally give out, and she passes from the mortal realm.

The problem with the portrayal of pain in speculative fiction is that it reinforces the belief that people who are in pain are weak, or liars, or both. They are not heroes because they have to hold up their hands and say, “I’m done, folks,” halfway up the mountain. They have to plan long periods of recuperation between missions, knowing that they won’t be able to fly in the next space battle or twenty even if they are the only person in the galaxy capable of piloting the prototype new vessel. It’s not through lack of desire—science just can’t overcome their pain and fatigue.

When I was diagnosed, I struggled to find a reason for it all. Whenever I wasn’t busy pretending it was something I could overcome by sheer force of will, I would ask myself “Why me? Why am I suffering like this?”

As science struggles to understand the cause of pain, and thus remains unable to find a cure, I find myself increasingly angry and bitter. I want to understand why. It is unfair that my pain is not a neat part of my development arc or related to my complex-yet-relatable backstory. It is not a plot point that will undoubtedly become relevant at the climax of my adventures. It just is. It just hurts. It’s just there.

Heroes are never in pain simply because they exist. They are never tired simply because they must be. Instead, we’re meant to marvel at their bravery and nobility and mourn them with heartfelt wonder when they sacrifice themselves so other, pain-free characters might thrive. To earn my place in speculative fiction, I am not supposed to survive my pain.

Luke, after projecting his Similfuturus to the Battle of Crait, dies in peace now that his strength is depleted.

Even then, though, we must suffer our pain virtuously before meeting our fate. We must fight on, in life as well as in fiction, because to be less than heroic is to be considered weak, or worse, a coward. Think of how Peter Banning is treated in Hook when he fails to reach his children’s hands, despite being unfit and terrified of heights. He tries, but it is not enough for the other characters or for the audience. He is the target of contempt, laughter, and derision.

I could not climb that mast, even with my children at risk. My body would allow me no choice but to fail—and I would be labelled a coward. Why? Because science fiction and fantasy have taught us that true bravery lies in overcoming all barriers, even our own minds and bodies, and anyone can be a hero if they just want it hard enough.

I cannot be a hero, so I cannot be anyone.

I cannot be someone.

I am of no importance to the tale.

The broken scientist, gesturing to their cane, counsels the hero on the upcoming task. “Would that I could go in your stead,” they say, resigned. “I would love to be the hero.”

Chronic pain, alongside many other disabilities and illnesses, relegates those of us with these conditions to the ranks of the disposable in our fiction as often as it does in life. Through omission, science fiction tells us that we cannot be astronauts, that we lack the physical strength to fight from the back of a dragon.

Yet here we are in society, still existing and contributing and even thriving. We can be happy and contented and find joy in life. We love, and we fight. There is no reason not to reflect this in science fiction.

Current medical technology is already producing adaptive technology that will help many of us overcome barriers to our careers. Why, as a genre, do we continue to assume that many of us living with pain and disability could not succeed in roles that science fiction has traditionally reserved for the able bodied? It will look different to the modern world, but isn’t that exactly what our genre is about?

True, even with adaptive technology not all of us would be able to fly intergalactic fighter jets, but that still shouldn’t matter to science fiction writers. We could be medics, or farmers, or scribes, or engineers, or writers, or office workers and cooks and cleaners and mathematicians. We can be the mundane as well as the spectacular, where simply existing while battling the constant hurt in our bodies is, and should be considered, a heroic act.

Following a grueling fitness exam, the hero and their classmates approach the board to see if they have passed. The names at the top all celebrate. The hero stares, stunned when they see their name at the top of the list. Those that fail are shown as dejected and weeping. They are weak and are dismissed from the tale.

In speculative fiction, where writers are supposed to push boundaries and explore lives and try out different perspectives, we often refuse to see that heroism lies within the community as much as through the One True Hero. In Interstellar, for example, Murphy’s brother, Tom, is implicitly criticized for trying to save humanity through his own expertise in farming rather than being an astronaut or a physicist. Even his father dismisses him in favor of his scientist daughter. Without men and women like Tom, how would the engineers at NASA survive long enough to fulfil their goals?

Tom is heroic: he dedicates his life to keeping humanity alive and yet he is portrayed as simple, dogmatic, and unable to fathom life beyond his farm. Tom is battling an impossible enemy and refuses to give up, despite likely being ill from the impact of the Blight. He continues when others, like his neighbors, give up in the face of impossible odds. Is that not the definition of a hero?

A hero with chronic pain may not be able to climb the sacred mountain or pull off complex maneuvers in an overpowered spacecraft, but the point is that they’d never think to try those things, anyway—they would know their limitations. They would think outside of the box because that’s what they’ve always had to do. They would still fight the oncoming horde any way that they could, perhaps through research, or logistics. They’d be able to plan and pack for every eventuality because their quality of life would have always depended on their ability to face the unexpected with as many aids, crutches, and supports as they can lay their hands on. Including other people.

Our genre’s obsession with the One True Hero ignores a vital component of success and victory that many people with chronic pain, or any other disability , already understand. It takes a community, an army, an alliance to face the oncoming storm, and without other people, none of us will survive. Those of us living with disabilities understand the concept of interdependence and the need for humanity to work together to lift us all out of the darkness, because we are already intrinsically linked to those around us to survive. When we have the correct supports, both social and physical, we are just as capable of changing the world as our fully abled counterparts. Perhaps the One True Hero will physically strike down evil overlord, but the person who forged the weapon, the woman who built the transports, the man who farmed the food—without these people, the Hero would not stand a chance.

While we follow the rebel wizards in their quest for the Sacred Items, the rank-and-file, the unimportant and the weak, are the ones who hold the line. They are the ones who battle daily against the banality of evil by leaking information, switching labels, or leaving food and information for the Heroes to access. Sometimes they die. We rarely learn their names.

Pain is part of the human condition. Although some of us feel like we got a larger share of that particular pie than is fair or necessary, the fact is that we exist, and for as long as there are humans with our complex brains and nervous systems, people living with pain on a daily basis will also continue to exist.

We need to write our stories, to show how existing, coping, and even thriving can be a heroic act. We need to express that it is not cowardly or weak to know our limitations, to admit there are things we cannot do. Interdependence should be celebrated, and our role in creating community explored. We must show our role in shaping the future and not be incidental to it.

Most importantly, we need to celebrate our strength. We need to celebrate our existence, our persistence, and make the world see that we contribute, that our experiences are valid, and that our place in society makes us all stronger, braver, and nobler.

Not all of us can heft an axe.

Not all of us can fight the aliens in hand-to-hand combat.

But, by the gods, we can all be heroes yet.

© 2018 by Gemma Noon

Gemma Noon lives with her family and pets in Alberta, Canada. A former librarian and education manager, she is currently busy learning to thrive with chronic illness while maintaining a writing career and taking care of her kids. When not buried in reading or writing books, she can be found arguing with strangers on the internet or binge-watching Supernatural.

My Genre Makes a Monster of Me
by teri.zin

I have always felt like a monster. And on this particular morning, my brain and body transform me into a creature I barely recognize.

Claws inject a longing ache deep in my ribcage, the disembodied chemicals’ lips brushing the shell of my ear whispering things no human should endure. Twins of agony perch at my hips while cousins of pain shackle themselves to my knees and shoulder.

But I’m late for work. So I swallow back the disappointment of being alive and slowly rise from the bed. The rest of my routine is executed in the same way: slowly. Every part of me is numb, yet on fire. I feel nothing and everything at once. All of it threatens to kill me, slowly, yet completely, like a laggard river of molten dread.

I overdress, layering too much for the abnormal winter day, so I’m sweating by the time I make it to the first train station of the day. People step away from me, eyeing me suspiciously as I wipe my brow with my scarf, that same wary gaze dropping to the significant bump in my midsection. Onlookers decide immediately at a glance that I am not pregnant: just fat. They’re assessing my uneven gait as deserved punishment for perceived gluttony. Or maybe they do think I’m pregnant and my penance is to stand for doing so out of wedlock or, at the very least, without the promise of marriage.

It would be easy to dismiss this as part of my rampant imagination, as a need to become the victim, a way to pull the race card. But my suspicions are confirmed when the first few tears fall as we sway awkwardly with each jolt of the train. It is evident in the widened, then averted gaze. In the way their bodies shift away from me as we are herded onto a crowded train car. In the downward cast of their eyes as I silently plead for someone to notice me. I want to scream, but if I do, the consequences would certainly outweigh the intent, considering the Black bodies strewn all over the news lately.

And it’s at that moment the thought that destroys me comes to pass: I wish I was a white woman.

This may seem like an odd thing to think during a moment like this, but it’s an ideal propagated throughout literature and media of who deserves to be seen as vulnerable and in need of comfort and help versus those who are capable to the point of being relied on consistently for help without considering the person’s own battles.

Most children’s first exposure to fantasy and science fiction is through Disney movies. Stories of spells causing years-long comas and magic changing fins to legs ushered in the idea of something beyond our immediate world, that we can create these worlds with abandon, yet even that abandon has been and continues to be limited.

I loved Disney movies. I loved being transported to dangerous worlds filled with treachery and madness softened by love and sacrifice. Yet, there was something that always irked me: I never saw a face like mine in these fantastical stories. Dragons, talking animals, and flying carpets were acceptable, but Black people in fantasy? Nah, homie.

On that day on the train, I could hear my mother’s voice: “Don’t cry. No one gives a shit about our tears.” In that moment, I know exactly what she means. When she said it, I was in kindergarten and Aurora* called me an ugly black monkey, after she fell in the sand pit and blamed me. I remember her red, bloated face. I remember not one tear falling from her eyes. And I remember her finger pointing directly at me, clear across the playground, the little Black girl who made her crush laugh one too many times. I hated getting in trouble, did my best to avoid it, but her word was taken over mine and I was sent to stand in the corner during one of my favourite Friday activities: movie time. It was some Disney production we’d more than likely seen before, with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed princess being rescued, a princess who looked more like Aurora than I ever would. My tears were real, but that hadn’t mattered. The evidence did not matter. My voice did not matter.

The nuanced hurt would visit me time and time again; when I’d cry until I passed out when my parents would drop me off with those cousins for multiple summers; when I’d carved my name into my forearm at fifteen while trying to find a vein; when I’d turn over on a friend’s couch, having nowhere else to go, ignoring the blaring television or the click of a disgusted tongue. My pain was frequently ignored or dismissed as attention-seeking and so I pretended nothing was wrong. I let the doctors tell me I just needed to lose weight, I let the social workers tell me to believe in their god, I let the vaguely insulting compliments from friends about being a strong, independent, painfully single Black woman keep me buoyant in a murky sea stinking of loneliness.

I have always felt like a monster.

From feeling so foreign to my kindergarten counterparts, I thought no else ate rice to towering over most of my classmates in sixth grade with teeth too big for my mouth, earning me the nickname Horse for my entire middle-grade career. It was in the eighth grade I found out I had scoliosis. I was set to be as tall as my brother, who stands at 6’4”, but the graceful ‘S’ of my spine stunted me from being even more outcast from my contemporaries. I thought it was a blessing.

Until the pain began.

Surgery was called for, but my parents refused. I went to chiropractors instead, ones who promised that after years of manipulative, expensive treatment, I’d be the towering presence I was meant to be. But the expenses racked up and my treatment was put on the back burner.

Over time, my left leg tucked up tight into my pelvis, my right knee taking up the pressure, while the vertebrae of my neck malformed so badly, I can hear the crunch of the posterior wingtips scrape together when I twisted my head just so. My pelvis shifted, cutting my track & field ambitions short when the pain became too much. I never told my family why I quit before I really started. I didn’t want to be any more of a burden than I was beginning to feel.

I’ve always related to the monsters in film because no one else looked like me, but I wouldn’t discover the catharsis of writing the monster until years later, after plenty of purses clutched a little closer, after multiple times being asked to give up my seat for the fairer sex, after being challenged by a drunk white kid who didn’t realize the amateur bodybuilder was with me, after being accused, followed, questioned, harassed, sat and spat on because I am so damn invisible. After, After, After.

I’d always wondered why different monsters couldn’t fall in love with one another. The invisible monsters. The ones who find each other after the world has shunned them, ignored them, or, even worse, attacked them just for being. Why didn’t those monsters rise up together and say, fuck this world, it’s time to start over?

Why continuously strive to prove humanity to those ingrained with their own vanity?

As most folks with depression will tell you, there are triggers.

As a marginalized child in love with the written word and movie magic, I’d learned to live with triggers in just about every facet of arts and culture to which I was exposed, including my first exposure to speculative fiction: Disney movies. Every story taught in school that featured a character with skin and hair like mine was a story of struggle and pain and abuse, so I donned the body of mental gymnast, ignoring and replacing descriptive words in the likes of R.L Stine, Douglass Clegg, Peter Straub, Stephen King with those that mirrored mine and me so the Black woman could be the one who makes it to the end. Or, at the very least, isn’t relied upon for sage advice or convenient magic to save the white people. I clung to Rae Dawn Chong because she was the brown face in film who went on the adventures in blockbusters, who was the object of desire in drama, who was the monster I thought I was in horror. And she was the closest to me I could see on WPIX 11 on Sunday afternoons.

As I got older, the mental work became harder, so I started writing for myself. I’d always written ridiculous fanfic based on movies like The Wraith and books like the Fear Street series, but I’d decided to venture outside of those story frames and start fresh, start on something that spoke to me as the little girl, the growing teenager, and, later on, the silent adult.

All the while, I still sought me in the written word and the movie magic.

Part of what would trigger a spiral months in the making was The Shape of Water. I went to see the film with a good friend of mine, someone with whom I am able to dissect and critique and enjoy films for what they were and for what they may have been trying to get across. I was excited for it; I’ve admired Guillermo Del Toro’s incredible imagination (and reverence of Chet Zar) and use of practical effects since Pan’s Labyrinth. I was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen as a kid and still hold stop-motion close to my heart. Seeing glimpses of the Fishman and knowing it was a story of two outcasts falling in love, I was ready to pre-order the Blu-ray and dream of a fishman of my own. I was ready for my Amelie with a sexy creature of the sea.

And then Octavia Spencer’s character arrived on screen.

I’m a fan of Ms. Spencer, though the roles she is given always irk me. They are matronly, these characters. Benevolent beyond reason, a form of magical Mammy negress that set my teeth on edge with how saccharine sweet and gentle and all-knowing they were made to be.

They were what people expected me to be.

As a bigger Black woman, both in height and size, who does not fit the convention of female attractiveness nor femininity, I understand immediately how to present myself when walking into spaces. Size and shade must be proportionate to geniality and approachability; the darker and heavier the Black woman, the kinder and gentler they are expected to be. I know my voice and tone must be checked, otherwise I will be looked upon as angry, combative, mean. I’ve experienced the repercussions of being perceived as such. I’ve lost jobs because of such. I’ve been challenged to physical altercations by grown men because of such.

I don’t need to tell you that I had no intention of presenting myself as such.

So here, on screen, is one of my favourite actresses fulfilling the role expected of darker-skinned Black women: the protector of and literal voice for the introverted, whimsical white-presenting woman, the comedic relief, the nagging and incessantly-talking wife of the no-good, lazy shiftless Black husband, both of questionable intelligence and ambition. It’s evident Del Toro appreciates his “quiet” women, the graceful and small-but-mighty (white) women against backdrops of beautiful silence and expected patience from his audience. By having this constant chatter from the only speaking Black woman on screen, it is assumed there isn’t much to her because she is incessantly talking about all there is to her. She doesn’t shut up about anything, not even a major secret of her ward to her good-for-nothing husband. The only moment of vulnerability we see is when this woman is terrorized by a bigot in her own home. Zelda is assaulted, her personal and living space violated by his presence, his breath, his goddamn necrotic fingers which he leaves behind like this woman’s home is medical waste dump. But the film’s sympathies hardly lie with her. Her tears and shaking voice and bone-chilling fear do not matter as we’re quickly whisked away to the great showdown at the canal. Zelda arrives with a useless cavalry that, in reality, would’ve never come to her rescue, no matter that it’s on the behalf of a white-presenting Latina. With that, we are tugged back into the only story that matters. Never mind Zelda’s lack of security; she’s more than likely lost her job and her home is no longer safe, being occupied by a bigot’s ghost and a cowardly husband.

It’s all for the greater cause of this white woman’s story.

I was immediately reminded of Aurora, of her tears and how her story was more important than mine, and I couldn’t help but wonder what that film would’ve looked like with a mute Black woman as lead. How the figurative and literal silencing of the Black female body would carry through in the world of ableism, racism, and sexism from the moment she is born, her skin being her gills, if you will. What that nuanced representation would’ve done for disabled and silenced Black women who watched this. To see someone come to our defense. To have a protector who valued us, who accepted our disability and even defended it. To be desired after putting so much of ourselves into helping, nurturing, lifting someone up. To be held. Physically held and comforted.

The Shape of Water and many other triggers would trickle together with the force of a waterfall, ending with me washed up in the psych ER after disappearing for a while on the day before Valentine’s Day. It was that day I realized just how far gone I was into the invisibility of my pain, even to myself. I had convinced myself of the very things I’d balked at from the very beginning; that my pain, physical and otherwise, wasn’t real, that I could beat this pain by jogging, fasting, eating several thousand salads with air for dressing to cleanse my body of stubborn, hormone-driven fat and my mind of the daemons that wanted me dead. That I didn’t need love because I could do bad all by myself. But it was the love of friends who knew better than those daemons, who were determined to yell louder than the chemicals telling me I was born wrong that saved me. It was the love that found me, the held me from afar, that has kept me going ever since. It is still hard to trust in that love. I still expect that pale finger to be pointed at me, to turn on me and tell me not only that I don’t matter, but my pain doesn’t either, as long as I’m serving a greater good for someone else.

People remember the Malcom X quote: “The most disrespected woman in America, is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” Yet I’ve only heard a few recognize its source from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God when Jamie Crawford’s Nanny says, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” We are the constant workhorses for the fairer, for our spouses, for fashion and culture and influence, yet credit falls so short of our black and brown skin and warm bosom. No one checks for us, but us. No one sees us, but us.

Remembering this, I realize no white or non-Black male director or writer would ever be able to pull it off.

And it is now I feel the weight and importance of the work I am set to do.

I will never be the Disney princess entire kingdoms shut down to find, but I can damn sure make it my business to give Black women the happy ending we deserve. We are the forgotten monsters, the invisible help, the unheard, yet influential magic who deserve to be front and center, who deserve to be seen for all that we are: beautifully flawed and like all humans.

© 2018 by teri.zin

teri.zin writes Speculative Fiction under the pen name Zin E. Rocklyn. You can find some of her fiction in Sycorax’s Daughters and Forever Vacancy and follow her on Twitter @intelligentwat for more information on her disabilities, her activism, and her random thoughts. Her personal website is currently under construction, so stay tuned for all of her weirdness in HTML form.

The Future Is (Not) Disabled
by Marieke Nijkamp

“The future doesn’t belong to you,” a friend tells me, when we walk home together one night. Not in those words, of course. Rather, he talks about scientific advancement, genetic manipulation, and how soon, we won’t have disabled people anymore. We can fix you. We can fix those who can’t be happy because they don’t know what abled happiness is. Better yet, we prevent them from being born altogether. The future will look brighter.

My friend invites me to my future. Welcome to the eugenic utopia.

“You don’t belong to the future,” a guest lecturer implies in one of my classes, years earlier, when we discuss medical ethics and neurosciences. Not in those words, of course. Rather, her arguments are thought experiments, challenging the future of medicine and technology, and the boundaries of acceptable humanity. I nearly agree with her, because in all my life, I have seen no evidence to the contrary. Internalized ableism is one hell of a drug.

“Do we belong to the future?” a fellow disabled author asks me, after yet another panel turns into a discussion about eugenics, after yet another futuristic perspective handwaves the consequences of disability, perfects technology as cure, or simply forgets about us altogether. The answer should be a simple, easy, resounding yes. And yet. We keep asking the question.

Welcome to our eugenic eutopia: we can see where we’re not wanted.

The nondisabled future comes up in discussions about representation in science fiction a lot in my community of disabled and otherwise marginalized authors. It comes up less outside of those groups. I’m not always one to bring it up then, either. When you’re faced with surprise!eugenics often enough, you learn to keep your mouth shut in situations that aren’t actively, purposefully inclusive and safe.

The downside of that is that often it means the conversation simply isn’t being had. And it needs to be. In creative spaces. In creator spaces. And especially in nondisabled spaces. So this one is for you, abled creators and purveyors of the future. This is what I want you to know.

You should know that the nondisabled future is built on an all-too-current eugenic baseline. That future is a dreary place. It is a future that is pervasive and othering. Othering, because it tells abled people that we don’t belong. Pervasive, because it tells us, disabled people, the same thing.

You should know that for the longest time I believed that.

As Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop wrote in 1990: “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”

I grew up reading science fiction and I found no mirrors. Imagine what that feels like. Imagine what that feels like, specifically, in the context of bright and infinite tomorrows.

And I believed it. I grew up in a society that believes disability is a bad word and being disabled is a terrible fate. Its common approach to disability is: “We will fix what ails you. If we fail to do so, you’ll be a burden on society.”

I turned to books to escape that.

This is the future, my books told me. You do not belong here, either.

The nondisabled future is fed by the common idea that technology will be a panacea that will eradicate impairments and, presumably, normalize brains. (Whatever normal is, in any given context, at least.) The nondisabled future is a cruel concept at worst, an unaware one, or an ignorant one at best.

Ignorant, because it vastly misunderstands what disability is and how it functions. The idea of fixing what ails you is rooted in the old-school medical model of disability: people are disabled by their impairments. Take those away and everything will be splendiferous(ly bland). If you can’t take them away, you’re pretty much screwed. More recently, the consensus among disabled people, disability rights advocates, and (thankfully, increasingly) medical professionals is that disability is a result of social barriers. A wheelchair user isn’t disabled by their wheelchair, but by the lack of ramps. A developmentally disabled student is disabled by lack of access and support. The impairments may be medical, but disability occurs because people with diverse body types and neurotypes face ableism, abuse, and inaccessibility. And that’s far more complicated than can be technologically handwaved.

Unaware, because disability is not something that was invented yesterday. We lived in the past too. We’re part of your present. And if you do not recognize that, you don’t see us for who we are. You’re missing out on many stories being told, on many disabled advocates speaking up about our lives and our rights. If you don’t recognize it, you’re part of the problem.

Cruel, because the alternative of unintentional neglect is intentional erasure.

Of course, it’s not just about the technological cure-all. It’s about an awareness of whose stories are being told and who is allowed to tell those stories, of what the world looks like, of who we think competent or valuable enough to be our heroes.

It’s about crafting access in story form, which is a matter of radical and purposeful inclusion.

The simplest solution is this: we tell our own stories. And we do. If you don’t think we are, you’re not listening. But you, dear abled creator, have a responsibility too: recognize that we matter. Recognize our voices. Recognize us.

Do we, disabled people, belong to the future then? Yes, simply, easily, resoundingly. We belong. To think otherwise is a failure of the imagination. And personally, I no longer care for futures that hold no place for me and mine.

If you take the social model of disability as starting point, disability occurs as a result of social barriers, created due to lack of equal access, stereotyping, and other forms of marginalization. Unless you write a perfect utopia wherein none of those things matter anymore, disabled people will be part of your world. Of course, write a perfect utopia wherein none of those things matter anymore, and people with diverse bodies and diverse neurotypes still both exist and belong.

Let me repeat that, for good measure and emphasis. Regardless of the society you build, people with diverse bodies and diverse neurotypes still both exist and belong.

I’d love to see a world like that. Give us utopia and belonging. It may just may take some explaining how we got from here to there. And in every other, nonutopian scenario, there are countless ways to make your disability representation future-proof. Consider who we are, consider that we are. Consider the thousand ways in which the most technologically advanced societies will still include disabled people. Even—and perhaps especially—on the intersection of disability, (medical) technology, and access.

I’ll start you off with some ideas.

If you wish to insert disability into the narrative, start here: consider how your society interacts with bodies, minds, emotions. What is considered physically normal and physically desirable? What is normal and desirable behavior? Where does our (ableist) sense of normalcy and, far more interestingly, lack thereof intersect with other forms of marginalization?

What happens if someone does not meet the standards society lays out, bodily, mentally, emotionally. Are disabled people laughed at? Shouted at? Spit at? Are they considered valuable members of society? Or only when they are considered useful or productive members of society? Is access conditional? Are they pitied? Avoided? Propped up as inspiration? Do they have agency and voice or are they talked over? Is access seen as a right or a nuisance? Is illness considered weakness? Is life with disability seen as life on the easier setting by those who aren’t disabled?

I should tell you, all those are contemporary examples. If you are nondisabled, where do you think we stand now with regards to disability perceptions and disability rights? Can you answer that question? You should be able to before you write about us. You should listen to us before you write about us.

Consider then what happens in the future if someone does not meet the standards society lays out, bodily, mentally, emotionally. What has changed, compared to today? Why has it changed, or why hasn’t it? Are disabled people still marginalized, are they tolerated, or are they accepted?

Consider medicine and technology. If you consider technology as cure, how realistic is it? If you believe medical science should be developed to perfection, ask yourself: is medical science as developed as it should be now? Under what paradigm? Should by whose measurements? Is curative technology a priority and if so, why? If so, where is the line between curing and preventing? And, from there, between preventing and eugenics?

How are the curative technologies used? What effects do they have on the body? On the mind? How lasting is a solution? Are solutions surgical, genetic, or based on medication? Does it differ per class, perhaps? Does your economic status influence which options are available to you (if at all)? After all, access is an instrument of power.

If your solutions are medication-based, how readily are medicines available? Are resources ever a problem? What is society’s perspective of medication? I can tell you from experience that even something as deceptively simple as taking daily pain medication is frowned upon by people who do not live with—or even doctors who do not specialize in—chronic pain.

Extrapolate a future based on our present: what are the politics of medicine? What are the costs to hospitals? Or to pharmaceutical companies? Is “fixing” disabilities both desirable and cost-efficient? Plenty of medication exists in theory, could be produced, and would improve quality of life, but aren’t because their target audience is too small. How politicized is the medical community in your world and what are the ethical discussions about?

Consider instead: technology as access. Think, for example: virtual reality therapy sessions (I would love to see futuristic societies that have normalized therapy and staying in mental shape). Or cyberpunk canes (I want one). Translate your futurism to assistive devices, like service robot dogs, hover wheelchairs, communication devices, or hell, even just ramps everywhere.

Consider access and power. Even if medical science is developed enough to immediately fix whatever ails you, is that development accessible to all? Is health care considered a human right or a for-profit mechanism? What are the costs? Financially, physically, emotionally? The conditions? The ramifications? How does access intersect with other marginalizations?

As an example: in this day and age, we have relatively decent diagnostics for autism spectrum disorder—for white cis boys. White cis girls have caught up in recent years but are still underdiagnosed. Despite there being a higher prevalence of autism spectrum disorder among nonbinary people, access to diagnostics for trans people is complicated at best. And children of color of all genders deal with worse access to diagnostics and are often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed.

Consider, too, how multiple disabilities can intersect and what that means for access. In certain situations, comorbidity might make diagnostics and access to medication or therapy easier. In other situations, coexistences of disabilities may make treatment overall much harder. Not to mention, what if institutionalized ableism is a problem in your society? What if it’s also the context in which doctors are educated? What if disabled people aren’t readily believed? What if theoretical knowledge and lived experience don’t match up?

What are the underlying reasons for providing someone access—or not? Because access is power, even when technology has become a benign panacea. Even when everyone should have access, it doesn’t mean they do.

Consider once more how your society interacts with bodies, minds, emotions. Everything follows from societal perceptions of disability. Everything informs societal perceptions of disability. If the medical community has evolved to a point where spinal injury cures are as common place as flu jabs, what does that mean for the overall development and society’s perspective of human health? Is life extension or enhancement normal? And if so, what effect does that have on the way injuries are perceived? The way disability in general is perceived?

Consider what would happen if someone, without any proof of science, decides medical science is the devil. It’s happened before. You need only look into the way vaccinations have been misrepresented and demonized in recent decades, and the way one-time nearly eradicated diseases are current once more. All because one former doctor falsified research. Consider what happens if facts become politicized.

And then, at the heart of it all, consider bodily and personal autonomy. No matter the technological advances, what if people don’t wish to be cured? Is that not their right? To decide that life with different body types and different neurotypes is both valid and fantastic? Because it may not seem that way to you, but many of us are perfectly fine the way we are. Our happily ever after is not dependent on being abled. I don’t wish to be cured. My cane, my joint braces, my weirdly wired brain are intrinsically part of me. I would take better painkillers, sure. Better access, please. But no one gets to deny my happiness.

That’s what I told my friend, when we walked home together that night. I’m excited for scientific advancement, because science is awesome in all meanings of the word. I don’t think it’ll be the solution to all our problems, because humanity as a species is great at creating new ones, but I’m cautiously optimistic. We could do brighter things. We could include instead of exclude.

But don’t you dare fix me. Give me the world to access. Fuck your eugenic utopia.

The future belongs to us. And more than that, we belong to the future.

Citation:
Sims Bishop, Ruth (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3), ix-xi.is.

(Editors’ Note: Marieke Nijkamp is interviewed by Haddayr Copley-Woods on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 24B.)

© 2018 by Marieke Nijkamp

Marieke Nijkamp is the #1 The New York Times-bestselling author of This Is Where It Ends and Before I Let Go, the editor of Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens, and writer of the upcoming Oracle: Rising.

Poetry Introduction
by S. Qiouyi Lu

I am multiply marginalized: I am a person of color; I am queer; I am nonbinary; I am disabled. So it’s not surprising that I talk about marginalization and identity a lot, as they affect my life in big and small ways. The common thread that appears in discussions I have within various communities about identity is that of not being enough: when people tell us our identities don’t exist, that causes a certain kind of hurt, but we see quickly enough that it’s not true that we don’t exist. Our existence is overwhelmingly obvious. But when the insidious whispers of not being enough come from within the community and from outside the community—of not being really disabled, for example—they’re much harder to fight off. Even I almost turned down the editor position for this issue because I wasn’t sure if my struggles with mental illness were enough to qualify me as “truly” disabled, whatever that means.

But I’m here, thanks to Elsa Sjunneson-Henry’s encouragement and reminders that disability is not a binary, either: that like any other marginalization, it comes with a diversity of experience. So I approached editing Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction’s poetry selections with that idea in mind. “Disability” is an enormous umbrella term and encompasses an incredible amount of human experience. Even within the same type of disability, people’s lived experience of being disabled can vary: some people may find their disability empowering; others may find their disability frustrating and discouraging. Some disabilities bring hyperawareness of your own body; some disabilities are more dissociative. Nine poems don’t provide much space to truly capture all the variation in disability and human experience; in fact, we didn’t require poets to even submit poetry that dealt with disability, although we encouraged them to. But I believe that marginalization informs the way we process and understand the world, leading us to produce art that is still informed by our lenses, even if we don’t explicitly write about a certain topic. It’s critical to have disabled voices producing art, even if we’re not producing art about disability.

Even without a specific prompt for the poetry, several themes emerged in the final selections for Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Five poems make up the first half: “Ctenophore Soul” by Rita Chen, “core/debris/core” by Rose Lemberg, “How to Fix a Dancer When it Breaks” by Genevieve DeGuzman, “the body argonautica” by Robin M. Eames, and “All the Stars Above the Sea” by Sarah Gailey. Several poems comment on bodies, expectations for bodies, expectations for behavior as expected by certain kinds of bodies, and how there are consequences when bodies don’t conform to those expectations. “Ctenophore Soul” channels a grander feeling of something sublime, whereas “core/debris/core” carries more of a rebellious tone; “How to Fix a Dancer When it Breaks,” “the body argonautica,” and “All the Stars Above the Sea” paint shades of subtlety in the shifting emotional reactions to the difficult circumstances in which the narrators find themselves.

The second set of poems, “Convalescence” by Alicia Cole, “hypothesis for apocalypse” by Khairani Barokka, “Spatiotemporal Discontinuity” by Bogi Takács, and “You Wanted Me to Fly” by Julia Watts Belser echo similar ambivalence but also agency over bodies. Ultimately, it is the agency over the narrators’ selves and narratives that drew me to all the pieces that I selected for Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction—there is not only a sense of self in a narrative that reads as highly intimate in each piece, but also an echo of a larger experience, a sliver of something that makes up a whole. In ordering the pieces for the table of contents, I wanted to pair poems together that seemed to be echoing each other, too: “Ctenophore Soul” and “core/debris/core” in revealing bodies; “How to Fix a Dancer When it Breaks” and “the body argonautica” in exploring imagery of healing, whether the healing is considered positive or not; “Convalescence” and “hypothesis for apocalypse” with their strong roots in such vivid red imagery; and “Spatiotemporal Discontinuity” and “You Wanted Me to Fly” with both of them hearkening to flying imagery.

I want to make a particular note as well about choosing to end on the piece “You Wanted Me to Fly” by Julia Watts Belser. The question of a cure when it comes to chronic illness or disability is a very personal one, and something that only an individual can really answer or choose. The larger issue at hand is personal agency and the fact that ableist society as a whole systematically denies disabled people our agency. Ultimately, I don’t think that any one Destroy issue can capture a full range of experience, or even claim to do so. Any single Destroy issue, or any special issue at all, can’t fix a systemic problem. But, like the last lines, “my foot dragging like a beacon, like / a flag” in “You Wanted Me to Fly,” what a Destroy issue can do is offer pride: that we are here, that there is no one way to be disabled. That we are enough.

Thank you for reading Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, and I hope you enjoy these poems.

© 2018 by S. Qiouyi Lu

S. Qiouyi Lu is a writer, editor, narrator, and translator; their fiction and poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons and inkscrawl, and they edit the magazine Arsenika. A dread member of the queer Asian SFFH illuminati, S. lives in California with a tiny black cat named Thin Mint. You can visit their site at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter as @sqiouyilu.

Ctenophore Soul
by Rita Chen

A soul is birthed
sealed shut.
Trembling,
fragile membrane
cocoons the glistening fluid,
clear and rich with possibles:
ichor mixed with tears.

Gentle, now;
surface tension.
Clutch your shimmering,
sea-jelly soul
that caught sunlight
in its depths somewhere.

If it still remains unbroken,
make a tear—
just enough
for the soul-stuff
to trickle out into the world
and leave its mark.

Just enough
for a little dust to find an in
—a syllable, a song,
someone else’s dream—
foreign bodies seed
and mix the sterile brew
with potentiality.

The soul, it likes to
close up—shell—
to heal around the breach.
But stay torn,
stay open,
wait.

Wait.

Let your cells
bloom,
proliferate,
germinate the monstrous and sublime;
let meld, let fuse
with alien particulates,
mutate into a thing
entirely new—

Give it sunlight and a lifetime
and some truth
and there you’ll have
you.

© 2018 by Rita Chen

Rita Chen is a disabled cyborg witch who loves mindfulness, audio drama, and tabletop games. She lives somewhere on the autism spectrum with her fibromyalgia in Edmonton, Alberta. You can find her on Twitter @expositionist.

core/debris/core
by Rose Lemberg

My skin peels in oozing scales: tar, cinnamon, H_2O, ferrum, CO_2, reverberation
of how dare you show yourself in public, hide it under wraps! it must smell
when whole galaxies fall scraped off, blood into void, covering all in volcanic ash
unseemly to talk about skin flare spreading to my fingers, growing spaceships out of the debris that sticks between cushions, corrodes elbow creases, exploding spaceships fall on my lover’s face until it’s cratered
with the acidity of moons, but everything is justified
if it’s a birth, so I grow new skin, repair stiff fingers with meteors, grow, grow, grow until my fingers spin again, pulling/peeling
gory protuberances from a thousand suns—oh, you want science fiction?—is there anything else you want
that will make my existence confirm to your sleek aesthetic, airbrushed noir
smooth out everything of me that erupts
with pain/ecstasy, releasing energy at each separation of debris from core, giving birth/unbirth, endless process of renewal and alienation, noir me out of existence into shadows where even my shadow isn’t seen, but
listen, I have/have not hid behind long sleeves,
listen, I had loved ones who took it personally,
slapped my hands away from my own flesh to “help” me—do you
slap protonic radiation away from a nascent star, do you fight comets with Comet, do you want your universe scrubbed clean of birth/rebirth/fall/freefall/death/gravity
become a monoculture
airbrushed
painless
in which even you cannot remain? Tough luck.

© 2018 by Rose Lemberg

Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in Lightspeed‘s Queer Destroy Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, and many other venues. Rose’s work has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and other awards. You can find more of their work on their Patreon, including their essay series Writing While Autistic: patreon.com/roselemberg

How to Fix a Dancer When it Breaks
by Genevieve DeGuzman

You didn’t think I was capable
of grace like this against your bull
horn temper breaking china. But I learned
to swallow your sound like a wide mouth
cave brimming with bats.

There’s a tightening around the gussets
of your performed tenderness when you ask me
to lean forward. I feel three fingers
marking the ridges where you’ve traveled,
cervical spine C2 to C7.

The first vertebra is indestructible. C1: Ring-shaped
atlas that hitches to the skull. A joint
that lets me nod yes when the needle goes in
and numbness trickles down the crook of my back
we don’t speak of. For now it’s enough to be gentle
knowing the stage lights. It’s enough to know
that excess force could tug
my column’s alignment off. Avoid break-
age, avoid split endings. Clean slate, you said.
As easy as snuff cloth dipped in accelerant
wiped across my screen face. Restart, erase
you dipped like lures in the coded pools
between my bones. But agreeing is different
from believing because you’d never really
forgive me for seeing the worst
you. No need to bandage up
the injection site but you do it anyway.
Roomy habit like an old sweatshirt
install. Then your eyes collide
with mine as if to answer
the question. A reaction not unlike comets
passing over horizons and curtains rising
to greet the camera. Wayward wires hang from the lens
and threaten a noose. What necks would break
reaching for the bright cupped sound
of their applause? Life begins in the joints
and facets, yanked cords and pulley systems.
Lumbar and sacral spine spindle. Bear it, you said.
And I did. That beauty rotating on the axis
of what the body bends and unbends.

© 2018 by Genevieve DeGuzman

Genevieve DeGuzman was born in the Philippines, raised in Southern California, and graduated from Columbia University. Her most recent speculative work also appears in Abyss & Apex, Flyway, Liminality, LONTAR, Reed Magazine, and Strange Horizons. She is a finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2017 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize, and a winner of the 2017 Oregon Poetry Association’s New Poets Contest. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she works on perfecting her hygge. You can find her on Twitter @gen_deg.

the body argonautica
by Robin M. Eames
the sun is drowning in my throat
burning her way down and leaving
in her wake bright welts and brief
splashes of milk-white scar tissue strained through
with saturnalian blues, violet, bitter carmine and sunrise
flush of searing hydrogen, all mapped out by
your curious hands, teeth, tongue, your bitten lips
tools of cosmography
my mind is honeycomb divided
into hexagonal compartments being eaten
by glittering little birds of every colour and hue
winging desperately through screaming solar winds
catching and tangling in your long stream of hair
neurons firing in orchestral arrangements
but lacking percussion
my heart sinking below a horizon
distilled into platitudinous equanimity
that deceives the eye—showing nothing
of the dark leviathans thrashing far beneath
the barely rippling surface, their whipping tails
and surging fins all stomach-churning intensity
battling through bilious oceans
in lacerated stomach lining
lungs filled with breath of dying gods
oxygen swathes of blue diffused diaphanous
trailing serpentine over silicate drag of nebulae
helium shell flash, the taste of orange peel, bright pain,
and the faint wetness of your eyelash falling
onto my cheekbone
a world unravelling
in the smoky pupil of your eye
whose icy mantle hides internal endless seas
over silted core of cryovolcanic chasm
pluming from translucent tract of radiant glaze
in glacier stillness the world pauses mid-turn, stops,
and turns again, stops,
amidst violent colliding comet chondrite and cosmic dust
thermal pulse and sooty fields of rubine
eyes fixed in middle distance you blink
and all is consumed
my body loosening apart from itself
like continental drift, ponderous movement of great
stately landmass, my bones the terrifying Symplegades
clashing thunderously: a sound like the universe clapping
like a falling cliffside crashing into valley and river
sending up sprays of moon-pale cerebrospinal fluid
splinters of bone, of river silt, leaving long furrows
in the flesh of the earth, wounds full of tiny gasping
lost creatures, looking to the sky
and finding alien stars engulfed
in the curl of your mouth
at which i smile
tilt my head, looking to the sky, to your body’s softness
and kiss you very sweetly, adjust your ventilator,
to breathe in the moon
if only to kiss you by starlight

© 2018 by Robin M. Eames

Robin M. Eames is a queer crip punk poet who is only mostly dead. Their work has been published by Cordite, Voiceworks, Ibis House, Archer, Red Room, GlitterShip, Strange Horizons, and Luna Station Quarterly, among others. They live on Gadigal land. You can find them online at robinmeames.org and @robinmarceline.

All the Stars Above the Sea
by Sarah Gailey

All the stars are closer now than
they have ever been. If you
were still beside me you’d reach up
on tiptoes, fingers spread to touch the
brightest one. But you’re not here,
gone deep below for far too long to
ever let me think you’re coming back.
If you could open up your eyes and
blink into the blinding sky, your lips
would tremble like they did the day
you told me what you’d done and
where you’d go and what you’d find
below the sea.
Your eyes would shine reflected light
(so long it’s been since you’ve seen sun
I wonder if you can recall the
way it felt on both our skins
the day you promised that
you’d never leave me all alone).

All the stars are closer now, they’re getting
closer every night, and punching
holes through daylight so the
days are brighter. Is there light at all
where you have gone? Do you have
bioluminescent algae woven through
the cracks that thread the underside of
bedrock arching overhead? Perhaps
you lie awake at night and let yourself
believe you’re counting stars. But you
could never count the stars up here,
I know you’d try I know you’d tilt
your chin up toward the shining sky and
close your eyes and count until your
throat was raw, and I would bring you tea
with honey and a blanket, drape my warmth
across your shoulders so you’d shiver
less, so you could count them all,
I said you couldn’t but you could, I know
you could, I know.

All the stars are closer and they move
too fast to track. All the constellations
ruined by the way the stars are closing
in: you found the thing you wanted
(left me for, you left me
here beneath the stars
to find it, was it worth the way
you broke me open when you left?).
You found the thing you left me for
and turned it on, I think, or else you
woke it up, enormous sleep-fogged eye
and hunger rising like the tide.
So hungry it could eat the space
between us, maybe, or could fit
the way I even now still want you
in between its teeth, and swallow
all the ways I hate the empty
place beside me in our bed.

All the stars are closer and the
earthquakes, worse each day and
high the sea, the rising sea and all the
birds have fled the cities, how I wish
that you could see them, clustered
spirals, clouds of crows and pigeons gathered close like
schools of fish, and falcons
picking off the weak and slow before
they vanish past the skyline.
Where they go, I’m sure the trees
turn starlight into dappled shade
the nights, less bright so maybe
they can tuck their heads beneath their wings
(like you, the lab you’ve built
tucked deep below the bottom
of the sea) and sleep the way they slept
before the cities turned to hives
of fear. You haven’t seen a bird
save your canaries for at least a year, you
used to wear binoculars and now
you live (are you alive? I’d surely know, I’d
surely feel it in my bones if
you had died) too deep below
for cageless birds. So you and I
are closer—
now that all the birds are gone, our
lives are something like the same.

All the stars are closer now, you
haven’t written me in months, the cracks
they found just off the coast are wide enough to
see the shadows moving underneath. The things
are rising up to meet the stars are coming
down to meet the things and all my friends are
asking when I’ll pack away your clothes and
sell my ring. I thought I saw you in
the store when I was buying bottled water,
powdered milk and bullets, cans of ravioli
frozen peas and generator fuel, I thought
I saw you in the line adjacent but I
touched your shoulder with my open hand and
no, of course it wasn’t you at all, the man who
flinched so hard you’d think I stabbed him.
I apologized and paid the clerk and left before
I started crying. In my car I pressed my
face against the steering wheel and missed you,
missed the way you used to sing when you
were shaving, missed the way you ran
your fingers through my hair and missed
a you I never met, the you who would have known
just how we might escape the stars.
I missed you and I wondered if you
saw them coming, if you left
to save yourself, if you decided
not to save me, too, decided it was better
to condemn me to the starlight.

The stars are closer now, the sea is
just below my window, things are
moving through the city, things we
can’t look at directly. The sky is bright and blinding
and I threw away my wedding dress, I threw it
off the roof into the water where it
sank into the open mouth of something
you’d have studied. I don’t miss you, I don’t
want you back beside me, I don’t want
to have to ask you what you’ve done. The
stars are almost here and there’s
a hungry kind of singing, songs that rattle
all my windows, singing coming from the sea. I tied
my bedsheets into netting and I caught
a fish and turned to tell you Look, I Did It.
(Look, you did it, I can’t help but feel
a flash of pride at every shadow in the
water rising up to meet the sky, I want
to grow a bitter pearl of anger at your work but
no, it’s pride, you did it, look). The stars
are closer now, and you are still
so far away, and all we have is
in the water, and I wish on every too-close star
that you would come back home
before the end.

(Editors’ Note: “All the Stars Above the Sea” is read by Stephanie Malia Morris on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 24A.)

© 2018 by Sarah Gailey

Hugo Award winner and Campbell Award finalist Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and they are a regular contributor for Tor.com and Barnes & Noble. Their most recent fiction credits include Mothership Zeta, Fireside Fiction, and the Speculative Bookshop Anthology. Their debut novella duology, River of Teeth, was published in 2017 via Tor.com. They have a novel forthcoming from Tor Books in Spring 2019. Gailey lives in beautiful Portland, Oregon, with their two scrappy dogs. You can find links to their work at sarahgailey.com; find them on social media @gaileyfrey.

Convalescence
by Alicia Cole

Sparse terrain. I took the drugs today.
They’re a necessity, like my breathing tube.
The drugs make everything clear. Still,
there are mornings when I look at them: small,
ovoid forms; oral pharmaceuticals. I roll them
between my fingers, look out the window,
see red dirt pile everywhere, see red dirt
like my brain’s own piled thoughts, drifting
mechanisms, uncertain shifts and loops.

They said it would be good therapy, seclusion.
They said it would be necessary. When I served,
psywar soldier, it was all necessary:
the mental bombs, the shadow-sliding, the smart
guns. The smart guns were the worst.
Have you ever been shot before? They prep you.
Pre-shooting shooting. You feel it deep, practice
absorbing the impact. I look out the window.

I take a walk. Everything is red. I’m red also,
my suit slick with copper. I’d like to be done
with red. I’d like to not be done with red.
There have been days, you know,
when I haven’t taken the meds. Unfortunately
they’re counted. My body’s monitored. One day,
I told them: it’s easier, the red, more soothing;
it drifts over me and stills me.

That day, they ordered me to take my meds,
as though they knew from the hush in my voice
I hadn’t, as though they knew. They turned
off the holoscreen until I complied. I cried
so hard the windows turned white. I cried
so hard I couldn’t breathe. It’s funny,
putting in a breathing tube while you sob.

But I went for a great walk. The world hammers
inside of you when you’re sick, and my heart
hammered then. Where would I be when
they came for me again? Where would I be
when the red drifted away outside?
Could it drift away inside? They’d given
the consequences if I suicided:
what would happen to my legacy, my family.

The damned red. As if that would help me,
talking about my family. It’s like a penal
colony here with one person. And the drifting
away is tempting. But I get better. I improve
in slow gulps and long stretches of red walks.
The only stress is wondering what to do
when I go back. I wonder what my mom
will say when I get home. Will she make
my favorite cake? Anything, I’ll say,
other than red velvet. Then I’ll look
out the window, long for home.

(Editors’ Note: “Convalescence” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 24B.)

© 2018 by Alicia Cole

Alicia Cole is a writer and artist in Huntsville, AL. She’s the editor of Priestess & Hierophant Press, the Interviews Editor of Black Fox Literary Magazine, the Smashwords Manager of Femspec Journal, and an intern for 256 Magazine. She also writes for Funky Feminist. Her work has recently appeared in TAB: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Atlas & Alice, and Man in the Street Magazine, and is forthcoming in Cascadia Subduction Zone, Split Lip Magazine, and Witches & Pagans. She loves coffee, plants, animals, and art.

hypothesis for apocalypse
by Khairani Barokka
elders told me your face could be opened
like persimmon
cleaving apart at the fingertips, reddened
as blood does,
as bloodied fingers will do.
inside, a round
sphere unheld by any other parts
of any other. seed of
nothing else will do, root and salve of you,
sweet and cracked; surviving
all droughts, i keep and keep, finger and thumb,
ache turning tiny, crimson
planet round and round, a humming sound.

© 2018 by Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka is a writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist, who has presented work extensively in thirteen countries, and is the recipient of six residencies and multiple grants. Among her honours, she was an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow, and is a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change for arts practice and research. Okka is creator of works for the stage such as Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee, co-editor of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Fixi) and Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches), author-illustrator of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), and author of poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches Press). She is a PhD by practice researcher in Goldsmiths’ Visual Cultures Department in London. khairanibarokka.com

Spatiotemporal Discontinuity
by Bogi Takács

I.

There is the before, the escape, being hurled into the rift gashing across spacetime the needlethorn layer pulled across skin. The words that are scrambled after your brain passes through the gap. There is the after.

II.

After the searing rush of information
there is silence.
Rooms blanketed in beige,
a bed soft as family would offer.

A statue of the Merciful Sibling,
covered in snow—
not the way you remember,
but allowing the comfort
of reoccurrence.

Crisp air grasping the lungs,
feet slipping on the sidewalk.
The body does not regain itself—
it stays other and yet yours.
Grit teeth. Remaining stubborn
and firmly evanescent.

This too shall pass
quoted as consolation;
and yet you prefer to stay
in the translucent moment
with balance not reasserted
knowing you are here—
you shall remain.

III.

To travel again you do not need to return to a previous unreachable state, only to construct a context to incorporate the memory. Embodiment is a struggle but it can be hard-going without rejection; you can hold onto the holding even after you’ve landed. Some metaphors exist across the gap. For the benefit of all sentience—you mutter, fingers curling. You take to the skies.

© 2018 by Bogi Takács

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or singular they pronouns) currently living in the US with eir family and a congregation of books. Bogi writes, reviews and edits speculative fiction, and has won the Lambda Award in 2018 for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (also a Locus award finalist book). Bogi is also a finalist for the Hugo Award in 2018 in the Best Fan Writer category. You can find em at Bogi Reads the World, and on Twitter and Patreon as @bogiperson.

You Wanted Me to Fly
by Julia Watts Belser

You wanted me to fly.

Has it always been your fantasy?
That my ungainly limbs
would slip the noose of gravity
and find some supple grace amidst the stars?

That you could tuck my brain inside a jar,
enfold my mind within the perfect plastics of a spaceship,
shear away unruly flesh from interstellar dreams?

For years,
I drank it down without protesting.

But now I am the ghost in your machine,
the traitor to transcendence.
I spit in your regeneration tanks.
I scorn your regrown limbs and buffed out scars.

Now when I dream of flight,
I dream the interstice of skin and shoulder,
lift spindly legs with arms that know the measure of this body’s weight.

I limp my way across the decks of clean-lined cruisers,
sullying the sleek edges of your future,
my foot dragging like a beacon, like
a flag.

© 2018 by Julia Watts Belser

Julia Watts Belser is a writer, activist, and academic whose fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Tikkun, and Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly. A professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, she studies gender, sexuality, and disability in classical Jewish texts and writes queer feminist disability theology and ethics. She’s a passionate disability activist, a friend of wild places, and a lover of wheels.

Interview: Rachel Swirsky
by Sandra Odell

( Content note: discussions of suicide)

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop where she, a California native, learned about both writing and snow. Last year, she traded the snow for the rain of Portland, Oregon, where she roams happily under overcast skies with the hipsters. Her fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Asimov’s Magazine, and The Year’s Best Non-Required Reading. She’s published two collections: Through the Drowsy Dark (Aqueduct Press) and How the World Became Quiet (Subterranean Press). Her fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award, and twice won the Nebula. “Birthday Girl” is a difficult and gorgeous tale of family and mental illness.

Uncanny Magazine: There are moments in “Birthday Girl” that took my breath away—the pain, the dissociation, the loneliness, and love. What inspired this beautiful, bittersweet tale?

Rachel Swirsky: I’ve recently moved to a new city, and I love it here very much. I spend a lot of time at the house of some of my friends, one of whom is the fourteen-year-old niece of a man I’ve known since grad school.

Adelaide is awesome. Hanging out with her, and chatting about school and goth fashion is great. Adelaide is queer, and mostly dates people who are female- or nonbinary-identified. She wore a rainbow bow tie to her middle school graduation. She has crushes on female media figures, and she can talk to her friends about shipping (imaginary relationships between) various characters, and while there’s still some homophobia extant, by and large, she has the support of her family and her community. It doesn’t have to be secret; none of her friends are risking homelessness (that I know of); if someone at school decides to make fun of her for being queer, there are plenty of students and teachers who are more than happy to tell that person to knock it off.

When I was in high school, we didn’t have reliable AIDS medications yet. My friends did get kicked out of their homes. One of them was sent to a camp which focused on drug rehabilitation, but also pressured the students to “become straight.”

I do not wholly blame my friend’s parents for sending her to the camp. Rae was very, very ill, and nothing else was working, so they took a stab at the last thing they could think of when they thought her life was at stake. They were right. Her life was at stake. Unfortunately, like everything else, the conversion camp didn’t help. She died.

It hurts so much sometimes to think of my friend Rae who never had a chance to become the full-fledged, beautiful, eccentric, kind adult she was on her way to being. I look at fourteen-year-old Adelaide, and I am so, so happy that she has access to all these things Rae did not.

I think about it in relation to myself, too. Kids Adelaide’s age have access to mental health care that I just didn’t. I’m so grateful for that. I want to celebrate all the people whose lives are improved and made possible by these changes.

Sometimes, I just also feel a bit jealous. What would it have been like to grow up in a world that didn’t do its best to kill Rae? What would it have been like to grow up in a world that didn’t tell me I couldn’t have depression problems because I had good grades? What would it be like not to have to bear that burden?

I am so happy for Adelaide—and a bit sad, from time to time, for the outcast, struggling kid I was at thirteen.

Uncanny Magazine: Narrative voice is as important to a story as plot and character. Bella and Natalie are the only characters addressed by name in the narrative, centering the focus on them and the shared diagnoses born of genetics. Was this an intentional choice from the beginning or did it come in later revisions?

Rachel Swirsky: That was a deliberate choice from the beginning. I think the sister and her husband have names somewhere in the text, but I didn’t come up with those names until I needed them in dialogue.

I wanted to write something with a Carver-esque feel. I don’t think it ended up that way ultimately, but I was trying at first to approach the story with sharp, driven focus. The naming convention was part of that, reducing extraneous information to the most important, pressing parts.

Uncanny Magazine: With this work you tackle such issues as institutionalization, something of what it’s like to be a sibling of a disabled person, mental health, the burden of shame and guilt, and the challenges of parenting a child with a disability, all presented with dignity and honesty. Representation matters. Representation done right matters even more. What was the hardest part of writing this story?

Rachel Swirsky: The story actually came fairly easily, but I did work back and forth with a couple of different editors on some of its parts. The story doesn’t have a lot of interiority—I added some in the last round of editing. The conflict is extremely internal, relayed mostly through dialogue and detail. It doesn’t have any O’Henry-type twists. So, I suppose the most difficult thing for me is taking a type of writing I don’t usually do, and trying to decide how I feel about what came out.

Uncanny Magazine: It has been said that writing is the act of bleeding on the page in new and interesting ways. How much of Rachel Swirsky made it into “Birthday Girl”?

Rachel Swirsky: In addition to being a disabled person, I am the close relative of someone who attempted suicide due to disability in their early twenties. It was an upsetting event for me—I was in middle school—and it definitely moves to the fore when I’m writing about relationships that are disrupted and sent into chaos by the prospect of suicide.

When you’re a kid, it’s hard to know how to contextualize suicidality in others. For me, it felt as if the person wanted to leave me, and that was crushing. As an adult, I know there were a lot of other things going on. Probably, the person who attempted suicide didn’t think I cared enough to be upset, or thought they were a net negative in my life, and didn’t want to keep hurting me (or anyone else) by existing. Those ideas are completely false, of course, but a suicidal brain will try to convince you they’re true. But when I was a kid, all I saw was someone I loved, one of the few people who felt like light in a time of my life that felt very dark, who wanted to leave.

Uncanny Magazine: If you could reach out to all of the writers struggling to balance their disabilities with their creative work, what would you tell them?

Rachel Swirsky: Be gentle with yourself. It’s very tempting to take all the advice given by (primarily) abled people and take it too seriously. “Write every day,” for instance, just isn’t advice that is going to work for a lot of people who have chronic illnesses.

It’s even trickier if your chronic illnesses are things that you’ve been trained to think you can work through—what’s a little depression, after all? Your fingers still work. What’s a migraine? Close your eyes, and type in the dark. And sure, you can do those things for a while, but for most people, it’s going to be exhausting and draining, and gives you a limited number of useful words.

A lot of people don’t believe in writer’s block—except that it’s one of the terms people use to refer to the kinds of problems one encounters while writing during a disability flare. (It’s used to refer to other things, too). If someone’s telling you that your writer’s block is illegitimate, and you just have to work harder to get things done, and you’d really do that if you cared, and you’re just being overdramatic and lazy—and 90% of the time the person telling you that is yourself—don’t listen. Working yourself into knots about it just makes everything harder, and it’s even worse trying to work through a chronic disability flare while self-loathing and anxiety about not writing are winding you up and making you feel even worse.

Treat yourself gently. Do what you can. Compare yourself to yourself. It’s all you can do.

Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!

© 2018 by Uncanny Magazine

Sandra lives in Washington state with her family and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a pitbull. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, and three of the four EA Podcasts. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate and an active member of the SFWA.

She is currently hard at work on her novel or plotting world domination, whichever comes first.

Interview: Marissa Lingen
by Sandra Odell

Marissa Lingen is among the top science fiction and fantasy writers in the world who were named after fruit. She has many opinions on Moomintrolls. She has been known to cross international borders in search of rare tisanes. Her personal relationships with bodies of water are intense though eccentric. She lives atop the oldest bedrock in the US with two large men and one small dog, where she writes, if not daily, frequently. “This Will Never Happen to You” is a powerful and personal piece of flash fiction dealing with spores, disability, and family.

Uncanny Magazine: Flash fiction is meant to be concise and direct, every word precisely weighed and measured for maximum impact. “This Will Never Happen to You” is exemplary of the form. What is it about such minimalist stories that appeals to you as a writer?

Marissa Lingen: I really love implication. I’m from the Upper Midwest of the US, where a lot of our communication is terse and indirect. But for me, that leaves room for very powerful communications to be done in very little space. That’s true in a story too—I love the way a good flash story gives you enough to unfold worlds in your own head. The fireworks often come afterwards, as you’re thinking about the story.

Uncanny Magazine: There is the sense of the autobiographical to “This Will Not Happen to You.” What was the most difficult part of writing this story? How much of Marissa Lingen made it to the page?

Marissa Lingen: The most difficult was the part about her mother. I can say things about my experience of disability, but that… that was about saying to my mom, I see you too, I see you through all this. I can speak for me, though I’m still new to this kind of writing; my voice still shakes when I do it. But the lines that are about getting it right for someone else, those are hard.

Obviously, we haven’t had a spore-based epidemic. This is not me… per se. But I went through a lot of the steps of “I think we’ve got it now! …wait, no…” that I think a lot of disabled people do. The frustration, the moments of humiliation, the long-term accommodation… that’s changed details but emotional reality. I’m still finding the balance of how to do that, with this story and with “Flow” in Fireside earlier this year. But I like where I’m going with it, even as it terrifies me.

Uncanny Magazine: One line that struck me was: “The odds of a neural mismatch that bad have gone down, and everyone knows that if someone says that it’s 95% odds, that means no one you know will get it.” Indeed, many people do think “it will never happen to me” and, wittingly or unwittingly, overlook the impact of a disability on their lives or the lives of someone they know. Why do you think that is?

Marissa Lingen: I think people are scared. I think people are looking to feel safe. The question I am asked most often by people who don’t know much about my disability is: what did you do? I didn’t do anything. Which means that there’s nothing they can do to have this not happen to them. And that’s terrifying. It’s very vulnerable, looking at other people and saying, yes, that could happen to me, the parts of my body that now work could betray me, things that I think are fundamental to me could slip away from me forever, and there are things I can do to make that less likely, but there’s nothing I can do to make it impossible. Bad things are not always correlated with bad people, or with stupid mistakes. Quite often they just happen. And this is a metaphysical truth of the universe that a great many people do not want to think about, ever. It would be so much more comforting if I had done something foolhardy that they could avoid. If I could be a cautionary tale. But I’m not; I’m a person whose body does excellently well at some things and dreadfully at others.

This is a highly intersectional issue, of course, not just disability. People who will self-describe as being 100% against racism will go searching for things a particular person of color did “wrong” to justify staggeringly bad treatment from an establishment or from “respectable” white people. Those of us with experience with reporting sexual harassment know very well that if there’s the slightest imperfection in any of our behavior, ever, then we “deserved” it. The phrase “to be fair” is weaponized to be completely unfair, as in, “to be fair, they shouldn’t have been there [in a perfectly legitimate public space] or the bad thing would never have happened.”

I think we’re particularly emotionally bad at statistics, and I wanted to highlight that. 95% odds are one in twenty. One of the comparisons I ask for is: how many people were in your high school graduating class? Mine was about 220. So that means that something with only a 5% chance of happening will, on average, happen to 11 people in a group that size. Some things aren’t random, of course, so you’ll end up with 60 instead of 11, or 2 in a different group of 220. But I think when people hear, “95% chance of a match,” you think, “probably it will match.” And that’s true, it’s entirely true. It’s just that it’s the kind of unlikely that will happen to several people you went to school with, rather than nobody you’ve ever heard of. You can use other population groups if you want, of course—how many people were at your college, how many people live in your hometown. But if you’re measuring over and over again, even a well-rigged coin will sometimes turn up the wrong face. 95% in a population of 220 is 11 people. Grab a high school yearbook and look at their faces, and tell me again what’s too “unusual,” too “rare” to need services, or attention, consideration, planning. Some outliers don’t lie out as far as our anxious optimism would lead us to believe. Even the ones that do—we need to remember that rare and nonexistent are not the same.

This story is not a very nice story, because it rubs people’s noses in those probabilities. It is a story that asks people to sit with the knowledge of their own fragility. I’m not always a very nice writer.

Uncanny Magazine: In this story we see the growth and progress in treatment for the fungal infection that causes such damage, yet for every two steps forward there is a critical step back that directly impacts the lives the cure is meant to help. What progress would you like to see made not merely in “curing” a condition, but in improving the lives and comfort of people with disabilities?

Marissa Lingen: I think that even taking those into consideration as factors will be great progress. This week a loved one saw two doctors for a particular problem, and one of them said, well, you’re going to have to live with it, because this factor in your health is more important than your day-to-day life and comfort. And the other one said, this is not an acceptable way for us to ask you to live, let’s find an alternative even if it’s a bit more obscure. The second doctor made such a difference. My loved one came home heartened and ready to keep doing things in their life, their way, rather than drained and frustrated and losing sight of what makes them themself.

I think one of the crucial answers to your question is not settling for “good enough,” and another is letting disabled people collaborate on the concept of what “good enough” might look like. Because it doesn’t just mean “convenient to others” or “not too unsightly.” Over and over again in working with poverty worldwide, studies show that poor people know what they need. That letting them make their own choices has better outcomes. That’s true for us disabled people too.

Uncanny Magazine: How do you think your own disability has impacted and informed your writing?

Marissa Lingen: Oh, that’s a big one. It’s changed what work I can do when. I apprehend all sorts of things differently, not all of them directly about disability. Because I have a balance disorder, I have to consider three-dimensional spaces in ways that I wouldn’t otherwise. I wrote about this a little in my essay in support of this project’s Kickstarter—that my ideas of zero-gravity, of life in space, are very much shaped by not knowing which way will be up at any given moment.

Also, on a very basic note, the hours when I really can’t move around safely much are quite often hours I spend reading. I read fast, copiously, and broadly before the vertigo, but one of the things I have to remind friends of when they’re bemoaning their inability to keep up with how much I read is that it relates very directly to how badly I’ve been doing in a given month. Still, it’s lemonade to make with that particular lemon.

I also think that it’s very easy not to notice some of the stuff I talked about above, about being vulnerable as a human body in various ways, if you don’t have to. I’ve had to. I’m glad I have. I would rather have that awareness of vulnerability than its blithe absence. I think it makes me a more careful and nuanced writer. I hope it does.

Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!

© 2018 by Uncanny Magazine

Sandra lives in Washington state with her family and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a pitbull. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, and three of the four EA Podcasts. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate and an active member of the SFWA.

She is currently hard at work on her novel or plotting world domination, whichever comes first.

Personal Essays Introduction
by Nicolette Barischoff

And so it is. Disabled People officially join Women, Queers, and People of Color currently destroying science fiction. Why, oh, why are we ever bound to destroy that which we love most?

Disabled folks love science fiction, did you know that? This personal essay section exists purely because we love science fiction. Because disabled authors and activists and bloggers and journalists and fan writers love science fiction so much that they wanted to help us raise money to make this special issue of Uncanny.

So, they wrote for us. They gave us deeply individual and intimate narratives about the stories and characters and universes, the interplanetary vessels and alternate timestreams they loved most. And you folks out there, you loved these essays in turn, and you gave us what we needed to make Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Thank you.

Each and every one of these personal essays is about love. Even where that love is complicated, and mixed with a fair amount of frustration, a healthy dose of distrust. Every essayist in this section is here because science fiction is the generation ship they call home. They believe it’s a ship big enough to house us all, and built well enough to bear some remodeling.

We can have wider transporter doors, ramps in the engine room, Braille on the bridge, stimulation-sensitive lights in all the sleep pods. More importantly, we can have ship’s captains who give their orders in ASL or mechanics who require communication devices and prosthesis.  It’s our ship, too. We’ve always been a part of the population, mixed right in with all the abled folks, drifting along toward that new homeworld. We belong here. These personal essays contain everything we love (and hate) about living aboard ship, and everything that could be better. There are personal gripes, expressions of ambivalence for some of our ship’s more worn and problematic machinery. But there is also adoration for the freedom and exploration this big ol’ ship affords us.

These personal essays are our love letters and thank-you notes and familial rants to the semisentient ship that carries our imaginations and our dreams. Thank you for reading them.

See you next year in Disabled People Destroy Fantasy.

© 2018 by Nicolette Barischoff

Nicolette Barischoff was born with spastic cerebral palsy, which has only made her more awesome. Her fiction has appeared in Long Hidden, Accessing the Future, The Journal of Unlikely Academia, Podcastle, and Angels of the Meanwhile. As an editor, Nicolette will be the Guest Nonfiction Editor for Uncanny Magazine’s Disabled People Destroy Fantasy special issue. She regularly writes about disability, feminism, sex- and body-positivity, and how all these fit together. Her personal essays on these topics get read way more than her fiction does, which is only a little annoying. She regularly collaborates with visual and performance artists to promote normalization of visibly disabled bodies. She’s been on the front page of CBS New York, where they called her activism public pornography and suggested her face was a Public Order Crime.

The Stories We Find Ourselves In
by A. T. Greenblatt

Let’s be honest here, science fiction and fantasy have always been the genres that misfits want to find themselves in. Growing up, I was a terrible student, but I was an avid reader. I loved randomly picking books off the shelf and discovering a good story, no matter the genre. Except I’d be lying if I pretended speculative fiction wasn’t my favorite section of the library.

Reading was always more than pure escapism to me. Books were my constant companions at school. I wasn’t supposed to carry heavy textbooks, but that didn’t stop me from hauling around hardback versions of tomes like The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation Trilogy in my book bag so I could sneak a few pages in between classes. Or during classes.

Back then, it gave me a lot of hope that given enough time even the most unlikely members of the fellowship could have their turn at being the heroes. Because in science fiction and fantasy, anything is possible.

And as a misfit kid, I needed to believe in improbable possibilities.

You see, I have cerebral palsy. It mostly affects my walking and balance, but my speech and dexterity also suffer. My disability is visible in the way that no one ever questions why I have a handicap tag. And yet, I’m incredibly lucky; it’s a mild case, I have the most supportive family anyone can ask for, and I’ve worked with some great physical therapists and teachers over the years.

The thing is, cerebral palsy is not a static condition. There’s room for improvement, especially as a kid, and over the years, I’ve had plenty of personal victories. Like mastering enough control and flexibility to tap my feet (the right one as a kid, the left one in my twenties.) And practicing and practicing and practicing until my fingers finally let me play piano. It was like a slow and unglamorous version of a training montage. But my victories are mine and I’m proud of them.

Trouble is, my progress supports a certain social mentality. People used to tell me regularly that if I just keep trying I could get better. And the stories I read supported this narrative too. I mean how many stories do we have where at the end the blind person’s sight is returned or the “wheelchair-bound” character gets up and walks at some point? Or a science fiction story where there’s a major medical breakthrough that magically fixes everything with no side effects?

But the hard truth about cerebral palsy is that there’s only so much control and flexibility your body will let you have.

These days, I’m not really “improving” anymore. On one hand, that bothers me. But on the other, more experienced hand, I know that’s okay. As of writing this, I’m turning thirty in a few weeks and I can still walk farther than most of my friends. I also know that I’d need to dedicate hundreds of hours of effort into getting an extra ten degrees of motion in my left foot. And honestly, I have better things to do. My biggest goal now is to retain my mobility and flexibility. And on the whole, I’m pretty happy with my body. I’m healthy and active and busy doing the things I want to do.

Lately, though, I’ve come to realize that it’s not just me who needs to re-orient my goals. The disability narrative in our stories needs to change too.

So, I’ll let you in on a secret, the thing I’ve learned about having a life-long disability, the thing that lots of stories never quite grasp: The real trick, the true solution to a disability, is to find a balance between your abilities and your goals.

The idea that you can “fix” cerebral palsy and disabilities like it with hard work and a good attitude is bullshit. But it’s what we are taught to expect. So, we writers need to start changing that narrative. We need tell stories that show a wider variety of abilities in characters. Stories that don’t pity the people who fall outside of the norms, or keep them in the house, or make them long for a “magic bullet” cure. We need to see more disabled characters in fiction, especially older ones, who’ve figured out what works for them and what doesn’t, and who are okay with that. Characters who embark on adventures, who make things and solve problems, just like their able-bodied companions. Because these are the types of stories that will change the way we view abilities and possibilities.

As a teenager, I needed to read more stories with disabled characters living healthy, productive existences.

Actually, I still do.

© 2018 by A. T. Greenblatt

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s well acquainted with all four seasons and is known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, as well as other fine places. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt.

The Horror and the Reality: Mental Illness Through the Lens of Horror
by V. Medina

When I was a kid, my family took me to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. I don’t remember the event very well, but they tell me I took it upon myself to try and scare the people trying to scare me. The one thing that did stay with me was refusing to go into the one attraction that was set up like a mental institution. I wasn’t easy to scare, but under no circumstances would I get anywhere near that one.

It was the same story with horror movies. I grew up watching all kinds of horror: slasher films with cousins, more psychological films with my mom. They were a fun kind of frightening, and I loved the thrill of it. As I got older, I started watching them with friends late at night, making fun of the cheesy ones and jumping at every sound when we stumbled across one that actually scared us. I loved a lot of what we watched, but I got uncomfortable whenever institutions came up, or they started talking about a villain as explicitly having a mental illness. Silence of the Lambs was a particularly troubling example. It made my skin crawl and got my hackles raised even though I didn’t really understand why.

Then I turned sixteen, got my first diagnosis of Bipolar II, tried to commit suicide, and ended up in a crisis unit for the first time. I look back on those early reactions and I laugh; it’s almost like I knew what was coming.

There was no lightning strike moment of realization that my fear was misplaced, but as I continued watching horror, my opinion slowly started to change. Instead of uncomfortable, I started to get annoyed, even angry, at the patterns I saw. The people who were obviously mentally ill, the people who were like me, were never the heroes. If I was lucky, they’d be the victims, but never the last one standing, or even the one who took the bad guy with them in the climactic showdown. More often they were the bad guys: the villains, the tormentors, the people who were supposed to scare me. But it’s hard to be afraid of them when I understand them better than the heroes.

Just about everyone I know is some kind of mentally ill. I know people struggling with OCD or depression, a few who are on the schizophrenic spectrum. I myself deal with occasional hallucinations and delusions, violent thoughts, and other symptoms that would get me cast in the role of the antagonist in any horror movie. None of it has sent me on a killing spree.

Instead, I survive. I survive the images that go through my brain; the terror of being sure there is something outside my window or watching me from behind a cracked door, or that I’ll fall into the floor and be trapped there forever. I survive, and I keep going, and there is still no one like me in the horror I see. I survive every day I manage to get out of bed, but somehow, people like me aren’t allowed to be heroes.

Where is the horror with a protagonist who was paranoid way before anyone was out to get them, who survives because they’re already scared? Where is the horror with a monster that feeds on fear and can’t get their claws into the hero because frankly, the real monster isn’t nearly as scary as what their own brain already does to them? Where is the horror that doesn’t play into the idea that mentally ill people have to be either a killer or a victim?

I want horror where a person can be mentally ill, and still be the one who rises up, takes on the monsters, and brings them down. I want to see us fight and win in horror movies the same way we have to in life.

© 2018 by V. Medina

V. Medina is queer, nonbinary, blind, and usually trying to write three things at once. They live outside of Tampa with their partner, two ridiculous cats, and a never-ending supply of fizzy drinks and coffee. Find them on Twitter at @howsweettheword.

We Are Not Daredevil. Except When We Are Daredevil
by Michael Merriam

“Mister? Mister, are you Daredevil?”

I’m at a local science fiction convention, riding in an elevator with this little boy of about six and his mother. I am dressed sharp because I’ve been making public appearances all day. I’m wearing my big dark wrap around glasses because the burning summer sun shining in through the big windows all over the hotel convention space is dazzling my diseased eyes. I’m wielding my white cane because without it, well, things get interesting. Mostly for innocent bystanders who have no idea I can’t see them, or at least see them clearly.

The boy scrutinizes me despite his mother’s whispered admonishments. “Timmy, stop it! Don’t stare. Stop it.”

I look straight ahead, trying not to laugh because it’s the loudest whisper ever and we are in an elevator. Finally, to his mother’s horror, the boy tugs at my sleeve. “Mister?”

I look down at him. “Yeah?” I can guess what is coming next. While it has never happened to me before, I know other blind SF fans and professionals, regardless of gender, have been asked some variant of this question.

“Mister? Mister, are you Daredevil?”

I have to tell you, I have a deep and abiding love of Daredevil. As a kid forced to deal with the knowledge that I was slowly, steadily becoming blind and then given no follow up care or counseling after the diagnosis, Daredevil was my hero, my sanctuary, and my hope.

As an adult, I find him problematic. As a reader and consumer of SF, I’m faced with the fact that Daredevil doesn’t live the life of a blind person, that he doesn’t reflect the experience of any blind person I know.

But I’m also faced with that fact that most SF cannot claim to have done any better. I’ve encountered too much science fiction and fantasy where the blind character is an object to be cured by science, magic, or by being turned into a vampire. Too many disabled characters play The Wise Mentor. Gruff on the outside, they have a golden heart within and will guide The Hero on his journey until killed by The Villain to show just how villainous the villain is (insert mustache twirling, puppy-kicking, and random tying of women to railroad tracks here).  Too often, a blind character doesn’t live in their blindness. They fight crime and drive cars and do all the things sighted people can because they have special powers, supernatural abilities, or science fiction tech. They see into the future or are depicted as sporting sharpened senses because of their blindness.

I live in this world. I can’t toss my white cane aside when I need to spring into action: the cane goes with me everywhere. I travel around my city on public transportation. My other senses are not supernaturally sharper because I am blind. I simply pay better attention to those other senses. It’s a learned skill. I live within my blindness every day, and I want to read about fictional characters who also live with and within their blindness.

When I began writing fiction and plays for publication and production, I made a mindful decision to write the characters I wanted to read. I decided I would be “that blind author and playwright from Minnesota,” would wear that mantle proudly, and my blindness would inform my fiction.

This is my job now, to write stories where the disabled’s presence in the narrative is not driven by other characters’ (or the author’s) need to fix them. Disability is part of who they are, as opposed to being their identifying characteristic. It is important to me to show the audience the joy, pathos, and everything in-between that makes any character, disabled or not, endearingly, heart-rendingly human.

I try to write the characters I want to read. The kind I wanted to be when I was a kid. The kind I still need as an adult.

I might find Daredevil problematic these days, might roll my eyes at his “radar sense” allowing him to see the world and toss his mobility cane aside at will despite his blindness, but when a child tugs on my sleeve and asks, “Mister, are you Daredevil?” what can a blind author do? I don’t know this child’s story. I don’t know what secrets and demons he might be carrying all alone, even at his age. All I know is, in this moment I have a choice, and I remember how much I needed heroes to believe in as a child. How much I still need heroes to believe in as an adult.

I look down and put a finger over my mouth and his face lights up in pure joy as I say in a low whisper, “Shh. You can’t tell anyone, promise?”

He nods agreement, eyes wide. The elevator doors open and he and his mother exit. I will probably never see him again, but…

“Mister? Mister, are you Daredevil?”

Hell yeah, kid. I am Daredevil.

© 2018 by Michael Merriam

Michael Merriam is an author, actor, poet, playwright, and professional storyteller. He has published three novels, two short story collections, four novellas, and over 90 pieces of short fiction and poetry. His debut novel, Last Car to Annwn Station, was named a Top Book in 2011 by Readings in Lesbian & Bisexual Women’s Fiction. His scripts have been produced for stage and radio, and he has appeared on stage in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Tellebration!, StoryFest Minnesota, and over the air on KFAI and Minnesota Public Radio. Michael is a founding member of the Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers and a member of the Artists with Disabilities Alliance, the Steampunk Artists and Writers Guild, and Story Arts Minnesota. Visit his homepage at michaelmerriam.com.

Nihil De Nobis, Sine Nobis
by Ace Ratcliff

I am 30 years old before I see myself—my disabled self—in any kind of science fiction.

Nobody meant to write about me.

It’s early 2017 and I’m reading The Expanse series. Okay, I’m devouring The Expanse series, because my boyfriend and I watched the first episode of the television show so I immediately needed to see how the books went. Every few pages, James S.A. Corey describes space travel in their universe: specifically, the brutal force of gravity pushing against the human body as it accelerates to hundreds of miles an hour. The human body is not made to withstand pressures like this; each ship is equipped with seats that help bolster the crew, injecting them with drugs while gently cushioning them, designed entirely to keep them alive as they hurtle through space.

Despite the equipment that exists to protect them, the characters in the series suffer grievous injuries as they travel. Their organs rupture. Their blood vessels pop. Their bones dislocate. Under the extreme variables of space travel, their bodies mutiny the very same way my body revolts here, in real-time and real-space on Earth. The injuries are neither abnormal nor strange to them; pain is simply an acceptable risk for the glory of seeing the stars.

I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a degenerative collagen disorder that causes my joints to dislocate incredibly easily on a daily basis. If I turn around the wrong way while backing my car up, my ribs dislocate. If I pick up a heavy water bottle, my wrists dislocate. Bandaids tear off my skin, and I bruise in deep purples and greens if someone so much as looks at me the wrong way. Collagen, you see, is in almost every system in your body. Collagen is both the bricks and the mortar that hold the bricks together in the house that is your body, and it’s being built wrong from the moment the cornerstone is set.

But these characters! Even the most badass ones—the characters with whom I deeply identified, the women who wouldn’t take guff from anyone, anywhere—were being torn apart by spaceflight. Every time Corey described another injury, I would highlight it on my Kindle and crow out loud to my boyfriend (or text it to him, if he wasn’t in the room.) “Look! Dislocated ribs! They’ve all got dislocated ribs! I know how that feels! That happened to me this morning because I sneezed!”

Of course, these characters weren’t falling apart like so much spun sugar hit with water droplets because of a mutation in their DNA. There were only so many similarities between my life and theirs. The series wasn’t a manifesto about being disabled in space—a point driven home like a stake through my heart in a paragraph tucked neatly into one of the latest books in the series. One of the characters—Chrisjen Avasarala, a United Nations chief administrative officer with a filthy mouth and a brilliant mind—ends up in physical therapy to repair the damage done to her body after an extended stay in space. Much like our astronauts today, there is a constant battle against bone and muscle deterioration from even short trips outside of a gravity well.

In physical therapy, Avasarala is frustrated on leg day and working hard to recover. “If you want the leader of Earth, the hope and light of civilization, to get wheeled off the shuttle in a chair, you can stop,” her trainer snaps at her. “If you want her to stride out in front of the camera like a Valkyrie returned from the underworld and ready for battle, you’ll go for twelve [reps].” (I’m fairly certain President Franklin D. Roosevelt would like a word with that trainer.)

I read that paragraph and felt my heart drop down to my stomach, felt the roil of nausea and anger build in my gut. There, between the pages of a series that somehow felt like home because it was one step removed from describing my own disability, was ableism, run rampant and unfettered. Hell, it was practically encouraged! I felt my heart break just a little bit, yet another hairline fracture caused by disability discrimination. It felt like wheeling into a bar and not being able to order a drink because the countertop was too high, like any restaurant I can’t get into because there’s no ramp. It felt like someone parked in the disabled spots because it was “convenient” for them. It felt like someone asking me why I deserved to sit in accessible seating at a concert.

I narrowly avoided the temptation to throw my Kindle and watch the book shatter into a million plastic pieces. If it had been a printed paperback, I’m positive I would be able to show you the dent in the wall. “For the record,” I tweeted out to the hashtags The Expanse was using, “you can be a fucking Valkyrie in a goddamn wheelchair.” I can assure you that any human with the wherewithal, sheer willpower, and pain tolerance to put her skeleton back into place on an hourly basis absolutely deserves a place in any mythological pantheon. (Thumbs up to half of the James S.A. Corey collaboration, Daniel Abraham, for his response and apology to my tweets.)

Much like Valkyries, words have power. Every single author who has ever put words on a page knows and recognizes this power. That power is why we write. As we all know, with great power comes great responsibility. The way writers conceptualize disability in their work has ramifications. The trope of disabled bodies being lesser than non-disabled bodies, about accessible devices making you weak when you use them, is played out and exhausted. Even still, it carries over into the real world. It’s alive in the way people think about, accept, and include disability in our daily lives. When you sit down and write a made-up sci-fi story about Earth in the future, you’re perpetuating real ideas and concepts in readers here, on our Earth. The fact that no editors caught and redacted that passage speaks deeply about the ingrained, acceptable, unrecognized discrimination that is ableism, both within the publishing community and within our social mores.

I did finish reading the series, though I fell behind on the television show after being frustrated by space ships that were littered with staircases. This future was inaccessible when left to the imaginations of non-disabled creators. There’s a saying in the disability community: “Nothing about us without us.” Well, these stories are for us, by us, and about us, through and through.

Welcome to our future. We’re all fucking Valkyries here.

© 2018 by Ace Ratcliff

Ace currently lives and works in Oakland, CA with her fiancé, Derek, and their pack of wild beasts. She lives with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, dysautonomia, and mast cell activation syndrome, all of which make for a particularly rebellious meatcage.

Ace writes about disability inclusion and representation and has bylines at io9, Huffington Post, Self Magazine, Bustle, and Bitch Media. She’s been featured in an Upworthy video which garnered more than 1.8 million views. Ace’s essay “Who Gets to Say #MeToo?” was published in Fireside Fiction‘s Fireside Quarterly July 2018 edition. Ace’s essay “Nihil De Nobis, Sine Nobis” appeared as part of Uncanny Magazine‘s Kickstarter campaign for Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Her poetry has been published in Breath & Shadow. Her short story, “The Ritual,” appeared in Phobos Magazine. She was a panelist at Worldcon 76. Ace’s voice as a disability activist has also been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, and Chuck Wendig’s terribleminds, and she’s gettin’ pretty good at podcasts.

When not freelancing, Ace is also the co-owner of Ace is the co-owner of Harper’s Promise, an in-home pet euthanasia, hospice and palliative care company. You can find link to her work at stayweirdbekind.com and she tweets @mortuaryreport.

From Rabbit Holes to Wormholes: KidLit Memories
by Alice Wong

I knew I was different my entire life. Born with a neuromuscular disability, my early childhood involved medical procedures, hospital and doctor visits, and times spent by myself due to social isolation or not being able to keep up with my non-disabled peers when playing.

On one of my birthdays, I received Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like (Four Winds Press, 1976) by Jay Williams and illustrated by Mercer Mayer . This fantastical folk tale blew my mind, starting a lifelong love of fantasy, speculative fiction, and children’s literature. With my body struggling to walk and “maintain strength” this story filled me with power and the central idea that people should never be underestimated.

No longer in print, the story takes place a long time ago in the city of Wu. The main character is a boy named Han who works as a gate-sweeper for the city. A poor orphan, he only receives one cup of wine and a bowl of rice for his labor (he was a child laborer! they gave him wine!). The entire city is in a panic because a messenger alerted the leaders of Wu that an invading army of marauders is on the way. No one knows what to do. All the adults in the room dispense advice from their smug and limited perspectives. Without any clear direction or consensus, they pray to the Cloud Dragon to save them.

The next day “a small, fat man came walking up the hill. He had a long white beard and a shiny bald head, and he leaned on a long staff.” He tells the leaders of Wu that he is the Cloud Dragon and if they give him something to eat and drink he will protect the city. Everyone laughs and mocks him except for Han. Everyone thinks they know what a dragon looks like, though they have never met one, and they are sure that a dragon is NOT a small old man.

As people in the city prepare for invasion, Han offers the old man his daily ration of rice and wine, and shows him hospitality in his little hut. After eating to his content, the old man says to Han, “I don’t think much of the people of Wu… but for your sake I will save the city.”

This is the point where two illustrations by Mercer Mayer swept and shook me. Both the language and text packed a powerful one-two punch to my worldview:

The little fat man puffed out his cheeks. He blew a long breath. The sky grew dark and lightning sizzled from the clouds to the earth. A great wind arose. It caught the Wild Horsemen and blew them far and wide. Those who escaped, turned and galloped madly away through the storm. The sky cleared. The sun shone again. The plain was empty.

I remember it clearly, a black and white illustration showing a human… swirling as a giant cloud. The swirls and magnitude of the cloud deity made the city seem insignificant. Seeing the transformation from a human figure to a force of nature gave me the belief that we all have something inside waiting to emerge.

Once I turned the page the second illustration was even more mind-bending. The cloud deity transforms into a dragon for Han. From puffed soft lines, the cloud deity that looked like the giggling Pillsbury doughboy morphed into a fierce dragon with fangs, claws, and scales, “He was more beautiful and more frightening than anything Han had ever seen.”

The detail of Mayer’s illustrations with Williams’ evocative language transported me to another dimension as a child. I swam deep into Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like. Those two images are as vivid in my memory now from the day I first read the book.

Before A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia , the His Dark Materials trilogy, the Harry Potter series, and everything by Octavia E. Butler, Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like was magical and culturally resonant. The story challenged my assumptions as the title suggests and encouraged me to be kind and open-minded. It also taught me that adults don’t know everything. Teachers and doctors had fixed ideas of what my future was going to be like; they never knew there was an inferno of rage and creativity waiting to leap out.

Books were a refuge for me, as they are for so many marginalized kids. My imagination was an infinite accessible multiverse where I could escape, have fun, learn, absorb, and dream big. Maybe I couldn’t go on the merry-go-round or jump off the diving board, but I could read like a little mofo and question my reality all day long. When I grew up, my sisters and I received books more often than toys for presents. We had two large bookshelves filled with all kinds of stories. I don’t know how my parents selected them, but I am very grateful that we had this personal library at our disposal. What a treasure!

For the last forty years, I’ve been connecting the dots of how the books from my youth shaped me into the person I am today. I hope this journey will be as entertaining as Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like.

(Editors’ Note: This essay as it originally appeared in Uncanny’s Year 4 Kickstarter included two images of the Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like illustrations mentioned by Alice Wong, which can be viewed by visiting the Kickstarter Update.)

© 2018 by Alice Wong

Alice Wong is a media maker, research consultant, and disability activist based in San Francisco, CA. She is the Founder of the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), a community partnership with StoryCorps and an online community dedicated to creating, amplifying, and sharing disability media and culture.

Alice is also a co-partner in two projects: DisabledWriters.com, a resource to help editors connect with disabled writers and journalists, and #CripTheVote, a nonpartisan online movement encouraging the political participation of disabled people.

Alice has been published in Eater, Bitch Media, Teen Vogue, The New York Times, Transom, and Rooted in Rights. Her activism has been featured in Roll Call, WBUR radio, Al Jazeera, Teen Vogue, Bitch Media, Rewire, Vice, Esquire, CNET, and Buzzfeed.

Twitter: @SFdirewolf

Stories That Talk
by Keith A. Manuel

Late last year, my therapist told me I was bipolar. We had talked about my personal history, and I’d always had phases of depression and mania, though the former had lately been a deeper, more life-altering issue. Depression for me is melancholy, feeling I’m sinking deeper into a hole, and compounded guilt over missing deadlines and not being there for the people I love. But I knew that I would eventually shift into mania, where I would rush to get as much done as possible, which in turn only led to being irritable because things were not happening, and exhaustion because I operated on little sleep and attempted to keep it up with too much coffee and sugar. With medication, talk therapy, and lifestyle changes (for me, getting to sleep on a regular schedule and curbing caffeine intake) the condition is manageable, but bipolar remains an important part of who I am. It’s still there, but less intense, not going back and forth as violently.

There’s no medical test for bipolar. Diagnosis and treatment relies on the patient self-reporting their symptoms. In other words, stories. Talk therapy for me is all about the stories we tell about ourselves. So, let me tell you about the stories and characters that helped me through the three decades before I was diagnosed.

I was drawn to genre fiction during my quest to understand myself. Since I was young kid, I read a lot of fantasy fiction, starting with fairy tales and classical mythology. In middle school, I devoured the Narnia books, reading and rereading whichever volume was close at hand. Then I graduated to Tolkien before I was in high school. The Hobbit was shelved in the children’s section of the library, and once I’d read it three times, the librarian on duty let me into the adult fantasy section.

It took me a few tries to get into The Lord of the Rings. I was already too cynical a kid to hang around Bilbo’s birthday party for long. But there were enough twists, and a band of brothers who reminded me of my own circle of friends. I knew people like Merry and Pippin and Sam. I so wanted to be a Sam, always resolute and sure of what he wanted.

But the Fates had made me a Frodo.

Frodo resonated with me. He kept going. He survived. He carried the weight of the One Ring, even as it got ever heavier; he was always tempted to turn invisible and slip away when things got too intense. The Ring he carried came to symbolize not wanting to let go of those powerful emotions that I’d wrapped around myself. Deep in mania, the whole world seemed within my reach, that I could accomplish so much if only I could push myself a little harder. Like the Ring, my mania stretched me and left me hollow until, like the Ringwraiths who pursued Frodo and Sam, I became a shadow of myself. I began to search for answers because I was in too deep to resist its power alone.

But the most important lesson Frodo Baggins taught me is that even when it’s over, the scars remain. Rereading The Lord of the Rings this year, I remember what hooked me in as a teenager: the pain takes a long time to go away, even when surrounded by love, and like Frodo sometimes you just can’t go home again.

Frodo prepared me for other representations of mental health in genre fiction and related media. As I was first approaching treatment, a friend recommended Joss Whedon’s Firefly. I initially found a lot to like about the TV series. The character River Tam is presented with symptoms that reminded me of what I was going through. Her brother, Simon, a medical doctor, was focused on “fixing” her, and everyone around her treated her as irrational, including at times, herself. I felt I likewise had little control over my choices and shifted radically from frenetic activity to melancholy. Once I was diagnosed and learned more about bipolar, however, the more problematic her character arc became. Rarely throughout the series or the follow-up movie Serenity do we see the world from her perspective. This goes beyond the male gaze that pervades the series. She is a broken genius to be protected or a scary, sometimes violent, mad girl. Unlike Frodo, once her burden is lifted in Serenity, she is instantly better, with no scars to deal with.

The third character that helped illuminate my mental health struggle is The Sleeper, a recurring character in George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards anthology series. Unlike many people affected by the mutating virus, The Sleeper has developed good and bad abilities, and his trait is sleeping for an extended period then waking up with a new set of abilities each time. I recognized in this character the unpredictability of my own condition. From one day to another, my mood and corresponding energy levels varied, sometimes rather unpredictably. Deep, dark depression might give way to a supercharged, agitated mania that would allow me to get everything done before I fell again into the darkness.

None of these characters are called bipolar in the material itself. Rather, seeking answers, I read my problems through the lenses of the stories that gripped me, filling in the gaps with my own feelings and experience. I sought out characters who represented my own struggles, to help me tell my story. Stories like these prepared me for talk therapy, because they gave me characters like Frodo who survived despite the odds.

Genre fiction needs more characters with bipolar who are not presented as scary, irrational, or possessing superhuman abilities because of their disability. The bipolar characters I’m writing struggle with their disability but aren’t limited by it. Bipolar characters must be given the same attention as any other character, with their own motivations, ambitions, and weaknesses. They can pilot starships, talk to dragons, travel between worlds, and fight for a future worth saving.

© 2018 by Keith A. Manuel

Keith A. Manuel is a SF writer, historian, and library worker. He lives and works in Florida with his wife, daughter, and three quirky house cats. You can find him on Twitter @KeithAManuel and on his writing and book review blog Borrowed Worlds.

Once We Were Prophets
by Leigh Schmidt

Epilepsy used to be called the sacred disease because it enraptures people, taking control of them and sometimes bestowing visions that can be heavenly or hellish. It was the realm of oracles and wise men. When the seizures overtook people, they were touched by the Gods themselves. But over time, people began to fear it. It became a sign of witchcraft and demonic possession, and during the Inquisition epileptics were burnt at the stake.

Most of this is rooted in a lack of awareness. Movies and television get it wrong more often than they get it right. Ignorance causes shame and doubt, and makes it harder for people to relate to those with epilepsy, even with friends and family.

Getting my diagnosis as an adult was difficult. I was able to find comfort in the stories of my youth where people were not limited by their disability, and were fully active and respected members of their communities. Geordi LaForge from Star Trek, whose assistive technology and comprehensive knowledge was an asset to those around him. Tyrion Lannister, who embraced his atypical body, and was stronger for having embraced it.

When I first started having seizures, I didn’t know what they were. It wasn’t like in TV or the movies—no falling down, convulsions, or foaming at the mouth. It’s hard to find people like me in media. I’ve never really known anyone I could relate to in fiction.

Epilepsy is different from person to person. Sometimes it’s just an unstoppable jerking of the limbs that goes away for a few minutes. Sometimes it’s the inability to use language correctly. Sometimes you get trapped in your body, and lose the ability to move or interact with anyone. For some people, it brings hallucinations and visions, which can be rapturous or torturous depending on the content.

Professor X’s seizures in the movie Logan are a good representation of what it feels like for me.  It captures the inability to do anything but just ride the seizure until it fades. It freezes your world. For the first time in my life I had something I could point to and say “This is what it feels like! This is me!”

Talking about my epilepsy is a source of tension in my family. It is simply Not Spoken Of. It wasn’t until more than a decade after my diagnosis that I learned that I wasn’t the only one in my family with epilepsy.

My great-grandmother was humiliated by her epilepsy. At the time, few in Puerto Rico understood what triggered epilepsy, much less how to respond to someone in the throes of a seizure. It was considered shameful, something not discussed in front of children. My mother and her siblings never understood the source of my great-grandmother’s ataques until they were well past childhood. She believed her seizures were the will of God, and by taking her medication she was avoiding God’s will.

After her first seizure, my great-grandmother gave up cigars and dived deeply into evangelical Christianity. For her, it was an escape, a form of control. For her, prayer and her deep devotion to God gave her release from epilepsy’s trap.

Science fiction is my release. It’s helped me through periods of abuse, homelessness, and my diagnosis. The people in those stories found ways to rise above their problems. Playing tabletop games gave me a sense of control. As a player, I controlled my own actions. As a storyteller, I controlled the story myself. It helped me to understand that sometimes, situations come up that we can’t avoid, but we always have choices in how to handle them.

Epilepsy is a thief of a disease. It robs you of your time, energy, and control. You are not yourself when you’re having a seizure. My great-grandmother fell into convulsions and lost her sense of self, a condition that sometimes would last a whole day. Epilepsy traps me in my own body.  I see, hear, and think at my normal speed, but my body slips from my control. It limited my horizons, robbed me of opportunities and stole my dreams. For a while I thought I was dying. I had no control, and no answers. I spent time coming to terms with the idea that my life could already be over and there was nothing to do.

But after I was able to understand the limitations of my epilepsy, I was able to do so much more. I took up ballet, I had a painting headline a gallery show, and I travelled to Europe. It was while I was travelling that I met the man I would marry and start a family with.

My diagnosis set me free in a way that I had never expected. Once I had a name for it, I had a path. Once I had a path, I had a destination. Once I had a destination, I had a goal. Epilepsy does limit your life, but it’s more like the borders of a map than an obstacle in your path. It helps to define the territory you can travel.

I found a renewed sense of purpose once I had come to terms with those limitations, I found I had more options than I had believed before my diagnosis. I put aside my life of fear and embraced the opportunities that came my way.

Once we were prophets. Maybe we can be again.

© 2018 by Leigh Schmidt

Leigh Schmidt is living her happily ever after with her daring hero in a seaside village in Denmark. She has a daughter and a way with animals and many stories she whispers to herself at night before she goes to sleep. She has been (in no particular order): a painter, a public speaker, a dancer, a cubicle drone, and a storyteller. She gave up on a life of chasing goalposts for a grand adventure and hasn’t looked back since. She lives in a state of perpetual motion, with a song close at hand to keep rhythm. You can find her on Twitter as @skriftleigh, or looking for a little peace and quiet as the monster under the bed.

Science Fiction as Community
by Kathryn Allan

I cannot think about my disability identity and my love of science fiction separately. They arrived in my life together. While some people have loved SF since they were children or teens, I’m a late bloomer—I didn’t start seriously engaging with SF until I was in my mid-twenties, which was also when I experienced a major health crisis. Both SF and being sick changed me forever. Since I was unable to leave the house or work for any extended periods of time for the first years of my chronic illness, my partner and I began watching a lot of Star Trek. We decided that we would start with the Original Series and watch every episode of every series (including the films) in chronological order. By the time we got to the Next Generation, I had branched out and was reading all the cyberpunk and feminist SF I could manage. From that point on, I knew whatever I was going to do with my life was going to involve SF.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and mental illness, most significantly generalized anxiety disorder, means that I am not able to get out of the house as much I would like. I spend the majority of my days alone (if I did not have my partner, I’d probably spend most of my evenings and weekends alone, too). Even though I am well-loved and supported, my lack of regular face-to-face social interaction can make me feel isolated and lonely. Science fiction fills not only the time when I am unable to work, but also my desire to connect meaningfully with other people. For me, SF is not just books and films; it is a community built on shared interest, and at least for the one with which I associate, a community that embraces people as they are. All of the new friends I’ve made in the past five years have been fellow SF fans and scholars (and most of them are disabled—as many other disabled have people said, we always seem to find each other!). My life is undoubtedly richer for having discovered SF (both the good and the bad).

I’m constantly awed by the power of SF to bring ideas and people together, both in online spaces and in the physical world. Accessing the Future, the disability-themed short story anthology I co-edited with Djibril al-Ayad, would never had happened if Twitter hadn’t brought us together over tweets about feminist cyberpunk. When I attended the Worldcon in Reno I didn’t know anybody in fandom—after a random hallway conversation about feminist SF, I ended up meeting several amazing authors who quickly gave me the lowdown on how to navigate cons, recommended new books to read, and perhaps most importantly, encouraged me to pursue my own work in SF. While I have learned that I don’t do well at large cons, I’ve become good friends with some of those awesome people, and we now support one another through email, Skype, and snail-mail letters.

This is why movements like #accessiblecons matter, why projects like Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction matter. Disabled people have always been a part of the SF/F community. Despite barriers (both cultural and environmental), disabled authors and fans have showed up and pitched in. One of the key rallying cries of disability activism is the recognition and celebration of interdependence (not independence) because no one truly survives by their own labour and effort (think about the roads you use to get around, the food you eat, or the electricity that powers your house—these are organized communal works). Disability is not something new to SF but it is something that needs better accommodations at cons and better representation in its narratives.

SF is a testing ground of possibility as it reflects what (and who) we think is important today. For this reason, I particularly dislike SF narratives that erase disability in future worlds (usually through genetic engineering or other invasive medical procedures). The message such stories tell us is clear: the future is not for you because you shouldn’t even exist now. That hurts. As well, because there will always be people with different levels of ability, such visions of the future are unrealistic. It is important that we talk openly about disability and make sure that disabled people are involved in the conversation. Disability is not a one-size fits all identity, and disabled people experience varying types of barriers and privileges that intersect with race, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality. There are still so many stories about disability to tell in SF!

The stories I long to see should not only reflect me, they should reflect the disabled people I know and love as well. I want characters who use canes, who are neuroatypical, who carefully measure out their energy, who need to check the menu for allergens, who take multiple medications—and I want these characters to be as diverse as the world’s population is today. I want utopias that include disability in all its forms (because if we can imagine a world like Zootopia, where animals of all sizes and from all biomes live together, then surely we can imagine some equally amazing adaptive cities for people). I want to watch SF films where disabled characters are three-dimensional and played by disabled actors. These types of stories are wanted and needed. Because representation matters.

Feeling like you belong to a community, or at least feeling like you have a community to go to when you are up for doing so, is important. Both in the real world spaces of today and in the far flung futures of our imaginations, I believe that SF can be this place.

© 2018 by Kathryn Allan

Kathryn Allan is editor of the academic collection, Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, co-editor (with Djibril al-Ayad) of Accessing the Future (a disability-themed SF anthology), and the inaugural recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship. Her creative writing has appeared in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Remixt Magazine, and Strange Horizons. She is currently working on a book that explores the connections between disability studies theory and science fiction. Kathryn lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Constructing the Future
by Derek Newman-Stille, PhD (ABD)

As a young disabled person with a combination of learning disabilities, depression, anxiety, and a spinal injury, I looked out on my world and saw that it was a place that couldn’t fit me in—there were barriers to access everywhere and disability was seen as a problem, a fundamental lack of belonging rooted in the body. I thought to myself that the only way to envision a world where we could belong was through tales of imagination, a different world, a future world, a world that had changed in some fundamental way. I consumed science fiction and fantasy, trying to find my body in those pages, my reflection in paper and ink. I read works that claimed to be about otherness, about alien bodies, about mutants and cyborgs, but I kept realizing that these other bodies were believed to be more possible to represent than a disabled body.

Instead, I saw images of “the cure,” images of a future without accessible spaces, another absence, another space where bodies like mine couldn’t belong. It seemed like people couldn’t even imagine me into POSSIBLE worlds. Yet there was something there between the lines, a kernel of potential for imagining a different world of disabled access, a possibility for thinking of a reality that is different than this one; one where our bodies could speak back instead of being spoken for by doctors, family members, and public policy. SF held a potential for us to imagine differently, to envision something new. It could be a space where we disabled people speak to a society that seeks to silence us, and remind it that we can imagine otherwise, that we won’t be content with the ableist world that works so hard to convince us that “able-bodied” means “natural.” We could speak up through a genre that questions the whole idea of “natural” and “normal.”

We can feed that kernel of potential with OUR stories, since our world is storied, and most of those stories have been told to write us into one-dimensional characters. We can assert our three-dimensionality, our complexity, through our voices.

My early desire to see disability and science fiction come together has shaped my work in Disability Studies, which has focused primarily on representations of disability in Canadian SF. My colleagues in Disability Studies frequently ask me why I don’t focus on “something that matters,” like political policy or disability history, and I always find this question interesting. There is a forgetfulness on the part of a lot of Disability Studies scholars of the fact that our imagination SHAPES our policies and we imagine those policies into the world. I focus on imaginative potentials around disability because this is where disability is shaped, forged, and built into existence. Disability is constructed through the gears of our thought processes about the body, through the wires that we connect to our views of normalcy, through the electrodes of our notions of independence. Disability is a machine that we build in our imagination and then send rolling out into the world, changing things as it goes, and yes, one of those things that the disability construction machine churns out is policy, shaped by all of the assumptions, ideas, perceptions, and biases that are fed into it.

SF may be seen as something fictional, imaginary, and insubstantial, but it, like the arts in general, has real effects on the world. It is a transformative genre and provides a space for ideological transformation, for the generation of new ideas that break down the idea of social norms. SF in its direction toward the ABnormal becomes a powerful space for challenging hierarchies that push only one way to be“normal” in our society.

My hope for science fiction to produce a new paradigm for looking at disability is partially shaped by the revolutionary texts that I have already encountered in science fiction, texts that have influenced new ideas like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which could arguably be an early science fiction text as well as an early commentary on disability with its presentation of a medically manufactured body that becomes a site of stigma and abjection), Ursula K LeGuinn’s Left Hand of Darkness (which critically questioned ideas of normativity and gendered expression), Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (which critically questioned the political relationship between power structures, our bodies, and our beliefs), George Orwell’s 1984 (which invited questions about the messages our media portrays to us and the power structures behind it), and, of course, Star Trek (inviting ideas of radical utopianism and suggesting that a non-capitalist system and a social system devoted to the desire to learn could be possible). Science fiction portrayed itself to me as a genre of ideas that had the potential to be unrestricted, yet I noticed that biases subtended these texts, whether produced by the authors, by reactions of the fans, by conservative publishers, and beliefs in the “unrelatable portrayal” that served to make only stories about straight, white, able-bodied cisgender male narratives canonical and perceived as the only “universal” stories. We still have a long way to go, but SF invites us to explore.

There are already steps toward these critical questions about disability in science fiction in anthologies like Accessing the Future (gathering together voices of disabled people to create SF tales of disability), The Sum of Us (an anthology complicating ideas of care and caregiving), Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn series (presenting the social changes that would occur in a world where half the population is blind), Tanya Huff’s novel Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (which features a protagonist with an intellectual disability who resists containment or control), Ada Hoffmann’s short story “You Have To Follow the Rules” (which transports the reader into a world where autism is the norm and asks us to reconsider how we codify rules of social interaction and privilege neurotypicality), and, even though it is horror, Todd Browning’s film Freaks, whose influence has been so powerful that it has meant that the film’s quote “one of us, one of us” has become a rallying call for radical inclusion of diverse bodies as well as a critical reaction to systems around us that portray our disabled bodies as spectacle. These works resist simplification and seek to invite questions rather than seeking to provide an answer. These works are vital first steps toward rethinking disability.

Many of us writing about disability are thriving at that vital intersection between critical explorations of images of disability, our own lived experience, and our desire to creatively produce change.

We have a space in SF to reclaim something that is important for people with disabilities—imagination. It is possible in SF to imagine otherwise, to think up new possibilities instead of closing them down by saying that they aren’t viable. Disabled people can reclaim our futures in the same way that we do everything in an ableist world—with vulnerability. We can wield our vulnerability as a tool for writing, bringing our readers on a journey into a space vulnerability with us where they can question the ableist apparatus around us.

© 2018 by Derek Newman-Stille, PhD (ABD)

Derek Newman-Stille is a queer, disabled, Canadian PhD student who teaches at Trent University. Derek is the 7 time Aurora Award-winning creator of the digital humanities project Speculating Canada and the creator of the website Dis(Abled) Embodiments. He has published in academic fora like Mosaic, The Canadian Fantastic in Focus, and Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings, and in public fora such as The Playground of Lost Toys and Accessing the Future. Derek combines art, academia, and activism in his work with disability.

Disabled or Just Broken?

by Jaime O. Mayer

Disability happened to me in an instant. One moment I was able, the next I was broken from the ribs on down, the result of a horrific car accident. But I was fortunate; I received excellent care from the first responders to my amazing surgical team to the dedicated physical therapy, occupational therapy, and nursing staff that comprised my caregivers for the three months I spent non-weightbearing. I was fortunate that most of my family survived, and that we had the love and support of many friends and our community. I was fortunate to have a body healthy enough that I recovered most of what I had lost.

Yet, that good fortune and my recovery is plagued by negative emotions. Frustration, because having been born able-bodied I can remember what I lost. Anger at what my body, as encouraging as its recovery has been, is no longer able to do. A sense of sadness, of loss, because the thing is I can’t really remember what it feels like to walk up the stairs without discomfort. It was through this able to broken to healed-but-never-the-same process that I connected with a character and fully felt like I saw a part of myself in a story.

As a reader, I first found Joe Abercrombie’s “The Blade Itself” and Inquisitor Sand dan Glokta when I was still able-bodied. I enjoyed the book and the character then, but it wasn’t until I came back to it as an able-turned-disabled person that I felt like I’d found someone I could relate to. Glokta’s morbid sense of humor, his bitterness both at himself and the world post-injury, the outbursts of anger, irrational as they are, and him not caring? That was me, especially in the early years after my accident when I was more inclined toward anger than annoyance. I bonded with Glokta all over again on the first page we meet him, in our shared loathing of stairs, our shared having taken for granted bodies that could skip up or down the damned omnipresent things without a second thought. “And down is worse than up, that’s the thing people never realize.” So, so true. He presents at first like he might fall into the “angry because I’m disabled” trope, but there’s more to the character than his disability, and his anger is multifaceted. He has good days and bad days (and he can’t be bothered to be your inspirational hero), with gallows humor to get him through. I recovered more than Glokta did, but the frustration when his body can’t do what he wants, the longing to be strong and able again, is a connection I don’t share with many characters.

But, I also feel guilt. I struggle with calling myself disabled, often defaulting to “less than abled.” Like I shouldn’t say I’m disabled anymore because in many ways I got better. My disability has become invisible over time as I’ve graduated from using mobility aids and the surgical scars are hidden beneath clothes. And, I’m glad; it’s easier to get around with both hands free and on my own two legs. I can hide my disability by avoiding situations where it would become noticeable. I can pass off my difficulty in kneeling or standing or sitting with bent legs for long periods of time by saying I have bad joints. That isn’t really a lie. But my experience is representative of only one side of disability, the acquired disability end, and I am only one person. The guilt I feel over calling myself disabled isn’t only a fear of rejection, but also a fear of appropriation because I do long for the things I’ve lost—to be able-bodied again. While that may not be unique to me, I struggle with wanting to tell my story while also respecting that the disabled community is not a monolith.

As a writer, the idea for “Contractual Obligations,” coming this year from Cast of Wonders, was born in those long months spent stuck in a bed, robbed of my independence, unable to get food or wash my hands or use a bathroom that wasn’t a bedpan. The story built itself during the nightly shots of blood thinner to stave off blood clots from my lack of movement. As I lay in bed, my legs strapped into a machine that bent my knees to break up scar tissue, the question “What would you do to get back your legs?” played in my head. It hounded me as I walked for the first time, hands gripping the parallel bars as my broken femurs and pelvis readjusted to my weight. While I went through basic balance exercises in PT and got annoyed because this shit used to be so easy, and realized that as great as my progress was I would never be who I was pre-accident. And thus, the story came to be. I wrote it and loved it because it was an outlet, but I worry because in a way it is also a cure narrative. At its heart it’s a story about an able-bodied person who doesn’t want to have changed, to feel less than what she was. In a sense, it is me.

© 2018 by Jaime O. Mayer

Jaime O. Mayer is a Korean American adoptee, tea drinker, and avid hobby collector living in the Seattle area with her husband and their two cats. Her fiction has appeared in Cast of Wonders and Cicada Magazine. You can find her online at jaimeomayer.com and on Twitter as @JaimeOMayer.

Now I Survive
by Jacqueline Bryk

“This visa is expired. Please step to the side.”

This could have been the opening to a spy thriller or a rollicking cyberpunk novel, full of chase scenes and neon lights. It certainly felt cyberpunk, being hustled back through the airport to a waiting taxi, surrounded by over-enthusiastic grifters and uncaring security guards. I cried in the cab on the way back to the apartment that was not in our name.

The year was 2016. My name was Jacqueline Bryk, and my boyfriend and I were being held under house arrest in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, for visa fraud.

Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the whole ordeal was that it wasn’t our fault. Our visas had been procured through a third party, who promised to handle everything. We were in China at the behest of my boyfriend’s employer, who wanted us to help set up an ESL tutoring business. The third party was supposed to be our local liaison. He abandon-ed us and went back to Guangzhou three weeks into the three months.

If I was a heroine in a fantasy novel, those threes would have meant something to me. We were on the 27th floor of our building. Three cubed. Three months in China. Three flights to catch there. Three hundred and twelve ESL instructional videos made. Three, three, three.

Phedre no Delaunay of Kushiel’s Dart might have found a universal cypher in those threes and made a key out of a hairpin to get herself out.

Tenar from The Earthsea Cycle would have seen it as an echo of her service to the nine Nameless Ones, and left that area as quickly as possible, resolving to never let them get a hold on her.

Hypatia Cade of The Ship Who Searched would have collected her things and flown herself and her partner out of imprisonment, without so much as a by-your-leave. Who would stop her?

I did none of these things. Instead, I floated along in my glass tower, and wept oceans while being shuttled in and out of holding cells, police stations, and government agencies for four days. It was 90 degrees the whole time, and the air smelled like vomit. My lungs were full of dust and tears. I am not a priestess or a changeling or an anguisette. I still have nightmares about that time, a year later. My therapist gave me a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, on top of my cyclic depression and overwhelming anxiety.

They were always there for me, though, these ladies and others of paper and ink. Even before China, I knew I could trust them. Tenar knew what I was going through, as a homeschooled Catholic child, constantly being pressured to represent an unstable family life with courtesy, dignity, and silence. She would not have told me what I was going through wasn’t “real abuse” just because her jailers were dark gods and not sneering parents. Phedre was there for me after both of my sexual assaults, reminding me that I was allowed to be terrified and hurt, but also have a healthy romantic life while in recovery. I was never kidnapped by a Viking overlord or the megalomaniacal god-king of darkness, but being violated by people I trusted was scarring just the same.

Hypatia lost her body to a debilitating illness, but became a cutting-edge interstellar spacecraft instead. She could have chosen to merely survive, but she thrived. Her disability changed her, but did not define her entire being. She was a brainship, but a brainship who liked to play chess and study artifacts and crush on her human partner, Alex. In the same way, I have a mental illness that knocks me out of “normal” human life in some ways—but that doesn’t mean I am no longer human.

I was scared once, but I am not dead.

Now I survive, but not alone.

These worlds are always there for me. These characters are always there for me.

“You’re safe,” they say. “We understand. We went through the same things and we survived. Now it’s your turn.”

Now it’s my turn.

Now I survive.

© 2018 by Jacqueline Bryk

Jacqueline “Jax” Bryk is a freelance writer and game designer from Delaware. She is no stranger to sci-fi and fantasy fiction, though she mostly designs analog games. She was a featured guest at BreakoutCon 2017 and 2018 and won the Golden Cobra Award for game design in 2016. Jacqueline has written for White Wolf, Onyx Path Publishing, Helmgast AB, Galileo Games, Growling Door Games. and Damocles Thread Development. In her spare time, she likes to yell at games like Civilization V and Crusader Kings II, model for photographers and visual artists, avoid arguments about politics, and attempt recipes she saw on Iron Chef America once. You can find her work, both self-published and freelance, at http://drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?keywords=&author=Jacqueline+Bryk

Instant Demotion in Respectability
by Bogi Takács

Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction will focus on making our work as disabled creators public. But what is it like to be disabled in public? In my experience it can be quite different from country to country, and also relate to how you present yourself, both online and offline.

I am autistic and also have mobility issues—some related to motor dyspraxia, others to a rare chronic illness. My mobility can vary quite a bit.

Last week I was trying to board a train home from a conference. This round trip was my first experience with trains in the US. The trains usually do not go where I need to go, but this time I got lucky.

There was a priority boarding lane for disabled people and seniors! I was really enthused, because I was in a lot of pain, my legs were stiff, and I was walking with a cane. I got in line… and promptly got shooed out by another passenger, an elderly white man in a cowboy hat, for not being a senior. I was trying to ask the person in charge of boarding if disabled people could in fact stand in this line. I am short and many tall Americans were standing in front of me. The person yelled “Seniors boarding!” She did not hear me.

Did she?

I stood back and waited in the regular boarding line. And waited. And waited, leaning on my cane. When the line started moving, I lost my balance and fell. Another white man helped me up and then told me he absolutely must go in front of me because his kids are boarding.

I have a lot of experience falling due to dyspraxia, so I only scraped my elbow. I was still upset. To top it all off, the train company apologized to my spouse complaining on Twitter, but not to me. (My spouse is also disabled, but this was not apparent from context.) As a disabled person, I could readily be ignored—and this is what I experience when I talk online about being disabled as well.

When I say something about disability with sufficient confidence, I often get treated as an authority; especially since I’m in academia. Whenever I add that I myself am disabled, the conversation frequently veers off track. I get ignored, shunted aside, even when I’m not explicitly dismissed. In my experience, this happens especially frequently related to autism, but it can definitely apply to other kinds of disabilities or chronic illnesses as well.

This kind of ignoring feels as if a sound-blocking (tweet-blocking? social-media-post-blocking?) cone of invisibility has suddenly descended on my head. I can say what I want, but the other side will not listen. I can wave my arms, but they will not see me. I am no longer that pristine authority; I am unfavorably biased by virtue of my existence. Instant demotion in respectability.

It’s not just about a train ride. I get this muffling experience in SF/F spaces too, which are where I primarily hang out online and occasionally offline. I get it when it comes to my writing, which is varied and sometimes about disability, sometimes not—sometimes about my other minority groups, sometimes not. Often, the only people who respond to disability-related tweets, blog posts, and stories are themselves also disabled. Disability inspires aversion from the non-disabled population. It elicits a turning away. When I want to promote something disability-relevant in SF/F spaces, it feels quite similar to standing at the back of the boarding line and waving and yelling to get attention. Sometimes I give up, at least until the next “I’ve never heard a disabled person mention this!” How could we be easier to notice?

It’s not just about positive versus negative experiences—at first, I guessed that maybe because, for example, when I talk about queerness as a queer person, the topic is something fluffy and cheerful, whereas disability is usually annoying or painful? But even when I talk about the negative aspects of queerness, like institutional discrimination, I feel that outsiders and majority people listen more than when I talk about disability. Even the positive aspects of disability. I have multiple marginalizations, and people can react to me quite differently based on which of them are foregrounded at any given moment. In my experience, disability ranks quite low on the respectability scale.

Now that a whole bunch of disabled people are going to vehemently destroy science fiction, maybe there is going to be some kind of interruption. Maybe the muffling cone will lift for a bit. At the very least, we will be able to have more discussions about disability where disabled people are going to set the tone, the topics, and the context.

I don’t think the muffling will end. It is on every single person to stop it. Communication is a choice that is recreated in every moment, every interaction. The best I can hope for is a slow, slow improvement—both inside SF/F and outside it. And then maybe one day I will get through a train ride without having to choose between yelling or falling on my face.

© 2018 by Bogi Takács

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or singular they pronouns) currently living in the US with eir family and a congregation of books. Bogi writes, reviews and edits speculative fiction, and has won the Lambda Award in 2018 for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (also a Locus award finalist book). Bogi is also a finalist for the Hugo Award in 2018 in the Best Fan Writer category. You can find em at Bogi Reads the World, and on Twitter and Patreon as @bogiperson.

Being Invisible
by Joyce Chng

“The Lessons of the Moon” (published in Accessing The Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction, edited by Djibril al-Ayad and Kathryn Allan) is in part a story about me and my body. How I coped with loss and disappointment, and the realization that I am disabled. I wrote a protagonist who chooses, in their pain, to become an alien-destroying machine. Part of me yearned so much to be a cyborg or a machine, because my physical body seemed (seems) to be failing me.

I have an invisible disability. No, let’s make that “invisible disabilities.” I pass as normal/able-bodied, but I will let you in on a secret: I was diagnosed with hypertension when I was sixteen. Since then, I have been on anti-hypertension medication. Because of my hypertension, my two pregnancies were “high risk,” coupled with placenta previa. Because of the trauma from my first pregnancy, I also became depressed.

When I was about 39-40, I had granulomatous mastitis which is basically non-cancerous growth in my breast. I was put on steroids by my surgeon. There began the slow, painful, and exhausting healing/recovery process which wreaked havoc on my body, both physically and emotionally. Because of the steroids, I was advised to go off on my anti-depressants. That was not fun.

And because of the prolonged medication, I now have mild fatty liver which I am told is reversible with a strict (read “restricted”) diet. Steroids and painkillers, thanks. `

So, my disabilities are invisible. They are also chronic illnesses I have to deal with for the rest of my life. When I was younger, still shocked by the diagnosis of hypertension, I thought I was truly hampered by this illness. I was weak. Why me? Why now? Why these limits? Why am I trapped within this failing chunk of flesh? It didn’t help that the incredibly sensitive and tactful specialist (not) told me, point blank, that I might just stroke out and die.

Well done, sir. You just frightened a teenager shitless with their future right before them. I changed specialists. My new doctor didn’t have the manners of a brick. I stopped taking bad medical advice, took up tennis, and grew confident. I wrote in school publications. I was happy. I took my medications. I didn’t stroke out. I simply learned to live with the new limits of my body.

Most people who meet me will never know how firm or sudden those limits can be, especially when I’m experiencing a bout of fatigue. When I was recovering from granulomatous mastitis, I struggled with bone-deep fatigue when trying to teach at the same time. I would be writing my lesson plans, teaching 14-year-olds in the morning, and the bone-deep fatigue would remind me about my limits. I would go home by the end of the school day, my body feeling hollowed-out. There were good and bad days. I cherished the good days and loathed the bad days because bad days meant I am not productive, I can’t write, I can’t live normally. I was just blah. My breast surgeon laughed when I told him about this and said that I was his first patient who experienced all the bad side-effects. I was not amused. I did get better. For now, I have annual mammograms done and a yearly appointment to see him.

The hypertension is still there, like a caged and tamed beast. Somnolent and subdued by the meds at most times, I have to watch it lest it bare its fangs and claws.

Part of myself coping with all this came out when I wrote “The Lessons of the Moon” My frustration and sadness wove into the story. I hated my body. I still tear up when I think about the writing process for the story. In fact, I wrote the poem on the day I had my biopsy done. My left breast burned as if it was on fire. The local anesthesia didn’t work. My breast tissue was just too inflamed, according to the surgeon. She was very kind and understanding. After the biopsy, I went to my parents’ to recuperate. In the silence of my dad’s study room, I wrote. In the rest of the story that followed, the pain and disappointment throbbed as undercurrents. As an alien-killing machine, the protagonist is finally free… or are they? Have they made the right choice? Having a cyborg body is tempting, immensely so. Yet, is being part-machine or all-machine the best solution to my problems? Will all my illnesses go away?

It will come back, my breast surgeon reminded me. It will come back. It’s just hiding now, like the hypertension. Cowed, but defiantly clinging on.

My disabilities are invisible. In my country, they are not even considered disabilities. Just chronic and auto-immune illnesses to be managed by healthcare providers. Healthcare’s getting more expensive too. I can’t help but wonder if I’m now a liability in the long run. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Rheumatoid arthritis. They just keep on piling up.

My wish is that people with invisible disabilities would speak up more. We pass as able-bodied. Our bodies remind us otherwise that we are not. Writing “The Lessons of the Moon” taught me that we need to have more SF/F stories about disability, especially invisible disabilities. The story contains my silent anxiety about having an invisible illness which doesn’t really go away, but will only deteriorate over time. May genre fiction hear more of our voices.

© 2018 by Joyce Chng

Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Her fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Her alter-ego is J. Damask. Joyce’s pronouns are she/they.

Joyce Chng is Singaporean. She writes science fiction, YA and things in between. She can be found at @jolantru and A Wolf’s Tale.

We Are Not Your Backstories
by K. C. Alexander

( Content Note for discussion of self-harm and suicide.)

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley taught me that gangly, self-conscious girls could become heroes; not damsels, but knights and dragon slayers. Robert Heinlein’s Friday introduced me to pansexuality, sex without shame, and the joy of multiple partners.

Like most, I discovered myself through the role models I had been given. In my majority heterosexual and extremely patriarchal world, few seemed like safe harbors. I felt abnormal. I wasn’t what everyone wanted me to be, and I was miserable when I tried. So when I read characters that didn’t just feel like me but also achieved their goals while remaining happily divergent, I felt like I’d been thrown a lifeline I hadn’t realized I needed.

I wanted to be strong like Aerin. I wanted to be free like Friday.

All I had to do was grow up, goals firmly in sight.

I had no role model for the largest obstacle I’d face next.

Puberty unleashed wild swings I couldn’t understand. Depression set in, getting worse every year. Reading, always my escapism of choice, kept me distracted from the world. Sometimes, I found Aerins or Fridays, characters who took parts of me and reminded me that Yes! I could! But somehow, those stories served only those pieces already self-aware, and left the greater whole of me feeling more alone than ever after. I’d wanted so badly to seize my world the way the protagonists I’d read about had, and I couldn’t. I hated myself so much. I was a failure, broken somehow.

I cut myself because numbness followed the pain; a sharp sting followed by a second of relief. In only a couple days, I’d bounce into manic productivity and finish projects, start new ones, ignore food and sleep until I crashed back into bleak depression again.

I had no control. I grew up, I became an adult, and every year, I lost a little more hope. A little more will to keep trying.

I’d never be Aerin. I’d never be Friday. I’d never be any of the protagonists I admired so much. I couldn’t cope.

It took thirty-four years and a suicide plan to understand just how desperate I was. With the last of my strength, I made an appointment with a psychiatrist.

Being diagnosed with Type II Bipolar Disorder felt like both a relief and an anchor. I was scared. As abnormal as I’d always thought. I’d never read about it in a book, had never seen it on the screen. How was I supposed to go about living with this? Research told me I’d be okay if I was careful, but I stood alone in my world and knew the monsters would come for me again.

When a real world role model appeared in that isolated existence, I thought I’d found the mental version of Aerin and Friday. Somebody who paved the way in the dark.

The late Carrie Fisher, a determined advocate for mental health awareness, became my light. Her open struggles and visible triumphs kindled a new hope that maybe I could be as brave and candid as she had been. I wish I’d learned about her sooner. Not as Leia, the princess, but as the real life warrior she was outside the role that branded her.

Why did I have to wait so long? In fiction, I’d learned about sex, violence, cultures, religions, genocide, solar systems, and stars, but had never seen my own disability. Why?

Science fiction shapes generations—how we think, the way we act. It influences the careers we choose and our thirst for knowledge. It cautions against the worst of our impulses, and quietly teaches us empathy. Without knowing it, we are slowly acclimated to people and beliefs that live outside our rigid monocultures.

A genre that was once the domain of white men has become the forefront of a battlefield for representation—queer folx, people of color, women, and more. Every day, new books and new characters that reflect the world we live in are released. New authors delve into centuries old topics blatantly whitewashed by the aging white genre, no longer confined to the old guard’s self-prescribed limitations.

We have come so far, and we fight so hard. But we have so much more to share, a whole other curtain to peel back.

Neurodivergent communities exist, but we are excluded from the stories authors and screenwriters tell. So many of us are outspoken—and judging by the amount of shares and retweets and comments we get, we are heard.

So when do we get to fly the Millennium Falcon?

Mental illness is so often invisible. We may have service dogs to help us, caretakers to mind us, medication to keep us as stable as possible, but we are still worthy of our place in the future. More, we are worthy of our starring roles rather than relegated to the role of plot device, or a footnote to another protagonist’s journey. Today, in the rare case a neurodivergent character is included, we serve as movable pieces in the service of somebody else’s agency. The new damsels, the ongoing villains. We are incarcerated, or we are fixed.

It’s bullshit. I am no damsel and if I am a villain, it’s sure as hell not because I’m “crazy.” I refuse to be your reason for striving. After thirty odd years of struggling to live, after a year of working my ass off to be the strong person I have more than proven that I am, I deserve better. We are all real people, and we are capable. Neurodivergent characters can colonize Mars, explore new worlds, seduce aliens, and live with our disability. Every single one of us battling our internal, invisible monsters are goddamn heroes.

People like Carrie, loud and proud, deserve to be written. Her efforts put mental health awareness in the spotlight, and I’ll be damned if we let that fade back into the dark. Characters like us, fighting every day, need to be read.

How do we do it?

The same way we have torn holes in the bigoted boundaries of race and color and sexuality. Slowly, surely, we write the stories that reflect the world we live in, and publishers determined to make the changes we need acquire them. Publish them. Market them.

Together, we have destroyed the common narrative. Queers have destroyed it. People of color have destroyed it. Women destroy it.

Now, neurodivergency is seizing its rightful place in the future.

We are not your platforms, your aliens, your Other. We are the sum of our whole, invisible disability and all, and we are not damsels. I am an incredible story. We deserve our incredible stories.

So get out there and tell them. Buy them. Publish them.

Read them.

The genre can accept us or it can be dragged, bloody and screaming, into enlightenment. We aren’t going away. We’re just going to get louder and louder, linking elbows with our compatriots in the battle for representation.

One industry. One world. One book at a time.

So very many readers.

© 2018 by K. C. Alexander

K. C. Alexander is the author of Necrotech—a transhumanist sci-fi called “a speed freak rush” by NYT bestseller Richard Kadrey and “a violent thrillride” by award-nominated Stephen Blackmoore. She co-wrote Mass Effect: Andromeda: Nexus Uprising with NYT bestseller Jason M. Hough, Bioware’s first novelization for Mass Effect: Andromeda. Other credits consist of short stories to Fireside magazine and a contribution to Geeky Giving. Specialties include voice-driven prose, imperfect characters, and reckless profanity. Also, creative ways to murder the deserving—in fiction. Probably.

She champions mental health awareness and prefers animals to people. And she writes anything she wants to.

Disabled Enough
by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

The other day, someone asked me if I felt like I “count” as disabled. A lot of people don’t. A lot of people feel like they aren’t disabled “enough” to claim crip, to claim disability, to claim party to this community, to this issue, to this world.

I said yes.

Not everyone would agree with me, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

We are enough. You, me, all of us.

We are disabled enough.

People have been asking us if they qualify to write for Disabled People Destroy, if their perspective has value, if their disability counts for qualification.

We talked a lot about this before the Kickstarter, and I’m sure we’ll continue to reassure people after it ends in a few days.

But you are enough.

Disability is not a one stop shop for definitions. Partially blind or fully blind. Visibly disabled or invisibly disabled. Any form of disability at all.

The only restrictions we have are these:

Are you currently disabled? If you are, then you can submit.

Do you consider yourself disabled? Great. You can submit.

That’s it.

There’s no test to pass, though you’re welcome to tell us about who you are and what your disability is in your cover letter. There’s no kind of disability that we’re limiting it to. We want your stories, your perspectives, your opinions. Dominik and I are not waiting here with a list of who can and cannot submit, of what does or doesn’t count.

Because the only person, at the end of the day, who can make the decision of if you should or shouldn’t submit is YOU.

Ableism likes to tell us that there’s only one thing that disability looks like, that there’s only one way to be disabled. It has lots of definitions, lots of arguments for who “gets” to be disabled. It’s one of the ways in which ableism functions, to keep us apart, to keep us squabbling over who gets a pass into the disabled community.

I’m not going to look at the submissions and ask questions. I don’t have a checklist. I don’t have an agenda. What I have is a goal to share as many stories as possible.

So, when we open for submissions in 2018, don’t let ableism tell you whether or not you can submit. Tell YOURSELF that you can.

© 2018 by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a deafblind speculative fiction writer and editor. Her nonfiction work can be found in The Boston Globe, Fireside, Uncanny, and Tor.com. She is the managing editor of Hugo Finalist magazine Fireside. She holds an MA in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College. When not working, she can be found volunteering for disability justice at the grassroots level. She lives in New Jersey.

Malfunctioning Space Stations
by Marissa Lingen

I dream of malfunctioning space stations.

They pitch and yaw wildly; the artificial gravity works sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. It cuts in and out at unpredictable intervals and smashes me into the deck. I float back up, I am weightless. I am slammed into the ceiling. It is my job to fix it, and I can’t even strap myself in to stay safe. I have no helmet, no knee or elbow pads. I am covered in bruises from the falls, and my muscles are wrenched from trying to reorient into some semblance of upright.

I get glimpses of stars and planets out the viewing windows, sometimes. Sometimes there are no viewing windows. Sometimes I’m in an interior room, metallic and futuristic, and it is a future that does not work.

I have a major balance disorder. When I am awake and able to use all my senses, I can reason out the vertical. If you make me close my eyes, I can still get it to within about five degrees of the correct answer if I’m sitting still on a firm surface. If I’ve got a squishy surface, motion, or other things confusing my senses, doubtful. Asleep? All bets are off. I literally do not know which way is up.

Since I have read and written science fiction for decades, what my sleeping brain knows to do with this much disorientation is to process it into a malfunctioning space station. And so I dream. Occasionally my dreams veer into carnival rides, roller coasters, giant swooping swings. But that is someone else’s genre. This is mine.

For the people who read about a malfunctioning space station, or who watch it in a movie, it is thrilling. It is an adventure. For people who live on a space station, it is not thrilling. It is terrifying, but it is also eventually tedious. Oops, another lurch, unpredictably timed but basically like the last one. Ouch, crunch, another slam into the bulkhead or the corner of the bunk. A bruise this time? A cut, a broken bone? Today when gravity reversed itself, I cut my foot. No broken bones, no difficulty walking. I give this day a 3 out of 10, a pretty good day, but always leaves room for much worse.

And when I tell these stories, I walk the line between making them interesting, funny, engaging for the able-bodied reader—between the thrilling malfunctioning space station—and keeping them real. Making the able-bodied reader understand that it is not thrilling for me—that scary, painful, and frustrating can also be pretty boring—without making them bored and having them wander off.

Which they do.

Often preemptively.

When my world goes wrong, I turn to science fiction. Science fiction doesn’t turn to me. I imagine futures where things are different. I spend a lot of my time imagining futures where things are better. But most of the time science fiction doesn’t return the favor. It doesn’t imagine improved technology for people like me; it certainly doesn’t imagine us doing the improving. It imagines people like me invisible, not present at all. I have never seen a character with a balance disorder in a story until I wrote one myself. That was in 2017. It’s not in print. (Stay tuned, I guess?) And while I occasionally get another disabled person to identify with around the peripheries, we’re too few, too far between. Miles Vorkosigan’s energy may be vast, but he can only take us so far.

When it comes to my story, to the stories of people like me, science fiction got bored and wandered off preemptively. We are literally not worth talking about. Our limits are decided for us: you can’t do that, you couldn’t handle it, you’re too broken, the future isn’t about you, you aren’t in this story.

I’m not so sure about that. I know space stations better than you do, kid. I can fix this thing in my sleep.

All of the other Destroy anthologies have been about this very same theme: here is a crew member you’ve been forgetting, and they have an angle on what is going wrong here. The anthologies are called Destroy, but they have a skillset to rebuild. They see the pieces you weren’t seeing before. Well, disabled people have that skillset too.

We know how to think three-dimensionally, we who have to navigate the world with hand-holds already. We who have had to juggle a bathroom hand dryer and a cane. We who couldn’t reach the hand dryer because we were looking at it a little further down than you from our chairs. We can see where you built your space elevator wrong from this angle. We notice that you’ve arranged emergency klaxons that will leave the deaf crew members on your ship vulnerable; that your solar-powered vehicles won’t fit a solar-powered wheelchair; that someone is likely to be allergic to your “universal” new pressed lichen snacks.

The space station that is science fiction has been broken for years now. It hurts as we get ignored and stereotyped and bumped around, and I know you thought you were going to get by with one guy with a banana clip over his eyes as the only disabled person in it with you. But you need the rest of us. We’re the ones who know what it’s like. We’ve been dreaming this all along, and we can help you fix it. We may be the only ones who can.

© 2018 by Marissa Lingen

Marissa Lingen is among the top science fiction and fantasy writers in the world who were named after fruit. She has many opinions on Moomintrolls. She has been known to cross international borders in search of rare tisanes. Her personal relationships with bodies of water are intense though eccentric. She lives atop the oldest bedrock in the US with two large men and one small dog, where she writes, if not daily, frequently.

BFFs in the Apocalypse
by John Wiswell

The ableist world would like us to feel alone. At fourteen years old, recovering from massive medical malpractice and teaching myself to walk again, school was Hell. I was mocked, had my books thrown, and when I staggered, boys would often “bump” me to try to topple me over. It’s easy to think I was always alone, but there was a boy with acromegaly, 6’4” at fourteen years old, who would walk with me to ward away the abusers. There was an autistic girl who couldn’t follow some lessons in Math class, so we hung out in our free period and I shared my notes with her. Disabled people have a knack for finding each other.

Being a disabled character is lonelier than being a real person. The disabled hero is too often alien in their home town, surrounded by non-disabled antagonists and admirers. Quasimodo fixates on Esmerelda. Barbara Gordon was an excellent character as Oracle, but she rarely shared stories with any other disabled characters—except possibly the insane villains she directed heroes to punch.

I grew up starving for the communities I knew to circulate through fantasy and science fiction, and instead found entire publishing catalogs full of books where never so many as two disabled characters were in the same scene. As is the way, I gradually thought I was weird for wanting it. When you don’t know better, you learn to self-shame.

And that’s one of the reasons Stephen King’s The Stand means so much to me.

After a super flu kills most of the population, Nick Andros looks like he’s going to be spectacularly lonely. He is deaf and non-verbal, and knows so few people who care about ASL that he carries a notepad to simply write to them. As other main characters meet each other on the road, it’s clear he’s destined to converge with them as the book’s token disabled guy.

But on the road, Nick runs into Tom Cullen—literally, almost running him over with his bicycle. At first, they’re overjoyed to see another living person. Tom has a cognitive disability (the description of which has aged terribly since 1978), and can’t read Nick’s notes.

I remember tensing up in my chair as Tom grew angry, believing Nick was making fun of him.

Then in a moment of particularly King-ish irony, Tom uses an ableist insult he’s heard all his life: “What are you, anyway, deaf?”

It was one of those moments we all have, when we realize what an idiom means and regret it. For Tom, it gave him a revelation. What he was missing clicked.

Immediately the two adapted to each other. Tom stayed in Nick’s line of sight for lip reading. When Tom needed medicine, Nick read the labels. And when Tom couldn’t ride the bike Nick owned, Nick didn’t leave him behind—the two just hunted down a simpler model that Tom could use.

It took Nick a while to successfully invite Tom to come with him, but the moment when Tom realized his new (and only) friend wanted him to partake in this odyssey across America, was tremendously sweet. They look out for each other long after they find a haven. They become BFFs in a world where most friendships are dead.

It’s what I would have done. Many of the disabled friends I had when I first read The Stand are now dead, and when I re-read those parts, it feels like a memorial to our bonds. On some particularly gloomy nights, I re-read my copy and imagine pedaling alongside Tom and Nick.

Some of the disability rep in The Stand is dreadful, but that’s why we need more stories. There have been too few such friendships in speculative fiction in the nearly forty years since The Stand became a classic. Especially in our beautiful Genre of Ideas, where we seek to explore everything in the human condition, the friendships of the disabled should flourish. We should not be alone in our stories.

© 2018 by John Wiswell

John (@wiswell) is a writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He has been disabled his entire adult life following medical malpractice at age thirteen. His work has also appeared at Fireside Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Robot Dinosaurs, Podcastle, and Pseudopod. As a child, the realization that The Iliad was a Greek Infinity Gauntlet crossover was what got him to jump to grown-up books. He’s eternally grateful to both Homer and Jim Starlin.

Why I Limp
by Dilman Dila

I don’t know what it is. When I was younger, I was made to believe it was polio, and then I met survivors of that disease and it put doubts in me. Now, I think maybe it’s clubfoot. I could ask my mother, but then, I don’t have the urge to find out. I don’t want to know if I was born like this, or if it came after I fell sick, because in my dreams I don’t have a disability. I have a “normal” body. I run. I walk without a limp. I play soccer. My ankle is not twisted and looking swollen, my toes do not face downward.

Often, I’m surprised when someone asks me, “Why are you limping?” I never know how to respond, for in my head, I don’t limp. Maybe because it is only a slight limp, often noticeable when I’m really tired. But mostly because from a young age, I was treated with ambivalence. While they saw I was different, they compared me to those who used wheelchairs, or crutches, or leg braces, and they would say, “You are not really lame.” They would look at people without limbs, at those who have to crawl, and would tell me, “You are lucky.” Maybe this stuck and makes me think I’m not really disabled. One incident that still haunts me happened at school. Those with disabilities didn’t have to queue for food. I walked into the dining and went straight to the counter, but a prefect stopped me, saying; “You are pretending to be disabled so you can jump the queue.” Many people laughed. Some who knew me came to my side, and the prefect, not convinced, asked me to walk so he could decide if I was faking it. The humiliation still burns me.

I used to think that this kind of background made me see myself, in my dreams, as not disabled. Then I went to Nepal and met a young, blind woman, Sristi. She told me that she saw me in her dream and that I did not have a beard. I was puzzled. “Do you see in your dreams?” I asked her, and she replied, “Yes.” I’ve not researched how people with disabilities see themselves in dreams, but meeting Sristi made me wonder if our brains are hardwired to see ourselves in a certain way, no matter how sickness or unfortunate circumstances have transformed our bodies.

How I wished society would see it this way too, but it does not, and growing up, for me, was hell. The stares made me feel horrible. I sometimes still hear the laughter, often from my own brothers who were ashamed of me. It still stabs deep, creating wounds that refuse to heal. And then there was the isolation, being made to feel unwanted, a burden. Useless. At that time in the 80s, my country was in a fragile place, with war threatening to break out anytime. “How will you run when fighting starts?” they would ask me. “We shall leave you behind.” Today, I flinch every time I see conflict in the news. I hear about war refugees and I wonder how those with disabilities made it out, if they ever made it out.

By the time I was fifteen years old, I was a loner, always buried in a novel. One I remember too well was The Stand, by Stephen King, which I read at about thirteen. It frightened me, mostly because it was set in a post-apocalyptic world, something that could have happened to my town, not through a flu, but through war. I imagined myself left behind, and having to walk miles and miles and miles. Alone.

Around this time, I started to write. Stories always made me feel good, and writing them gave me a purpose in life, a future to look forward to. I soon ran away from home to take my book to a publisher in Nairobi. I thought the publisher would instantly fall in love with my book, and give me a lot of money, and that would solve all my problems. It did not turn out like that. On returning home, I found my family panicked and furious. I wrote my mother a letter, trying to explain why I ran away, why I desperately wanted to be published. I mentioned something about suicide, which I insisted I wouldn’t think about because “…in this useless body of mine, I’ve discovered something useful…” I don’t know what else I wrote in that letter, but that phrase stuck. I put in “useless,” not because it is how I felt about my body, but because my mother had used it when describing me to one of her friends.

I don’t think I ever felt useless. While in my dreams I did not see myself as disabled, in my daydreams I saw myself as worthier than everyone around me. I saw myself as a king of sorts, as a superhero, as a boy full of secret powers. Soon, some people started to whisper that I was unstable, for I daydreamed a lot. Maybe too much. One day one of my brothers reported me to the rest, saying, “I saw Dilman walking in the market. He had a gait as if he owned the whole town.” I believe I built for myself secret worlds in my subconscious, where I gave myself new identities, a new kind of living, and I brought that world to life when I started to write. I wanted to change the world’s perception about me. I wanted them to stop seeing me as a limping creature. I wanted them to see me as I saw myself in my dreams, as I imagined myself in my daydreams.

And yet, I almost never wrote about characters with a physical disability. It happened only twice in novels. Both have never gotten published.

Then, sometime in 2015, I met a girl. “You are Dilman Dila!” she squealed. I’m not a celebrity. I think the little success I’ve had has pushed my name out there, but the way this girl behaved, you’d think she had run into Brad Pitt. She had read all my published works, seen all my films. We dated for a few months. Then one day we went to a movie, and the elevator was broken, so we had to use the stairs. I hate stairs! At the top, she looked at me with a frown and asked, “Why are you limping?” I was a speechless for a few seconds, but then, I told her, “I’ve always limped,” and she said, “Why did you hide it from me?”

I didn’t know how to respond. She had called me a liar and I just did not know what to say to defend myself. We watched the movie, an awkward silence between us, and she ghosted me after that night.

I keep turning her question in my mind. Why did you hide it from me? Did she mean Why do you never write about protagonists with disabilities? Her question bothers me, makes me wonder: If she saw disabled people in my stories, would she have been upset on finding out that I limp?

Maybe, I told myself, the reason I had a hellish childhood was because my society had been conditioned to think people with disabilities are useless, or cursed, or bearing crimes from past lives, or are evil. It’s not only Hollywood and Western literature that paints disabled people as the bad guys. Growing up, I kept hearing this comment: “God knew you would have been dangerous, so he made you lame to control you.” This realization put a burden on me. I don’t want to be a spokesperson, nor do I want all my stories to have only protagonists with disabilities, but I know stories have the power to change society, and I want society to change its attitude towards people like me. I don’t want a girl to ghost me simply because I limp. I don’t want a family to reject a child simply because the child has a disability.

So early in 2016 I wrote my first short story with such a disabled protagonist. It got published a few weeks ago. The second short story came out in A World of Horror. Then, this year (2017), I started on a novel about a boy, Ocan, who uses a wheelchair, and whose parents leave him behind to die when war breaks out. He survives, and has to flee through a war-torn country, searching for somewhere to call a home. I wrote 120,000 words in about three months. It surprised me. I thought I’d written a pile of garbage for I had never managed that quantity in so short a time, especially as I had a lot of work and traveling. I sent the first few chapters to a publisher, and even before he finished reading the sample, he sent me a message saying, “Wow!” Though he agreed to publish it, I later withdrew it so as to finish it without the pressures of a publishing deadline.

It leaves me confused. Writing 120K words in three months can only mean that the story has been deep inside me all this time. I had never thought about Ocan, or his quest, until a day before I started writing, though that world is one of my favorite daydreams. Still, I daydream about many worlds which I’ve struggled to bring to life. So why did Ocan gush out like that? And once he is out, will people know me enough to stop asking that question: “Why do you limp?”

I don’t know if writing protagonists with disabilities is supposed to lead me to accept my body. The way I see myself in my dreams has not changed. The way I see myself in my daydreams has not changed. I still grit my teeth every time I face a flight of stairs. I still groan every time I have to walk up a long hill. I still shy away every time I meet a girl, for I imagine she’ll also take a look at my legs and flee. I don’t think I’ve ever rejected my body, nor seen myself as useless. Maybe I have and just don’t know it. Maybe I live in denial. Maybe it will take writing many more stories for me to accept my body. I don’t know. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing Ocan and I look forward to writing many more people like him.

© 2018 by Dilman Dila

Dilman Dila is a writer, filmmaker, and all-round storyteller. He is the author of A Killing in the Sun, a collection of short speculative stories, and two novellas. Among many accolades, he was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2013), longlisted for the BBC Radio International Playwriting Competition (2014), nominated for Best Novella at the Nommo Awards (2017), and he received an Iowa Writer’s Fellowship in 2017. His films include the masterpiece, What Happened in Room 13(2007), which has attracted over seven million online views, The Felistas Fable (2013), nominated for Best First Feature by a Director at the Africa Movie Academy Awards (2014) and winner of four major awards at the Uganda Film Festival (2014), and Her Broken Shadow (2017), a sci-fi set in futuristic Africa, which has screened in places like Durban International Film Festival and AFI Silver Theater.

Disability and Fiction
by Liana Brooks

I’m writing this in the corner of an empty house, my aging laptop propped up on a retired army duffle bag found at the surplus store. When Elsa reached out to me and asked if I could write an essay on disabilities and fiction I was elated (Uncanny Magazine is awesome and I’ve loved the Destroy series), but what quickly followed was doubt. I knew I was moving 3000 miles from Alaska to Washington, a move that would require writing in a corner waiting for furniture to arrive. But there were other doubts…

Am I disabled enough to tell this story?

Am I informed enough to speak for the three million people worldwide estimated to have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome?

Did I have a right to be in this anthology at all?

Welcome to the mind of someone who is invisible.

I was born with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and diagnosed before the symptoms were ever manifest. It’s an odd genetic quirk that affects the collagen (connective tissue) that makes up 90 percent of your body.

In my youth that meant being a little more flexible than others, in my twenties it meant having a little more joint damage, by my thirties it meant daily pain and dislocations. I became fluent in the language of Spoonies and Zebras, the people whose illnesses and conditions aren’t readily visible to the naked eye but who are nonetheless suffering from an invisible affliction.

Often, we become as invisible as our disorders. Washed out of life by waves of movies showing only the healthy, only the happy, only those who can fight through their pain to win the day. Unless, of course, we’re meant to be someone’s inspiration, a trope that makes me sharpen knives and smile in the darkness waiting to dance on its grave.

With these syndromes that people struggle to pronounce often come far more familiar words: depression, isolation, pain, loss, fatigue. We wake up in pain, crawl through our bad days, and fall back into the blankets at night with muscles burning and cheeks carved by tears. It hurts to live some days.

But, from the outside, people like me look healthy. We look abled. We look like someone who doesn’t need the disabled parking sticker, or a cane, or a wrist brace, or a cupboard full of pain killers.

When it comes to outreach we’re often cut from the narrative.

As a friend once pointed out, she could walk up the wheelchair ramp to a building just fine, the problem was she couldn’t open the door without dislocating her wrist. Everyone who saw her would see a healthy human being glaring at the door in frustration. No one would stop to think she was psyching herself up for the burst of pain that would come while she fervently hoped someone would open the door for her.

And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Someone to open the door for us so we are spared the pain? That’s what I want to do for other people.

Someone once said that the surest way to change the future was to create it. Nowhere is that idea truer than in fiction, especially science fiction. The worlds writers create, the ones readers are invited to inhabit, set the path for the future of humanity.

I’ve thought a lot about that over the years and how to introduce Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome into my fiction. It’s hard, in part because I write to escape but also because any good editor is going to flag Ehlers-Danlos symptoms as unrealistic. A disorder that cause chronic pain and is co-morbid with a gene deletion that makes pain medication useless, what are the odds of that happening? (Answer: way higher than I and everyone else immune to morphine want it to be.) Skin that can be cut by a washcloth? Shoulders that dislocate because gravity on Earth is too heavy? Skin pulling away from the human body and stretching for inches? None of that sounds plausible.

In fact, when I first wrote Ehlers-Danlos into a story I did it unwittingly. I was describing a moment of extreme anger and frustration for a character and I wrote about her clenching her fists so hard her palms bled.

My editor wrote back saying that simply wasn’t possible. The skin on the palm of the average human hand is pretty thick. It resists being cut. It’s Ehlers-Danlos skin, with the mutated collagen and bad connective tissue that slices easily. I’d given a character the body I knew because I didn’t realize it could be any other way.

I actually talked with my editor about taking the reference out, but left it in, unnamed but there for the readers like me. Because people like me deserve to see themselves as more than victims, or inspirational stories, or undesirable flotsam washed away by technology.

Now is our chance to put disabled people back in the narrative.

This is our shot to show the whole world what the universe looks like through the eyes of someone fighting an internal battle every day. Whether the struggle is depression, social anxiety, faulty genes, or broken limbs, everyone who falls under the huge umbrella term of Disabled deserves to see themselves not just as someone’s sidekick, but as the heroes of fiction. To see ourselves as royalty, space pilots, daring adventurers, dinosaur wranglers, protagonists, and villains.

What disabled people need is what everyone looking for good representation in fiction wants: not one perfect example of wholly inclusive rep, but many examples. I want to see disabled people occupying all the same human spaces that abled people are welcomed to occupy. That means disabled people of all colors, cultures, languages, and types living in fiction where disability is part of who they are and not their entire story.

© 2018 by Liana Brooks

Liana Brooks writes science fiction and sci-fi romance for people who like fast ships, big guns, witty one-liners, and happy endings. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, four kids, and giant mastiff puppy. When she isn’t writing she enjoys hiking in the redwoods, playing at the beach, and watching whales.

You can find Liana on the web at lianabrooks.com or on Twitter as @LianaBrooks.

The Only Thing Faster Than Tonight: Mr. Darkness
by Elise Matthesen

I’m going to explain about how A Wrinkle in Time gave me the title for this, but to get to that, I have to talk about imagination, about three things that got in my way when I tried to write this, and about inspiration. (I’m also going to yell at abled people a few times. If you’re abled, don’t worry, you’ll live through my yelling at you. If you’re disabled, feel free to make popcorn or your equivalent if doing so suits your needs.)

So, abled people. Hi! What can I tell you? What should I not tell you? What is forbidden? Can I tell you the things that might make you find me not such a sweet plucky cooperative good disabled person? Can I say that if there were a way to put some of you in a restriction box sometimes I’d do it? Confess that when you tell me how hard it is to have a disabled friend or lover I hate you, or hate that part of you at least, for a while?

I know one thing for sure. I won’t measure myself by you anymore.

I can’t measure my future by you, either. And I’m not leaving it in your keeping.

So let’s start with imagination.

Imagine me. I am disabled, so imagine me disabled. You can do it however you like. Choose your favorite template of disabled person. Then imagine me again, disabled differently. Then two or three more times. Blend multiple disabilities. Keep going. Does the space in your head where you keep templates of “disabled person” have as much room in it as the place you keep other templates?

I want disabled people in science fiction. Lots of us. All the templates and more. Infinite combinations. I want so many of us that we’re an unremarkable part of the situation. I want so many of us that nobody calls us “inspirational” anymore. I want us to be part of the general imagination.

Some days I am so weary of the way this genre is set up. This is a genre where a spaceship is glorious and a tiny hand-held computer is everyday technological magic, but a ramp is too fucking complicated to invent and install, and disabilities are too unimportant to think about with respect and empathy. (Let’s be honest, it’s the thinking about it with respect and empathy that seems to be most resented here.) Where the frack are the engineers who boldly go and boldly come back and boldly are fracking disabled right out here in public?

Make no mistake about this: disabled people are engineers. We have to be engineers because there are so damned many obstacles erected by you people between us and most of shared community life.

As for spaceships, there’s a mental image I keep close to my heart. I want to see a bunch of kids living on a ship, being home-schooled (ship-schooled?), using adaptive technology to contact Perkins for information on Annie Sullivan to write their essays for their history lessons. I shared this with a friend who works at Perkins when we were talking about accessibility and tools, and she liked it very much. She had told me, “In the 1830s, someone who was blind had to rely on what other people chose to make available, either by reading aloud or by using awkwardly large, expensive, and limited materials in embossed type. These days optical character recognition, refreshable braille displays, magnification software, and text-to-speech tools mean people can live, work, learn, and enjoy the world, following their own interests.” She works with deaf-blind researchers. They’re following their own interests, and I’m pretty sure those interests do not include being inspirational for able people. (I really REALLY want to see the Perkins Institute in space. I want the ship-schooled offspring of space-farers doing reports about Helen Keller’s Socialist writings and relating that to their own lives and disabilities, and writing about what’s different and what’s not.)

I’ve been having trouble writing this essay for two reasons. One reason is the festival of difficulty that chronic illnesses have made of my last two months, ranging from the recurring numbness and pain in my hands/arms to the nausea and increased pain levels, along with bonus brain fog. All of these things make everything take more time and cost more effort. The other reason, possibly the bigger reason, is that all of that makes it more difficult right now for me to achieve the upbeat, optimistic tone which is everyday survival equipment for so many of us disabled people.

Nobody likes an ungrateful cripple. But I’ve got to say that it’s hard work being inspirational for you all the time.

(If you’re a disabled person of color, that’s squared or cubed; if you’re a disabled woman or non-binary or trans person of color, it gets into large exponents fast. I only know first-hand from being a currently-fat white perceived-as-female person… but I believe other people who tell me how it works for them.)

There’s a third reason, but we’ll get to it later.

So what do we disabled people want? We want to exist as part of the regular fabric of a usual day. We want to exist in your imagination and in the human-built gathering places of the physical world. This, of course, is often decried as asking for special privileges. Then also we have the people who ask why we’re making such a fuss if we just want to be treated like everyone else.

Shades of Camazotz. “Like” and “equal” are not the same thing at all. Treating us “like everyone else” isn’t going to bring about equal access. Figuring out what each person needs for full access, and then trying to get as close to that as we can manage: that’s what we’re aiming for.

Not everybody needs movie trailers to be captioned, but some of us do. Not everybody needs ramps, but some of us do. The funny thing is that the benefits of accessibility are not always limited to the people you expect to use something. When WisCon equipped their Guest of Honor speeches with CART (Computer Assisted Realtime Transcription), those of us who are hard of hearing or deaf were glad. So were the people with other auditory processing disorders. So were people for whom English is a second language. The accessibility added for one group benefitted at least two other groups unexpectedly. This is not unusual. It happens all the time. It’s so good when it does, too. It adds so many possibilities for connections.

Disabled people enrich the world for everybody. Designing for us (with us! by us!) improves things in unexpected ways. (Monocultures fail more easily. It would be a good idea to remember that.) Disabled people are good for a lot more than just our inspiration value, though you’d hardly know it from some people’s approaches to us.

Oh, and besides existing in your imagination, we want to exist in our own imaginations.

There’s some work to do on that, too.

So we’re up to talking about inspiration. Right.

Inspiration is tricky. I do find certain people inspiring, but not in expected ways. Here are a few examples:

Somebody who used to be a friend would get on my case whenever I complained about how something related to disability was hard. “Other people have that too,” she would say, whether it was mishearing something, confusion, exhaustion. “You’re not special.” And she’d tell me to stop setting myself apart from other people. These days when anybody starts doing that, I ask them how they handle it when they’re left in the building during a fire alarm because they didn’t hear it, or how they deal with cafes where the waitstaff mock the stupid person who never came to the counter get their order when their name was called and just let it sit there getting cold.

Once, when I needed to be at Mayo for some follow-ups after a hospitalization, a friend offered to drive me there and get me from place to place. Their offer was much appreciated, because I was having some pretty bad bouts of depression around everything else, and getting me there was a great boon, even bigger than usual.

The friend is a good person but they have a habit of making offhand remarks that if they ever lose mental capacity, their life would not be worth living and they would kill themselves. (Can I tell you how tired I am of telling myself “so-and-so is a good person but…?”)

I have lost certain capacity in some areas. I had a stroke. Mostly I came back just fine, but there are a few things that changed: I cry more easily, I forget names more easily, there are certain words I lose. And some of my other chronic illnesses affect how quickly and easily I can do math in my head, et cetera.

The point is, I used to have greater capacities, I have lost some of that, I know it, and I know that the losing is probably not over, what with one thing and another. So I wanted to ask her not to make her usual comments, seeing as how dealing with hospital follow-up plus depression plus reasons for hospital follow-up plus other stress would put me in a place particularly vulnerable to “If I were diminished, I’d kill myself.” So I asked that she not say anything like that, please, while she was with me.

This resulted in an hour of her declaiming why she was absolutely right to say that she would kill herself if she lost certain mental capabilities. Which is very hard to keep from hearing as “If I had your troubles, if I had your life, it would not be worth living, and I would kill myself and that would be the right thing to do.” She never did get that into her head. She never did understand why what she was doing was a problem. I learned to stop talking about it with her, and just try to change the subject as fast as I could.

Inspiration. Yeah.

I have been told how difficult and annoying it is to have a disabled friend, a disabled lover, and then expected to sympathize with and soothe the friend or lover telling me this. I have apparently been expected to say that I’m sorry.

Sorry. Sorry for slowing you down. Sorry for taking so long. Sorry for eating so slow. Sorry for the damned eating disorder in my past, and the way it sometimes makes me weird and difficult in grocery stores. Sorry for the way I panic sometimes, and get very short or opaque or just difficult.

Sorry for not being able to hear things. Sorry for making you repeat. Sorry for making you irritable. Sorry for making you give up because I am so frustrating, because being with me is so frustrating. Sorry for not being able to hear the damned voiceover on your special precious completely uncaptioned movie that means so much to you. Sorry that I am a failure as a lover for not being able to hear this important thing, because after all, if I really cared, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Sorry for crying when you got mad at me for not being able to hear the movie.

Sorry sorry sorry. I am no fun for you. I realize that.

Thank you for being so inspirational.

I promised I’d tell you about the title of this essay, and about the third reason I was having trouble. The title comes from a movie trailer, but you won’t find it there if you can hear the dialogue.

A trailer for a movie I’m excited about was making the rounds online, but the trailer had no captions. I grumbled about this, and a friend found me a link to the trailer on YouTube which she brought to me in hopes the captions there would work for me.

YouTube uses auto-captioning software, and the degree of messed-up-ness they can achieve is truly rage-and-hilarity-inducing, depending on how badly you need to actually understand the video at the given moment. Without captions, I understand about ten percent of videos at most, unless there are unusually favorable circumstances. Watching auto-captioning is an exercise in figuring out what they might have meant, and adding that to whatever lip-reading cues are available, combined with pushing the sound as loud as I can go without signal degradation. (Yeah, I call it lip-reading. I know some call it speech-reading, but when I use that phrase with the abled people I’m trying to get access through, they have no clue what I’m talking about—and confusing them can make them irritable. So lip-reading it is.)

The auto-captioning failed to accurately caption at least three sections of the trailer (which was a pretty short trailer, so that’s a significant quantity of failure). One important piece of dialogue was, “The only thing faster than light… is darkness.” The auto-captioning software rendered this as “The only thing faster tonight: Mr. Darkness.”

Yeah. Welcome to my movie-going (and television-watching and show-streaming) experience. (“Be a warrior” got captioned as “do aria,” which was also pretty ridiculous. Filking may ensue.)

Not being able to hear the movie trailer brings up the third reason I was having trouble writing this. I was disqualifying myself. Chronic illness and disability. Am I disabled? Am I ill? If I’m ill, am I disabled? Am I broken?

Recently I was talking with my doctor today about disabilities. Specifically about multiple ones. I had gone in to get my ankle checked out, because it didn’t seem to be healing, and that was making it harder for me to walk, which is making all sorts of other health stuff hard to manage. We got onto a tangent about hyperhidrosis and I was saying that hyperhidrosis is not even in the top ten for painful or scary things I have, but it’s the one that causes the most social anxiety for me. (Navigating social spaces with a cane and an unusual gait makes me conspicuous, which I can handle. Having a physical condition that drenches me with sweat at unpredictable intervals, leaving me sitting in a puddle of moisture that looks a lot like pants-wetting to bystanders when I get up, is a lot harder for me to endure.) She remarked that a lot of times the medical/health/chronic illness/disability issues that bother people the most are not the ones she would expect them to name.

Do I count? Am I disabled enough to count?

According to Mr. Darkness, I’m disabled enough to count. If I don’t have access to the trailer everybody else on Twitter is talking about? I count.

So. Back to the other, more commonly cited sort of inspiration, by which I mean when we disabled people are told we are inspirational. “The identity of a disabled person = tragic,” says Eman Khan @punnysamosa on Twitter. “Simply existing is ‘overcoming tragedy.’” Khan points out that therefore simply surviving is seen as inspirational—because we’re not supposed to.

We do survive. We do exist. We’ve been here forever. We will use any means available to keep existing. We will keep on until you finally get over calling us “special” to keep us at arms-length. Deal with your attitudes. Deal with us. Deal with the ways you erase us from your description of daily life, now or in the future.

Deal with your lack of imagination.

Khan shared an exchange which goes:

“Wow you’re so inspirational!”

“For what…? All I did was go to the store… like you…”

All we are doing is going to the store. And to school. And to the lab where we work. And to space. And to every corner of the future—and to every corner of our stories about the future, too. Our stories, your stories, and everybody’s stories.

There’s work to be done. Let’s do it.

© 2018 by Elise Matthesen

Elise Matthesen has been a convention runner, writer, poetry editor, filker, fanzine fan and apahacker, fanfic writer, and nominee for the World Fantasy Award. She is proud of being repeatedly requested as panel moderator by Jane Yolen. With Jane, she’s a member of the Lady Poetesses from Hell. Her old bio says, “She has a hearing impairment, fibromyalgia, arthritis, attitude, ingenuity, numerous publication credits, and more than two dozen pairs of pliers,” but that’s changed. She now calls one of her disabilities “hard of hearing” rather than “a hearing impairment,” though she still persists in saying “lip reading” rather than “speech reading.” She’s added several chronic illnesses and is trying to summarize the mobility stuff beyond “walks with a cane, sometimes can’t walk a long ways, and a long ways varies from day to day.” She gave away many of the pliers to people who needed them. You can tell how she’s doing by checking out how many new shinies are in her Etsy shop, because making art is her way of surviving. Her pronouns are all of the pronouns, though most people use she/her — and that’s fine too. (If you want specifics: queer, bisexual, genderqueer, nonbinary, demigirl, polyamorous.) She sings and is learning several instruments, and would rather make music with people than pretty much any other intimate interaction.

Homo Duplex
by Tochi Onyebuchi

What often makes literature meaningful is that the reader can see themselves in the text, whether through a skin tone they share with the characters or a temperament or a locale, whether a particular familial dynamic, or even if they find in the text a simulacrum of their own psyche. To see oneself twinned, depicted, described, articulated, explained. Which is perhaps why few pieces of literature that I’ve ever read depict with more terrifying familiarity the interiority and exteriority of alcoholism than Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Substance abuse and mental illness are often co-pilots. The mind hacks the meat, and the meat hacks the mind. I was 15, a sophomore in high school, when diagnosed with chronic clinical depression. I had my first drink at 16 and my last at 23. In between were multiple hospitalizations, weeping ex-partners, damaged organs, two relapses, and over one million words of fiction written. At 25, two years sober and in the midst of spring semester exams during my first year of law school, my diagnosis was corrected to Bipolar II Disorder. To live with bipolar disorder is to exist in an exaggerated state. Joy is ecstasy. Sadness is despair. The soul’s soil is fertile with disharmony. It simply needs a little watering.

Stevenson’s novella begins with Hyde already an animated and malicious entity, excised from a Dr. Jekyll whose adult life has been captured by an inner discord I recognized. The exoskeletal firmness and stability and equilibrium of “a life of effort, virtue, and control” gives lie to the storm of stress and inconsistency. Jekyll confesses in his final letter to having “already committed to a profound duplicity of life.”

His tinctures organize him. Just like the vodka-waters, the whiskeys, and the dark rum organized me. I knew that I could never be rid of the lesser angels of my nature. If I could but let the leviathan out of its cage, maybe some time swimming in the ocean would quiet it and provide me some measure of peace.

During the fall semester of my junior year in college, three months criss-crossing Europe and learning political theory, I wound up, one night, in a Haarlem beer hall where being the only American in a room full of Europeans meant I didn’t pay for a single drink. Already, assorted dry goods swam in my bloodstream. A boy runs in to tell one of his mates that “they’ve” been spotted. It turns out that I’ve been drafted into a war against football hooligans from the enemy squad, whom we spend the rain-soaked night hunting with murderous intent. I’ve already become Mr. Hyde. All I need is a Sir Danvers Carew to beat bloody on a fog-shrouded London street.

In the beginning, Jekyll reigns. “The moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde,” he assures a colleague. Eventually, Hyde, having spent enough time in the sun, no longer needs the potion to have his cage unlocked. In a stunning reversal, Jekyll needs the potion to become Jekyll again. There’s that point at which liquor stops being the thing that knocks you sideways and becomes instead the thing that holds you upright. If I wanted to talk to a girl, a shot—sometimes half a bottle—was necessary. Jekyll’s charm, his generosity of spirit, they no longer existed absent a preliminary bath in the river. Whiskey washed Hyde off my face and flooded his hideousness out of my system.

Consuming the potion, whether to let rage a vicarious depravity or recover one’s better self, becomes the compulsion and, in the eyes of others, the mystery. Want of being spirited into that uncharted country is intelligible. Need of it, the object of disdain. And that, in essence, is addiction. You need the thing, even as you don’t want it. The disease co-opts the body and colonizes the mind. It implicates responsibility. It is invisible, as is the fight against it. In the end, however, the warring is all contained in one meat-package. Regain a harmonious mind? Easier to catch a falling knife.

I used to think my diseases were attachments. If I could somehow excise those Bad Parts, maybe I would get better. But the three of us—I, alcoholism, and bipolar—will forever remain locked in a treacherous pied-à-trois. I have since dried my shoes, my steps are surer. Sober, Hyde is contained, less a tyrant, more a passenger.

The lesson in Stevenson’s novella has shed its Manichean cast. I am no less Jekyll for carrying a Hyde inside my head.

Differently put, one may say that the world is all the richer for having a Devil in it. So long as I keep my foot upon its neck.

© 2018 by Tochi Onyebuchi

Tochi Onyebuchi is a graduate of Columbia Law School and L’institut d’études politiques in Paris. Prior to law school, he attended Yale University and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His fiction has appeared in Ideomancer, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Seven Scribes, Obsidian, and Omenana, and is forthcoming from Tor.com. His debut young adult novel, Beasts Made of Night, was published October 2017 by Penguin Random House’s Razorbill imprint. Its sequel, Crown of Thunder, hits shelves October 2018. He tweets, on occasion, at @TochiTrueStory.

A Dream to Shape My World
by Eli Wilkinson

“I much prefer you in cat form, Dream, old friend. When you wear a human head, I find it so hard to know what you are thinking.” So says the Egyptian goddess Bast to the King of Dreams. This line appears in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Season of the Mists, and in the context of that volume is relatively unimportant, but Bast’s confusion hit a deep chord with me. This one panel was a nearly perfect metaphor for my life up until reading it.

I was diagnosed with Aspergers at sixteen. In the fifteen years since, the once “trendy” diagnosis has become a lot more controversial, in no small part to a cacophony of voices chiming in on the subject including the anti-vaccination movement, proponents of neurodiversity, and media depictions of people living with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The characteristics of ASD are well-known and comically exaggerated in media. However, these characteristics are not shared by all with a diagnosis. I, for example, am not obsessively focused on one particular subject or thing, nor do I take everything literally a-là Drax the Destroyer, and my fine motor skills are not poor (but they aren’t great either if I’m being honest). However, the understanding of others’ emotions and reading facial expressions will be a lifelong struggle for me.

It’s no exaggeration to say the isolation and paranoia this can cause is like something out of Philip K. Dick. Imagine the following scenario: you are speaking with a group of people with whom you do not share a strong connection; perhaps you’ve just met them, or perhaps they are acquaintances such as work colleagues. Everything is normal. You’re just talking. Suddenly one member of the group becomes extremely upset or angry. You think, “What’s their problem?” but the others in the group quickly voice their displeasure as well, and their faces have now morphed into crunch-browed, fierce-eyed, mouth-curled kabuki masks of anger. But we were just talking, what did I say? You don’t know, and odds are good you won’t know. High-functioning individuals will likely be immediately dismissed as insensitive assholes, low-functioning individuals will often be dismissed as “just autistic.” Both are denied an opportunity to learn from the exchange, and to potentially present another aspect of their identity. This has happened to me uncountable times.Your world becomes eggshells.

As I got older and learned more about my condition, my life took on a new and distressing dimension. I was being warned, prior to the onset of discomfort, upset, or anger, to change the subject, dial back enthusiasm, tone down my voice. But I could not see these warnings. At the risk of stating the obvious, people communicate and express with more than just their voice. Widening eyes might indicate increased interest in a topic; a slight change of tone in the voice a signal that the listener finds something just said uncomfortable. The list goes on and on. Until the age of about twenty-two, I existed in a world populated by Mona Lisa smiles that I knew could transform at any moment into emotional extremes if I spoke too long.

At nineteen I read Moore’s Watchmen; having never read a comic like it before, I was hungry to find more graphic stories of equal quality. I explained this to a co-worker who very generously gifted me a portion of his comics collection, including Season of the Mists. For the first time in my life I was being presented with faces in various states of expression, and many graphic novels I was reading also narrated a character’s thoughts and emotions in each panel. Even if there was no narration in the panel, art of sufficient realism could allow me to make sense of different facial expressions on my own time, imagining them into real world interaction. There are three wordless panels in Season of the Mists where Dream learns that Lucifer has quit Hell that I’ve revisited many times because of how well they capture shock and surprise.

The literary quality of Gaiman’s work and others moved me to pursue my degree, and to read broadly to better understand the layers of references within Sandman and other works. Studying literature has not only further helped me in my ongoing struggles to identify with the emotions of others and build empathy with them, but also kicked off my lifelong love of genre fiction.

Living with ASD is difficult, there’s no mincing words about it, and as long as I live the struggle will be there. The works of Gaiman, and other genre writers have enriched my life, and help me cope with some of the more difficult aspects of my condition. A nameless character in Dream Country implores people: “Dream! Dreams shape the world.” I like to think this is true, because to make sense of a strange world, I have to dwell for awhile in dreamed ones.

© 2018 by Eli Wilkinson

Eli Wilkinson writes science fiction and horror stories. He lives and works in the frozen wastelands of Canada.

To Boldly Go
by Cara Liebowitz

When Julian Bashir is asked to help a group of genetically engineered “mutants” on the space station Deep Space Nine, he faces an interesting dilemma. Illegally genetically engineered as a child himself, his status as a “mutant” has recently been revealed, and he now has to deal with the fallout as his friends and co-workers see him in a different light. But in working with Jack, Patrick, Lauren, and Sarina, he realizes that he can take pride in his genetically engineered identity, and perhaps most frighteningly, that he can relate to these outcasts in some ways better than he can relate to the typical Starfleet officers he’s surrounded by in his everyday life.

I wasn’t genetically engineered as a child, but I was born with cerebral palsy, and like Julian’s exploration of his genetic identity, I have had to navigate what my disability meant throughout my life. I grew up trying to be as “normal” as possible. I went to public school and all of my friends were nondisabled. I felt that despite my disability, I was “smart,” and I took much pride in my academic achievements. That all changed when, through a series of coincidences, I began going to a summer camp for children and teens with physical disabilities when I was thirteen.

Julian’s first reaction to his fellow genetically engineered comrades is similar to my first reactions to people who were more physically and intellectually impaired than I was. “All I kept thinking was ‘There but for the grace of God go I’,” he says to his friends. He considers himself lucky that his genetic enhancements didn’t result in cognitive impairments like Jack and the others. I felt lucky that I could walk and talk, and that I didn’t have any intellectual disabilities. Like Julian, I felt pity for those I saw as less fortunate than myself—until I got to know some of those “less fortunate people.”

Later in the episode, we see Julian becoming more and more comfortable with this group of misfits and isolating his typical friends in the process. Miles O’Brien, Julian’s best friend, feels left out among this odd new camaraderie. “When we actually got down to working, it was incredible. We were all on the same wavelength, talking in shorthand, finishing each other’s sentences—I’ve never had that with anyone else.” Julian explains excitedly to an increasingly uncomfortable Miles. It’s a revelation, the same revelation I had when I first came to camp. It was the first time I’d been around so many other people with disabilities. No one during the school year could relate to the way my aide would never leave me alone, or the stares and comments I got every time I went out in public with a mobility aid. A light had come into my world, a light I didn’t even know I was missing.

Unlike Julian, whose foray into this brave new world lasts barely an episode (two, if you count the follow up episode featuring the Jack Pack several seasons later), I dove eagerly down the rabbit hole and didn’t surface for many years. I eschewed able people as people who would never understand me, and each school year was just another painful interlude between summers at camp. Disabled people were my family and camp was my home. I even begged my parents at one point to let me transfer to the segregated school for kids with disabilities near my home (they said no, believing that public school was the best place for me to get an academic education). Even after I graduated high school and started college, I instinctively sought out those on campus who were also disabled in some way. It wasn’t until after college that I started to let down my guard and realized that while abled people may not understand firsthand what I go through, they “get it” more than I think.

Now that I moved to the DC Metro area, I feel like I’m starting the process all over again. Only this time, I have the wisdom to learn from my past. Since I can’t take my cues from Julian Bashir and go to Starfleet Academy, I’ll have to be happy with what I have.

© 2018 by Cara Liebowitz

Cara Liebowitz is a multiply disabled writer, activist, and second generation Trekkie. Though Star Trek is her first love, she has also flirted with other sci-fi and fantasy fandoms, including Doctor Who, Warehouse 13, Firefly, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Cara works for the National Council on Independent Living, a national, grassroots disability rights organization. You can find her on Twitter @spazgirl11, where she squeals about disability, country music, and sci-fi, sometimes simultaneously. She also blogs at thatcrazycrippledchick.com.

Move Like You’re From Thra, My People
by Haddayr Copley-Woods

When I was a child, the world had a lot of surprises for me: even as a rough-and-tumble tomboy who delighted in running and climbing trees, the world of books was an endless imaginative joy. It seemed that reading them opened up a door in the back of my mind and I could just fall in: The Chronicles of Narnia, the world of Pern, The Chronicles of Prydain. Despite my frenetic childhood energy, I could sit still for hours, lost in wonder.

TV, except for Sesame Street, was forbidden in my hippy feminist household, and movies were a luxury we couldn’t generally afford. When I did sneak some TV or we rented a movie, they often left me shifting in my seat: everything was flattened. Too bright. Too sleek and produced, the rough edges smoothed away. The laugh tracks grated. With the notable exception of Star Wars, I felt that TV and movies were for other people.

But then at age 12, my parents took me and my little sisters to the dollar theater to watch this wondrous movie called The Dark Crystal. It seemed custom-made for me and my weird, nonconformist family: slow and quiet at times, awkward, dark, and funny. Cluttered and intense and wildly, beautifully imaginative. My sisters and I spent the next months leaping from cliffs (okay the edges of the creek), informing boys that we had wings and they didn’t; turning ourselves into dramatic and evil Skeksis; lumbering slowly through the high grass in a form of a gentle Mystic dance; and limping around glaring through one eye, hollering: “Another Great Conjunction coming up! Anything could happen! Whole WORLD might burn up!”

It took two decades for me to realize that the effect of this movie was far more profound than I’d thought.

When I became disabled at 37 years old, the world still had a lot of surprises for me.

One of them was running into disableism, of course: people seeing me on my forearm crutches and speaking v e r y  s l o wwwwwwwwwlllllllyyyyyyyyyy in a Very Special Voice. People grabbing the back of my wheelchair without asking if I needed help.

People staring. Staring staring staring staring. Double-taking. Staring again.

But what was shocking to me was how much internalized disableism hurt me, as well.

In our disableist and ageist society, it’s hard to admit that you need to use a cane at 37. It’s hard for many people to use one at 73. So many of us struggle to embrace mobility equipment that we desperately need. We have ideas in our heads that either we are being greedy and are not disabled enough to deserve them (CAPITALISM OH MY GOD), or that using them will somehow limit us, or that it is a sign of weakness.

Please believe me when I tell you that very few women have as much of a machismo problem as I do: I identified early as a tomboy and bought hook, line, and sinker the lie that “physical strength = emotional strength;” that you can tough it out and do anything; that somehow my signs of neurological issues pointed to deep morality issues.

I would take a deep breath, tell myself sternly to just walk down the hallway normally (whatever the hell that meant), and I was determined, and I would do it, and then I just COULDN’T. My legs just would not support me as they had before.

And then something clicked. This was my new reality. I was done fighting it. I immediately started looking for very good mobility equipment. I just jumped right in.

After seeing a mobility specialist, within a few months I had forearm crutches. A few months after that, a wheelchair.

Everyone around me was skeptical. “Was it really that bad?” they asked. “You seem awfully fit to be needing these.”

You’d think that this would have attacked me right where it hurt: in the machismo. But it didn’t.

Because I loved the way I moved in my crutches. When I was going slow, I did an alternative one-two-one-two, supporting my legs that refused to respond consistently to my brain’s commands. When I moved quickly, I planted both crutches and swung my legs and body through them. I moved faster than I ever had on just two legs. I felt fast, strong, free. Using the crutches changed me in powerful and wonderful ways.

Once, my three-year-old made a beeline for the street on his Big Wheel.

I beat his triathlete dad to his side on those crutches.

When I had terribly exhausting days in which I wasn’t able to drag my legs with me, I used my wheelchair: a light, sweet little thing with the deliciously naughty name of a Rigid Quickie (I am not even kidding), it weighs only 15 pounds and has red wheels with yellow spokes, and when I roll on that chair on a decent surface it feels a little bit like flying.

A co-worker once asked me about it: “Is it as bad as it seems?”

I boggled.

“The chair?” he asked. “I’ve always thought it was my worst nightmare, to be stuck in one of those things.”

Where I saw freedom and joy and speed and effortless movement, he saw “being stuck.”

Even when I use only my cane on good days and my leg gives out, for some reason I feel like more of a bad ass with my loping, awkward gait than I just walking the way I had my whole life up to that point. Even in the face of pitying glances.

I didn’t know why I accepted this all in stride (ha, ha, ha—in stride), but I was glad I had. I can see many of my disabled friends and family staggering along in their houses, refusing to leave them as they use the backs of chairs and the tops of tables as support, turning down the motorized cart and deciding not to go to the zoo with their grandchildren after all because they cannot face that thing. Stumbling along and tripping and finding their lives becoming more and more constricted because they cannot handle the stigma of being obviously, visibly disabled.

I was glad I didn’t have this unfortunate internalized disableism stilling my movements, but I didn’t know why I’d found it so easy to make the switch until I sat down with my little boys to watch The Dark Crystal, which I hadn’t watched in decades.

I didn’t know. It took my breath away. The reason why I am fine with moving like this, the reason I am fine with people staring and why I love myself this way, is because of The Dark Crystal.

First, there were the urRu: slow, hunched, exhausted, yet elegant. They moved with a poetry and beauty BECAUSE they were hunched over and using canes. They were stunning in their slow, ponderous, and clearly disabled gorgeousness.

I gasped at seeing myself on my worst days, celebrated as wise and powerful beyond words.

And then, Aughra. Wonderful, pernicious, ancient, and clearly disabled Aughra. Although she has room for three eyes in her head, only one is working, which she uses brilliantly as a prosthesis that she can pluck from the socket and hold out around the corner to see what is coming. She limps EXACTLY LIKE I DO when I have no support. She is large and demanding and overbearing and casually, powerfully impressive in her physicality. She is disabled, and she is a MOTHERFUCKING BADASS.

It was when we got to the Landstriders that I began to weep.

The Landstriders, who seem a bit gangly and awkward if silently impressive at first, can move like THE WIND. And they are played by people on stilts with enormously long forearm crutches.

When they move slowly, they walk like I do. And when they speed up, they are FAST like I am, swinging their bodies between their crutches—I mean forelegs—and zooming along. When they fight armored beasts, they fight valiantly and powerfully. They move the way they move, and it WORKS for them.

Whenever people tell me that representation doesn’t matter as much as I think it does, or that we shouldn’t analyze pop culture from a sociological perspective, I find this baffling intellectually (where else would you look for society’s unfiltered prejudices and anxieties and isms other than in our popular culture?), and I find it cognitively and emotionally dissonant in regards to my own life.

I am certain—wildly, powerfully, completely certain—that watching this movie that delighted in and celebrated disability repeatedly as a child put positive images of and ideas about disability into my brain.

I am lucky that I watched this over and over rather than, say… almost ANYTHING ELSE.

When I look at SF and fantasy, I see it like all art reflects our society’s view of disability: twisted, cruel uncles desperate for their able-bodied, beautiful brother’s glory. Villains in SF described as “more machine, now, than man—twisted and evil.” Even Hansel& Gretel: Witch Hunters—which completed the miraculous feat of showing witch hunters working without lurching into misogyny—showed a witch’s council in which the vast majority of the witches were disabled or moved in a way that is not the usual: it was all staffed with disabled women and contortionists. Awesome to see the council of witches, but my heart sank when I saw it.

Little kids who watch this movie now over and over for the brother-and-sister kickassedry and the delightful camp of it will have this image of disability etched into their brains: Evil. Twisted. Malevolent.

I have no idea what Henson and Oz’s relationship to disability was. I assume they were able-bodied guys. But they somehow created a world that would later help me to be proud of who I was. (So did Madeleine L’Engle with her autistic baby brother Charles Wallace and her learning-disabled protagonist Meg Murray, the latter of whom I instantly, with my learning-disabled self, identified with. So has Jo Walton in Among Others, and a few others.)

Even when comic books start out well, they fuck it up: DC Comics created a wonderful disabled character Oracle beloved by many but especially close to the hearts of their disabled fans, and destroyed her with restored ability I cannot get the image out of my head of artist Jamie Noguchi’s fanart , inspired by the DC Comics’ changes, showing Batgirl striding happily and confidently away from her wheelchair. In that image, the wheelchair was a symbol of misery. Of “being stuck,” as my coworker had seen me when I was at my most free and mobile. It was obviously an image of disability written by someone who has NO IDEA what a wheelchair really MEANS.

It just broke my heart.

We need more Dark Crystals and more disabled writers, artists, actors, and directors to counteract hundreds of years (thousands?) of images in fairy tales, science fiction, folk tales, urban myths, books, and movies that show disabled people as cruel, twisted, pathetic, and pitiable.

We need more Dark Crystals: not just so disabled kids can see themselves up on the screen, but so able-bodied kids like I was can grow up to embrace the disabled people they might later become.

So that we can run into fewer people who cringe away at the unusual way we move or speak or read or learn.

So we can all of us—walking, rolling flapping, shuffling, dragging, running, skipping, and falling—can get to where we need to go in this world together.

(Editors’ Note: This essay as it originally appeared in Uncanny’s Year 4 Kickstarter included two images—of a Mystic, and Aughra—from The Dark Crystal, as well as an illustration of Batgirl, which can be viewed by visiting the Kickstarter Update.)

© 2018 by Haddayr Copley-Woods

Haddayr Copley-Woods is a scifi/fantasy writer, radio commentator, and essayist with pieces and performances in places such as Minnesota Public Radio, Apex, Story Club Minneapolis, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Erotica.

Her radio commentaries, essays, and spoken-word performances cover disability issues, community, queerness, and politics.

Everything Is True: A Non-Neurotypical Experience with Fiction
by Ada Hoffmann

What does autism representation in fiction mean to me? There is almost a formula for answering this question. A story about looking fruitlessly for yourself in the books you love, finally grabbing them to assert your right to be in them anyway.

This is a meaningful story which is real and important for a vast number of marginalized fans.

It is not exactly my story.

In my story, I am always reading. I teach myself at three, out of sheer book-hunger. Books are real to me, as a child. I am hyperempathic to them. I feel what the characters feel; I see in my mind’s eye everything they see. I can’t stand it when they are injured: I don’t feel the pain, quite, but I feel an awful wrongness in my body, just like theirs.

Contrary to autistic stereotype I have no trouble playing pretend. A lot of my peers’ interactions go over my head, but I find other children who like to play by declaring that “we” are other people, or are in some other world.

In every book, as a schoolchild, I have to figure out which character is “me.” This is the character whose feelings I feel. I feel better when “I” look and act like me. Fortunately, intelligent white girls with brown hair are not uncommon in the middle-grade literature of the time. I have no inkling yet that I am different from other people. That happens later.

I make it through elementary school undiagnosed, thanks to adults who quietly make informal adjustments behind the scenes. “She’s sensitive,” they tell each other. In junior high school, this is suddenly no longer enough. Everything about my newly hormonal body and the newly complex social environment is all at once too much to cope with.

I go into burnout. I have screaming meltdowns. I stop being able to clean myself, join a conversation, focus on a lesson, get up in the morning. I hide—in bathrooms, in gym lockers, anywhere—instead of going to class. Nobody knows what to do with me. People who used to admire my intelligence now scoot away from my presence in alarm.

I cope by going somewhere else. I write absurd fanfiction. I read the same books over and over again until I hate them, because I can’t deal with the overload of picking out a new one.

I still experience fiction immersively, maybe more immersively than before. My favorite experience, one that somehow doesn’t get old, is the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera. The part of me that’s an actual teenage girl identifies with Christine, with her paradoxical desire to be whisked away mysteriously and yet protected. Another part identifies with the Phantom—an imaginative outcast who hides under the opera house because everyone hates him. I understand him, I think.

Fiction is a respite, but it doesn’t actually fix anything. Eventually, after an especially dangerous blurring of fantasy and reality, I get medication. That doesn’t fix everything, either, but it takes an edge off. Fiction also, curiously, gets duller. I learn to armor myself, to endure frightening scenes by finding conscious reminders that they aren’t real. I stop feeling what fictional people feel.

Eventually someone hands me The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Christopher is nothing like me, but I don’t really know how this works. I just shrug and tell myself he must be lower-functioning.

I do relate to one scene: the one where Christopher, overloaded, hides in a train bathroom. The people who find him are a lot nicer than the people who used to find me in places.

By the time I turn sixteen, I am acting like a shy nerd again, as opposed to a creepy phantom. My peers start to look at me like a person. I hardly know what to do with them.

At seventeen, I date a Discordian. We take comfort in our mutual weirdness. His Principia Discordia is mostly nonsense, but one dialogue jumps out at me:

“Everything is true.”

“Even false things?”

“Even false things are true.”

“How can that be?”

“I don’t know, man, I didn’t do it.”

Later in life I meet eclectic neopagans who insist that everything humans believe in enough becomes real somewhere. I don’t know if I’ve ever believed that. What I do know is that stories aren’t nothing. Real things are in them. Whether they are the author’s distorted reflection, or something more.

I run across the social model of disability in college. It makes me intensely, viscerally angry. The idea that society should change to accommodate us strikes me as a dangerous idea, because they never will.

Later, I sort of tiptoe into social justice backwards. I learn about RaceFail secondhand, from my brother. I learn words like “privilege” and “marginalization.” I get, paradoxically, less angry. I notice that my speculative fiction friends want to hear about autism, but no one is actually saying much about it yet. It’s 2010 or so, and the huge push for representation that will start in YA and echo into spec fic hasn’t reached me. I have no idea what a wave I’m about to ride.

People keep waving autistic characters at me to see my reaction. None of them are anything like me. Sometimes I like them anyway. Sherlock, before his show collapses under its own self-indulgence, is weirdly attractive. Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory fascinates me because of his sheer indifference to other people’s expectations, his insistence on being himself.

Of course, the cost of Sheldon’s attitude is that to his friends he is an annoyance, a burden, even a child. Nobody really likes autistic characters, in the end. People put up with us. People selflessly shoulder the burden of our inconvenient selves.

“Are you going to freak out again?” asks my college boyfriend, five seconds before heading out the door. “Because we might as well not go.” The guy after him makes a point of explaining how many things I do wrong, from cleaning my house to speaking to asserting my boundaries. I leave that relationship terrified and gaslit. But it’s okay. These are good guys. They took a chance on me. People are attracted, at first, to my quirky intelligence; it’s not their fault that everything goes bad from there.

Here’s the thing. The people who can’t stand me aren’t the whole story. Some of the people who’ve loved me have really loved me. Some of my friendships, on and offline, are real friendships. We are genuinely excited by each other. We give and receive real support, the kind you can only offer as an equal who’s been there.

The trouble is that I can’t always tell which is which. I still look at the people who love me most right at this minute, people who love me more than I’ve ever been loved before, and wonder when they’re going to get tired of my shit.

When I read #ownvoices autistic characters, I often think the authors have had that same feeling. Many of these characters have devoted family, friends, romantic partners, even when the world at large is awful to them. Most of them first have to overcome a broken relationship with themselves. To learn to believe that they’re worthy as they are.

With autistic characters written by NT authors, it often feels like everyone is tired of their shit from the start.

When I am twenty-nine, I finally watch Community. I get obsessed with the friendship between Abed and Troy. The strongest, closest, most joyful relationship on the show is an autistic friendship. Not a friendship between the autistic man and a nice person who took pity on him, but a friendship based on sheer mutual excitement, a friendship which actively refuses to be normal. Troy and Abed spend their time wrapped up in science fictional worlds of their own devising, playing imaginary games the way I did as a child, gleefully indifferent to everyone else’s expectations of reality.

Has anyone ever in my life been as delighted by me as Troy and Abed are by each other? Maybe. At twenty-nine, I’m almost starting to believe that someone might.

I tell a person I’m in love with that he’s Abed and I’m Troy. (I’m the emotional, easily confused one.) He says “cool cool cool.” We practice doing the Troy and Abed handshake.

To Abed, everyone is already a fictional character.

Troy leaves in season five, of course. “I want to be one person,” he says. Even when you have a happier autistic friendship than it is physically possible to have, your friends will still get tired of your shit.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, anymore, or what I am trying to say. Maybe I haven’t deviated so far from the formula, after all. Maybe all this can be boiled down to a discussion of which aspects of my life I see welcomed and acknowledged and which I do not. Maybe I want to shake your shoulders and ask if you’ve ever really believed, for two whole seconds, that autistic people are worthy of love.

Maybe I just want to be real.

© 2018 by Ada Hoffmann

Ada Hoffmann is the author of The Outside, forthcoming in 2019 from Angry Robot Books. Her speculative writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and Uncanny. She is a winner of the Friends of the Merrill Collection Short Story Contest and a two-time Rhysling award nominee. Ada was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome at the age of 13, and is passionate about autistic self-advocacy. Her Autistic Book Party review series is devoted to in-depth discussions of autism representation in speculative fiction.  You can find Ada online at ada-hoffmann.com, or on Twitter at @xasymptote.

Unlocking the Garret
by Rachel Swirsky

It’s in the stereotype. The artist of tempestuous temperament who drinks to excess as he stumbles, lean and tuberculotic, up the winding steps to his garret. Van Gogh cut off his ear. Plath put her head in the oven. The artist is passionate; the artist is mercurial; the artist is mad.

Sometimes stereotypes do hold a shard of truth.

I don’t know why there’s a connection between creativity and madness. One could provoke the other; both could be caused by another factor. It could be inherent. It could be cultural. Whatever the why, there’s a high frequency of mental illness among artists.

Despite this, we rarely talk about how mental illness affects the work. Taboos about discussing personal experiences with mental illness remain, promoted by shame and ignorance. In this toxic fog, the stereotype of the mad artist looms large, discouraging some from even seeking treatment because they believe creativity can only persist in the garret.

I have bipolar disorder—the second type, the one that lacks extremely high mood. I’ve been in treatment for ten years or so, and I’m lucky in that medications work for me. They don’t work for everybody, and for some people, they come with unbearable side effects. Still, disability remains something I have to navigate daily, and it probably always will be.

There are many needful conversations about creativity and disability, but this is not the space for all of them, nor am I the person to start them all. What I can offer best is these few pieces of pragmatic advice for other writers with chronic disabilities.

(Although the bulk of this essay concerns bipolar disorder, what I have to say may be generalizable to some other illnesses, especially because I also have chronic migraines. This advice, like any advice, is meant to assist, not to mandate. Always do what’s healthy for you.)

- It’s okay not to write every day. Many writing teachers and classes are emphatic about the “write every day” thing, but it’s just one way of being a writer. I know successful writers who do and successful writers who don’t. If your illness is flaring, and you need time off, take it. It’s not laziness or dereliction of duty. It’s taking care of yourself, and if you don’t take care of yourself, you might end up worse later.

- There are many different ways to interact with writing and publishing. While many people enjoy networking and conventions, some disabilities like social anxiety or acute pain can make it arduous or even impossible. Time spent socializing can yield opportunities—but time spent researching yields ideas and realism, and time spent writing yields more fiction to sell. You’re also less likely to be good at something you find miserable, so the time you spend on it has diminishing returns. You don’t have to force yourself to do something you hate.

- You don’t have to be tough. People sometimes say things like, “If you can be discouraged from writing, you should be,” and use that as a way to justify being unkind to people who are tender. I don’t think it’s meant as a cudgel against disabled people specifically, but it can function as one. If you doubt your abilities, if you are sometimes crushed, if you feel like an imposter—that’s fine. It’s normal. If only tough people wrote stories, then we’d only have their perspectives, and we would lose all the things other people—you—have to offer.

- Be kind to yourself. This career is high stress, and anxiety and depression can make that worse. It can be easy to focus only on the negative, and to blame oneself for everything that doesn’t go right. It can spiral into self-doubt or self-hatred. If that’s happening to you, it’s probably unjustified. When you regard yourself, look with a generous lens. Give time and attention to your successes. Try to see yourself through the eyes of someone who loves you—if you’re very depressed, what they see may be much more accurate than what you do.

Writers don’t have to be depressed. Many writers have mood disorders, but many don’t. Many authors who have mood disorders treat those disorders with therapy and/or medication, and continue to be writers even when their symptoms improve. Their examples prove that treatment can help depression without curing creativity. Some people do experience difficulty writing when they take some psychoactive medications, though they may not continue to have trouble if they switch to a different type. Many writers—like me—find medication helps unlock their creativity. Treatment enhances my productivity by cutting down the amount of time I’m too sick to work. Treatment for you might look very different from treatment for me, but please, take care of yourself. Unlock the garret.

© 2018 by Rachel Swirsky

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop where she, a California native, learned about both writing and snow. Last year, she traded the snow for the rain of Portland, Oregon, where she roams happily under overcast skies with the hipsters. Her fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Asimov’s Magazine, and The Year’s Best Non-Required Reading. She’s published two collections: Through the Drowsy Dark (Aqueduct Press) and How the World Became Quiet (Subterranean Press). Her fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award, and twice won the Nebula.

The Stories We Tell and the Amazon Experiment
by Day Al-Mohamed

I am the metaphor for the hero to learn a “valuable lesson.” I am your “afterschool special,” your vengeful monster and scarred villain. I will die or be killed gruesomely to serve as motivation for the protagonist, or I will overcome and be healed. This is how the world views people with disabilities; how the world portrays characters who are like me. And I hate it.

In genre fiction—where there is typically an expectation of unique worlds, daring heroes, and amazing adventures—I am either erased or exist only because my disability is needed as a plot point. I exist within narrow parameters, confined to the same sad storylines. You’ll recognize many of them: the psychic blind, happy people with intellectual disabilities, bitter cripples, and inspirational overachievers.

Not long ago, I wanted to more formally explore these “disability narratives” in the stories we tell, so I set up a simple test. I went to Amazon and typed the word “blind” into the search box—more than 26,000 books were selected. After narrowing the category to Romance; the list contained 1466 books. And finally, I designated just Historical Romance—134 books. In this “Amazon Experiment” I would read the description of every one of those books and see if there were any trends in the stories told about characters who were blind.

What I discovered was that the vast majority of these disability narratives would fit into five categories. Please pardon any snarkiness, it is fully intentional. I am paraphrasing the descriptions of actual books to protect the guilty.

1. Bringing Light to Darkness and other Painful Metaphors I Never Want to See Again
A story of passionate awakening, [NYT Bestselling Author]’s novel unites a war hero consigned to darkness with a woman who finds her own salvation by showing him the light of love.

2. Let Me Heal Him/Her with my Love Because You can’t be Blind and Happy
When Lady Noname, is carried to safety from a fire, she recognizes her rescuer as the man who despises her! But he has been blinded and Lady Noname must nurse him back to health.

3. Beauty & the Beast or more accurately, the Blind & the Beast
Once overwhelmingly irresistible to women, Wicked Sir Knight’s life was changed forever by a brutal wound. Now he has come to wreak revenge by claiming his enemy’s daughter. Left blind by his invasion, innocent Fragile Blind Woman trembles before the scarred barbarian.

4. Blind Psychic Powers or Amazing Sword Fighting/Martial Arts Abilities I Wish I Had
A young girl is ritually blinded to gain powers. While she can never get her eyes back, she can however learn to truly see the world around her and seek a life based on love instead of avarice.

5. Learning to Accept Blindness and Grow up to be Rebuilt Better, Stronger, Faster…
Teenage Girl must struggle with the news that she will soon go blind. As if this weren’t shocking enough, she is forced to face the fact that she must now attend a school for the blind to learn Braille and how to use a cane. She inwardly hopes for a miracle that will save her sight. But will that miracle come, or will she need to learn to embrace her new life?

This does not mean these books are awful or terrible. In fact, I have actually gone on to read about a third of the books in the Amazon Experiment; a couple are The New York Times bestsellers and one is a national award winner that I often point to as an example of where someone effectively captured disability. My intent is to highlight that in all of these books it is the same kind of disability narrative and the repetition of these stereotypes becomes ingrained into society.

As an example, I once asked a room full of authors what their response would be if I asked them to make the protagonist in their current Work-in-Progress a woman—most nodded, yesses were heard around the room. Then I asked if they could make their character a person of color—again, nods around the room. Then I asked if they would make the character disabled—silence. The discomfort was palpable. In theory diversity and disability was great to include in fiction but when it came to implementation, they couldn’t easily connect disability with their protagonist. They had trouble adjusting to the practical reality of disability existing outside of the boxes they knew. This is why 134 stories on Amazon could be broken down into five story categories.

It is a difficult thing to face every day, to see yourself portrayed as Victim, Monster, Cripple, Inspiration, or Cured. Are these the only stories we tell? Are these the only stories we read? Are these the only stories we deserve? Obviously, the answer to that should be a resounding “No.” I demand more from writers. I demand more from readers. And you should too. We shouldn’t be okay with these limits on creativity and imagination. My Amazon Experiment highlighted characters who exist only because of the disability and speaking as a woman with a disability, we are so much more. We are mothers and brothers, lawyers and 1800s lamplighters, fierce warriors and mysterious magicians. We are heroes in our own stories; stories defined by who we are rather than what we can or cannot do. Those are the stories I want to read.

© 2018 by Day Al-Mohamed

Day Al-Mohamed is author of the novel Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn: A Steampunk Faerie Tale, editor of the anthology, Trust & Treachery, and a regular host on Idobi Radio’s Geek Girl Riot. Her stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Apex Magazine, and GrayHaven Comics. She is a Docs in Progress Fellowship alumna and a graduate of the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop.

In addition to fiction, she also works in comics and film. Day’s short story, “The Lesser Evil” was nominated for the WSFA Small Press Award for Best Short Fiction of 2015. However, she is most proud of being invited to teach a workshop on storytelling at the White House in February 2016.

A disability policy executive with more than fifteen years of experience, she presents often on the representation of disability in media, most recently for the National Bar Association, at New York Comic Con, and at SXSW. She lives in Washington DC with her wife, N.R. Brown. You can find Day online at DayAlMohamed.com and on Twitter @DayAlMohamed.

Science Fiction Saved My Life
by Laurel Amberdine

Maybe the first thing I should say is that this story has a happy ending.

I was a sickly, nerdy kid whose financially-strapped single mom carried baggage of her own and could never quite cope. I was an obsessive lover of books, one of those prodigies who was reading at two and polishing off chapter books by kindergarten. In grammar school I worked my way through the library, gradually getting less picky as the options thinned. Finally I gave in and read a weirdly titled book that I thought was about getting old. Yeah, A Wrinkle in Time.

After that, I still read anything that was vaguely book shaped and had words in it, but what I wanted to read was science fiction. It was hard to find. I didn’t know what I was looking for. A sixth grade teacher lent me a copy of Watership Down, another transformative experience.

It was the last time any teacher would be kind to me.

My symptoms are odd, and no one really knows what my disability is, nor does it really matter at this point. I wake up with flu-like symptoms. That is, if I can get to sleep at all, with feeling like wasps are stinging me whenever I try to relax. But the most devastating aspect only kicked in at puberty. I don’t clot right.

I remember sitting there horrified in sixth grade, realizing I had to go to the front of the class and write my name on the chalkboard in order to go to the bathroom. I could already feel the puddle that had soaked through my pad and my jeans, oozing across the chair.

I don’t remember much of school after that.

Sometimes I think I’m not disabled. Then I see how my condition has warped my entire life, and I know I am.

I do remember the books. I grew weaker and more isolated, but I got a ride to the library once a week and checked out all the novels I could carry. I became allergic to everything. I couldn’t spend time outside in the summer. A sympathetic but ungeeky friend re-gifted a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings to me. When I ran out of library books, I’d read and reread those. I was always anemic and mortified over my constant accidents. For a week every month I was barely conscious, and didn’t dare get half an hour away from the bathroom.

If I’d had any family with resources, maybe I could have weathered this, but I didn’t. And I didn’t.

The library’s adult fiction section didn’t separate out science fiction and fantasy. It marked the spine with a little blue rocketship sticker. I scanned every shelf picking them out, though I wound up preferring the W-Z section. John Varley, Joan D. and Vernor Vinge. Gene Wolfe. Roger Zelazny.

When I was fifteen the high school asked my mother to withdraw me. She agreed, and my mother and I and the administrator were all relieved. I had managed excellent grades despite 85 percent absence, and the school couldn’t deal with what that did to their records, they explained. My already-overwhelmed mother had never tried to force me to attend. She could see how sick I was, and knew how much I actually wanted to be there. But truancy officials had started to get involved.

All the cranky old male doctors I saw never asked the questions that could have got me some measure of help, or at least understanding. They accused me of taking drugs.

Then my stable if less-than-ideal life was thrown into chaos when my mother was suddenly killed, leaving me an orphan at 17. The court emancipated me, but while I was an adult on paper, I still couldn’t function. One week every month, I was homebound and useless, and every week of every month I had no education, no experience, and no connections.

I’d wanted to be a physicist since I read about ions in the encyclopedia when I was six. I don’t think there is any more impossible career for a person who can’t go to school.

But you know where this is going.

I met a technical nonfiction writer, who gave me a copy of his how-to book, which explained how to make a living writing for magazines. At last, something I could do! I subscribed to Writer’s Digest. I contacted markets for guidelines. I set up a word processor.

I… wrote a fantasy novel instead, because of course I did. What else was going to come out of my brain?

My new husband and in-laws were very supportive of my choice to be a writer. My brilliant, highly-educated, world-traveling mother-in-law had never read any genre work. She thought I was amazingly creative instead of just regurgitating all the stuff I’d read.

It was a start.

After finishing that first novel, I made writer friends online. I went to conventions. I attended Viable Paradise (the only workshop that would let my husband come along. No way I could go anywhere without someone to look out for me).

I thought my life made sense at last. Here was a career path where all my reading would pay off. Where my lack of credentials and disability wouldn’t shut me out.

Well.

It’s been a long time. I’ve watched two “generations” of writer-friends succeed and move on without me, and a third is starting to fade into the distance. Turns out that being a professional writer is something like Olympic-levels of competitive, and you need to do a lot of training and be in top form to compete.

I couldn’t compete. One frustrated year I carefully tracked my days. I was productive maybe twenty hours a month. Doubts constantly whispered that only healthy, affluent, college-educated people with nice families ever succeeded as writers. Sometimes they still do.

But this is an essay on how science fiction saved me. I stuck at it. I mean, I didn’t have any other options, you know? I kept working to improve. I made new friends and new connections.

My background required me to be more creative in my stories. I don’t have any idea what it’s like to have a regular family, go to school, hold a job. So my YA fantasy novel (forthcoming in spring 2018 from REUTS Publications!) is about a world of magical islands, featuring teens who train to fight in light battles using mirrors, lenses, and prisms. I figure I am as much of an expert in that background as anyone. My adult SF novel (out on sub, wish me luck) is about a lost colony world, settled by three experimental utopias.

It turns out that in writing science fiction being unique can be a benefit, practice eventually works, and persistence is really what matters. Not that it will ever be easy. My small press publication after 25 years of trying is not likely to be lauded as a success by anyone. But without science fiction, I wouldn’t have had anything to aspire to, and I would never have produced something I could share with the world.

We are an amazingly open-minded industry, overall. We’re not perfect, but I don’t honestly know any place more welcoming of all different kinds of people, as previous projects in the “Destroy” series have helped demonstrate. But we can be as welcoming as possible, and that still doesn’t mean it’s fair. Professional writing preferentially rewards the privileged, whether that privilege be social, economic, or, as we are addressing here, physical health.

Try to remember that it’s not an even playing field for everyone. Remember that the people who aren’t just like you might have a new perspective you want to hear.

And they might not have any other options.

© 2018 by Laurel Amberdine

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She read a novel a day for over a decade, until she married someone who occasionally wanted to talk to her, putting an end to that streak.

She currently lives in San Francisco where she works as Assistant Editor at both Locus Magazine and Lightspeed Magazine. She is willing to entertain offers from other magazines that start with “L.”

She has published poetry and short fiction, but loves novels best of all. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing.

After the Last Chapter
by Andi C. Buchanan

This is a story of how I found my life in a book, and what happened after the final pages.

The book in question was John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (also titled Re-Birth) and I first read it when I was perhaps twelve, in snatches over breakfast or in the school dinner queue. As for many, my introduction to science fiction came around this time, reading my way through Asimov, Wells, Orwell, and, perhaps less commonly, John Christopher and Louise Lawrence. I fantasised about worlds beyond our own, worried alone about nuclear war, pondered the ethics of robotics when I should have been focused on algebra.

The Chrysalids was different. The edge of panic started to seize me when I read it. I knew it was saying something deeply personal to me; was too scared to contemplate what.

The novel is set in northern Canada, some years after a global nuclear war, in a society ruled by religious extremism which denounces any biological mutation or atypicality as the work of the devil. This is a world in which disabled people are either killed or sterilised, then banished from society. The book follows a group who are forced to conceal their telepathic abilities for fear of their lives. At the conclusion of the novel they are rescued by a woman from the island country of Sealand, where these telepathic abilities are both common and viewed as a positive stage in evolution.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why this work was so important to me. I was both autistic and queer, only partially aware of both, in a conservative country where neither was acceptable. I tried—and failed—to find a balance between the inevitable violence that would follow any expression or exploration of my reality, and the slower, but no less destructive, intense denial of any sense of self. I spent my teens careering between rebellion and obsessive rule following, between internalised self-hatred and burning anger, eventually determining that no matter what I did, the parts of my person I did not yet know to call autistic would always be suppressed whenever they dared to show themselves.

So the idea that there was something wrong with them, not me, that there were others like me, and that I would find a safer, happier life, were fantastically appealing for all the obvious reasons.

No-one would be coming to save me, though. I had to save myself. I saved money from my Saturday library job, money from my grandfather, money from a summer employed removing staples from hospital records. I opened a dated school atlas and traced a route as far as I could go. New Zealand. Sealand.

It would be a lie to say I picked my destination based on a fifty year old novel; language, climate, and the easy accessibility of a working holiday visa were my more immediate concerns. But the novel wasn’t far from my mind. I’d like to say I packed it and kept it with me the whole time but in truth I put it in a box of books I gave to my younger brother, taking satisfaction—if combined with a little fear—in purging as much of my old life as possible.

And that’s where the story ended. I’d made my escape. There were people like me here, and I was safe. All threads wrapped up, a satisfying read.

Except that wasn’t the end of the story.

I was safer and happier than I had ever been, yes, and I began to find pockets of community, began to talk about myself, to claim the word “disabled” and understand how it related to me. But none of the science fiction of my pre-teens told me how to navigate the fact that even our refuges contain oppression and discrimination, and that every question I found answers to only yielded a dozen more. Nor could I leave my past behind as easily as I had once hoped. I doubted myself, questioned myself, used the terms that had been used against me—lazy, clumsy, useless—against myself. I experienced times that were deeply painful, that made me once again want to pack my bags and run, and sometimes I’d stare at a map and despair that there was nowhere further away to run to.

And where things did become easier—or at least straightforward—for me, there were always others who were struggling. The forces pushing people like me down were perhaps not as strong, and sometimes avoided me altogether, but the more I built myself back up, the more I could see others around me being marginalised.

The easy solutions fiction can provide are rarely present in reality.

I began, too, to realise the flaws in The Chrysalids. It was inescapable that, in what I had read as a celebration of difference and a condemnation of oppression, the characters readers were invited to identity with were those whose mutations would either be inconsequential in our society (such as an additional toe) or could be thought of as super-powers (such as telepathy). Those who were more obviously different, or who experienced significant impairment, were presented as deserving of compassion but not as protagonists, effectors of change, or potential members of a sustainable society. And in the presentation of telepathic abilities as an advanced stage in evolution, Wyndham ends up reinforcing some of the eugenic implications he earlier seemed to challenge.

I keep The Chrysalids—a new copy—on my shelf, and I reread it every few years. It’s a brilliant, important book for all its flaws, and it’s served me well. But here’s another thing that’s changed: when I want science fiction that I related to as a disabled person, I no longer have to grasp at anything which could possibly, non-literally be about people like me, and offer me a glimmer of hope. Part of this journey has been discovering science fiction by disabled writers that I relate to in more complex ways, stories where people like me are allowed to be directly and unambiguously on the page. Stories I don’t have to secretly claim, but are written—and waiting—for people like me.

© 2018 by Andi C. Buchanan

Andi C. Buchanan is a writer, editor, and part-time space lobster based near Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Their work is published or forthcoming in Apex, Kaleidotrope, Glittership, and more. Andi is also the editor of Capricious magazine, a freelance web developer, and likes cheese and dinosaurs. Their website is at andicbuchanan.org or you can find them on Twitter @andicbuchanan.

Dancing in Iron Shoes
by Nicolette Barischoff

Space Unicorns, I leave you with a Question.

I have an open-door policy when it comes to able-bodied writers asking me questions about disability and the crafting of disabled characters. Whether it’s specific questions about disabled experiences, or a borrowed detail here and there to help build a nuanced disabled character. Any writer working on a specific project may approach me, and if their questions fall within the bounds of my own experience, I will answer them as thoroughly and honestly as I can.

You can learn everything about a writer from the kinds of questions they choose to ask. A writer who asks thoughtful, engaging questions will go on to write a thoughtful, engaging story. A writer who’s just hoping to kick the can of disability research down the road a little will soon discover that their work’s only just beginning.

And every now and again, a writer will ask you a question you’ve never been asked. Sometimes, it’s a question so vital and basic you can’t believe nobody thought to ask it before, including you.

What do you want to see more of in representations of disability?

What do YOU want to see more of in representations of disability?

I actually had to think awhile about how to answer it. Of course there are the self-evident answers: I want characters who are well-rounded, who are real, who are interesting. Characters who live honestly within their limitations without ever being consumed by them. But let’s assume the writer who asks this question is already planning on doing these things as part of writing a halfway decent story. What, specifically, do I as a disabled reader want to read more of?

The answer I came up with was that I wanted characters whose disabled bodies felt lived-in. I wanted to see characters whose disabilities were nothing new to them, who had inhabited their bodies for their entire lives (or at least a good long time) and who knew how to navigate their possibly deeply inconvenient worlds without thinking very much about it.

The trouble for me is that disabled characters as written by able-bodied writers tend to spend a lot of time thinking about disability, and feeling things about it. Bran Stark, one of the more prominent disabled protagonists right now, spends an awful lot of his inner life lamenting his broken body, even five books later. Around book four, I would have loved to experience a little less lamenting and a little more of Bran adapting to the new limitations of his body. What’s Bran’s day-to-day like? Apart from a convenient supernaturally gentle giant, what clever medieval assistive technologies have the household clergy dreamed up to help their lord get around Winterfell? (The handsome man at my elbow would like to point out that George R.R. Martin did rather thoughtfully line the walls of Bran’s bedroom with weight-bearing bars.) What does he think about in the moments when he’s pissing, or bathing or eating or scratching an itch? There’s gotta be whole hours where even Bran Stark doesn’t think about his broken back at all.

Tyrion Lannister, A Song of Ice and Fire’s born-disabled (by Westeros standards, anyway) protagonist doesn’t often fare much better. Though he’s figured out how to get by in his world by hook or by crook, he’s still awfully bogged down by the way all the big people treat him. Here’s the thing, though. If you’ve been treated the same way by crappy people all your life, you tend not to let it linger in your thoughts too long. You learn what people’s expectations and judgements of you are pretty quickly, and you learn how to get out around them.

If I roll into a room where a great big oblivious able-bodied person has already decided I’m not worth listening to, I don’t waste time getting angry because I’m not being listened to. Maybe I ought to, but I don’t. I’m already too busy thinking of ways to subvert this person’s expectations, to force their attention in order to get what I need. That’s not cynicism or bitterness; it’s adaptation, and all humans do it.

When a disabled character can’t stop thinking about disability, what that tells me is that the author can’t stop thinking about disability. They can’t imagine what it’s like to live and work and play and flirt and fuck in my body, even for a few paragraphs. There are able-bodied writers who can imagine all sorts of other fantastical lives (boys and girls who live as wolves while they sleep, young men who live in the shadow of a great wall of ice and never grow warm) but can’t figure out how an eight-year-old boy gets by, moment by moment, without desperately wanting to walk.

At Worldcon this year, I attended a panel on older female characters in science fiction and fantasy. In expressing what irked her about young authors trying to write older characters, one panelist hit the nail on the head. “Young people don’t really understand just how boring everyday pain is,” she said.

Ha! There’s the rub. When able-bodied twenty-six-year-old writers think about the pain or inconvenience of disability, they can’t imagine living with it. Trying to explain to young, fit twenty-somethings about my chronic pain was like revealing to them that I spent my evenings dancing in iron shoes so the devil wouldn’t eat me. “You mean you’re in pain all the time?” as their eyes got wide and round.

Continual pain seems so impossible to them, so unaccountable, like something that would take up all your thoughts, and every bit of every story you were ever in. It would be its own subplot, running through the story like a dark, noisy river. And for some disabled people it does exactly that. But for me—for many of us—pain is just there. It’s well-traveled territory. We know the ins and outs of it so well it doesn’t mean much to us anymore, other than a muscle relaxant, or a quick soak in the tub, or a lie-down. It’s part of the rhythms of being alive, more of a character quirk than a subplot.

Yes, I am in some level of pain, pretty much all the time. Yes, my life is at times horribly undignified and inconvenient. And the minute I finish writing this essay, I’m going to stop thinking about it entirely. Until tomorrow morning when I have a lower-back spasm that gives me sailor-mouth for a few minutes. After which time I will get up, take a hot soak, and eat, and work, and play.

That’s just my boring, totally ordinary life.

Writers should be able to find the boring bits in any kind of life, cut most of them out for the sake of pacing, and then sprinkle a few choice bits back in. That’s realism.

So, that’s my Answer. As a writer with a relatively stable and very visible disability, what I want to see in disability representation is more ordinariness, more boring bits. More basic adaptation.

But the answer to this Question is different for every one of us. So what are your answers, my dear sweet space unicorns? Think long and hard to yourselves, and then maybe write it down someplace for some of us writers to read. I invite you to be specific, to be wild, to be ambitious, to be strange. As of this moment.

What do you want to see?

© 2018 by Nicolette Barischoff

Nicolette Barischoff was born with spastic cerebral palsy, which has only made her more awesome. Her fiction has appeared in Long Hidden, Accessing the Future, The Journal of Unlikely Academia, Podcastle, and Angels of the Meanwhile. As an editor, Nicolette will be the Guest Nonfiction Editor for Uncanny Magazine’s Disabled People Destroy Fantasy special issue. She regularly writes about disability, feminism, sex- and body-positivity, and how all these fit together. Her personal essays on these topics get read way more than her fiction does, which is only a little annoying. She regularly collaborates with visual and performance artists to promote normalization of visibly disabled bodies. She’s been on the front page of CBS New York, where they called her activism public pornography and suggested her face was a Public Order Crime.

Table of Contents

- About Our Cover Artist: Likhain

- The Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Manifesto

- Fiction Introduction
- The House on the Moon
- Birthday Girl
- An Open Letter to the Family
- Heavy Lifting
- The Frequency of Compassion
- The Stars Above
- The Things I Miss the Most
- Abigail Dreams of Weather
- A House by the Sea
- Disconnect
- This Will Not Happen to You
- Reprints Introduction
- By Degrees and Dilatory Time
- Listen
- Nonfiction Introduction
- Design a Spaceship

- The Linguistics of Disability, or, Empathy > Sympathy

- The Body to Come: Afrofuturist Posthumanism and Disability

- The Expendable Disabled Heroes of Marvel’s Infinity War

- And the Dragon Was in the Skin

- Miles Vorkosigan and “Excellent Life Choices”: (Neuro)Divergence and Decision-Making in Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga

- Give Me Heroism or Give Me Death
- My Genre Makes a Monster of Me
- The Future Is (Not) Disabled
- Poetry Introduction
- Ctenophore Soul
- core/debris/core
- How to Fix a Dancer When it Breaks
- the body argonautica
- All the Stars Above the Sea
- Convalescence
- hypothesis for apocalypse
- Spatiotemporal Discontinuity
- You Wanted Me to Fly
- Interview: Rachel Swirsky
- Interview: Marissa Lingen
- Personal Essays Introduction
- The Stories We Find Ourselves In

- The Horror and the Reality: Mental Illness Through the Lens of Horror

- We Are Not Daredevil. Except When We Are Daredevil

- Nihil De Nobis, Sine Nobis

- From Rabbit Holes to Wormholes: KidLit Memories

- Stories That Talk
- Once We Were Prophets
- Science Fiction as Community
- Constructing the Future
- Disabled or Just Broken?
- Now I Survive
- Instant Demotion in Respectability
- Being Invisible
- We Are Not Your Backstories
- Disabled Enough
- Malfunctioning Space Stations
- BFFs in the Apocalypse
- Why I Limp
- Disability and Fiction

- The Only Thing Faster Than Tonight: Mr. Darkness

- Homo Duplex
- A Dream to Shape My World
- To Boldly Go
- Move Like You’re From Thra, My People

- Everything Is True: A Non-Neurotypical Experience with Fiction

- Unlocking the Garret

- The Stories We Tell and the Amazon Experiment

- Science Fiction Saved My Life
- After the Last Chapter
- Dancing in Iron Shoes