The Children of Gal

The Children of Gal

By Allen M. Steele (excerpt)

In the days that followed, Sanjay did his best to put his mother’s banishment behind him. With less than three weeks – thirteen days – left in summer, there was much that needed to be done before the season changed: fish to be caught, dried, and preserved, seeds planted and spring crops tended, houses and boats repaired. He and his father put away Aara’s belongings – they couldn’t bring themselves to burn her clothes, a customary practice for the families of those sent to Purgatory – and accepted the sympathy of those kind enough to offer it, but it took time for them to get used to a house which now seemed empty; the absence of laughter and the vacant seat at the dinner table haunted them whenever they came home.

Sanjay didn’t feel very much like attending the Juli service at the Shrine, but Dayall insisted; if he didn’t make an appearance, the more inquisitive Disciples might wonder whether Aara’s son shared her blasphemous beliefs. Dayall was an observant Galian if not a particularly devout one, and the last thing they wanted to do was draw the attention of the Guardians. So Frione morning they joined the Disciples in the dome-roofed temple in the middle of town. Once they’d bowed in homage to the scared genesis plant that grew beside the Shrine, they went in to sit together on floor mats in the back of the room, doing their best to ignore the curious glances of those around them. Yet as R’beca stood before the altar, where the box-like frame of the Transformer stood with its inert block of Galmatter in the center, and droned on about how the souls of the Chosen Children were gathered by Gal from the vile netherworld of Erf and carried “twenty-two lights and a half through the darkness” to Eos, Sanjay found himself studying the Teacher resting within his creche behind the altar.

The Children of Gal. Photo by ElenaB.

Even as a child, Sanjay had often wondered why the Teacher didn’t resemble the Children or their descendants. Taller than an adult islander, his legs had knees that were curiously forward-jointed and hinds lacking the thin membranes that ran between the toes. His arms, folded across his chest, were shorter, while the fingers of his fores were long and didn’t have webbing. His neck was short as well, supporting a hairless head whose face was curiously featureless: eyes perpetually open and staring, a lipless mouth, a straight nose that lacked nostrils. And although the Teacher wore an ornate, brocaded robe dyed purple with roseberry, every youngster who’d ever sneaked up to the creche after services to peel beneath the hem knew that the Teacher lacked genitalia; there was only a smooth place between his legs.

These discrepancies were explained by the Word: the Teacher had been fashioned by Gal to resemble the demons who ruled Erf, and the Creator had made him the way to remind the Children of the place from which they’d come. This was why the Teacher was made of Galmatter instead of flesh and blood. According to history, everyone diligently learned and recited in school, the Teacher and the Disciples had fled the mainland for Providence just before the Great Storm, leaving behind the unfaithful who’d ignored Gal’s warning that their land would soon be consumed by wind and water.

The Teacher no longer moved or spoke, nor had he ever done so in recent memory. Yet his body didn’t decay, so he was preserved in the Shrine; along with the Transformer and the Galmatter block, they were holy relics, reminders of the Stormyarn. In his sermons, R’beca often prophesized the coming of the day when the Teacher would awaken and bring forth new revelations of the Word of Gal, but Sunjay secretly doubted this would ever occur. If he did, he hoped to be there when it happened, he’d like to see how someone could walk on all fours with limbs and extremities and misshapen as these.

It Takes More Muscles to Frown

It Takes More Muscles to Frown

By Ned Beauman (excerpt)

“Cantabrian don’t have access to any pipeline data,” I said.

“But they built our security architecture. They have back doors.”

“The programmers are in Singapore,” said Soto.

“Doesn’t matter. The cartels have reach. Hey, that reminds me,” Obregon said, tapping his phone for another round. “So there’s this cartel boss’ son, right? Eight years old. And his nanny tells him that if he wants a lot of presents for Christmas this year, he should write a letter to Baby Jesus. Because if it wasn’t for Baby Jesus, we wouldn’t even have Christmas. So the boy sits down to write the letter, and first boat.” He looks at it, then he crumples it up and throws it away. He gets out a new piece of paper, and this time he writes, “Dear Baby Jesus, I’ve been a good boy most of the year, so I want a new speedboat.” He looks at it, then he crumples it up and throws it away again. But the he gets an idea. He goes into his abuela’s room, takes a statue of the Virgin Mary, wraps it up in duct tape, puts it in the closet, and locks the door. Then he gets another piece of paper and he writes, “Dear Baby Jesus, if you ever want to see your mother again…”

Everyone guffawed. And event though I’d heard the joke told better before, my guffaw was more convincing than anyone else’s, at least visually. Because I had help.

The electroactive polymer prosthesis had been developed at the UC Davis Medical Center as a treatment for paralysis. It still hadn’t been approved for use by regulators anywhere in the world. But the Nuevos Zetas’ hackers had stolen the designs and forwarded them to a fabricator in Guanghou that specialized in biomedical prototypes. Presumably both Cantabrian and the company that made the emotion detection software were aware that the technology existed, but thought they had a few years’ grace before they had to worry about it.

It takes more muscles to frown. Photo by Elena

There wasn’t enough metal in my face to show up on a body scanner, and even under a close examination the lacework under my skin could easily be mistaken for the titanium ally mesh sometimes used in facial reconstruction surgery. It worked on roughly the same principle as a shipbuilder’s powered exoskeleton, but in miniature: when you initiated a movement, the prosthesis detected that movement and threw its own weight behind it. A smile that would normally be thin and mirthless would instead dawn across your whole face. Then it would linger and fade, like a real smile, instead of clicking off like a fake one. Conversely, when you tried to keep your face neutral, the prosthesis would steady anything that might squinch or quiver or droop. No more nervousness, no more death face.

Because the emotion detection software that Cantabrian used could also detect spikes in facial temperature and perspiration, I had a unit in each of of my cheekbones to dispense a fizzle of magnetite nanoparticles into my facial veins, which in an emergency would partially neutralize both tells. So far, though, that had never been necessary, because the support of electroactive polymers meant I was always relaxed about telling lies (or listening to jokes). If I started babbling or gnawing my fingernails or squirming in my seat, an interviewer would certainly notice, and there was nothing the prosthesis could do about that. But it was easy to train yourself not to show any of those signs. Whereas it was impossible, as far as anybody knew, to train the microexpressions out of your face.

The prosthesis could be switched on and off wirelessly. On my phone I had a settings app disguised as a puzzle game. I took off my girdle for sleep and exercise and sex, otherwise I got a sore jaw. But the rest of the time, I kept it on. Once you get used to having full control over your face, it begins to seem very strange that you ever tolerated its delinquency. If a social network decided to broadcast your deepest feelings to the world without permission, spurting emojis left and right, you would delete your account. And yet your body does precisely that. Crying, blushing, sweating, goosebumps, involuntary facial expressions – not to mention erections, when visible, and stress-related incontinence, in extreme cases – are all serious data breaches. Strangers on the Metro have no more right to know how you’re feeling than strangers on the Internet

The Daughters of John Demetrius

The Daughters of John Demetrius

By Joe Pitkin (excerpt)

On waking he felt again the perfect confidence that he would walk out of Dessicant Wells with the child of Lupe Hansen. The night’s sleep, the revitalizing Ambrosias, the brilliant white tunic all convinced him that success was a foregone conclusion.

Then, walking out of the Hotel Vieja Delicias, he saw a lilith snooping about as she came up the road, peering into windows, swiveling her half-snake head to and fro like a flashlight. Mendel had worried about the blood on the old tunic. It wouldn’t have hurt him to have worried about it a little ore. But he had thought it unlikely for one like Perses to carry radio tags in his blood like a child or a criminal. Mendel’s main worry had been that the bloodstains would frighten the naturals.

The lilith was a good way up the street, moving past a trio of vulgaris hauling in enormous handcart towards some market or warehouse. Mendel was the only other divine on the road; she would spot him for sur if he began to run. To his left a laundromat operated out of a family’s garage. He turned into it as though that had been his errand all along.

A broad-faced natural with a thick braid of hair in the ancient style looked up at him from the pile of laundry her neighbors had left for her. Mendel wondered for half a second whether the old bloodstained tunic was in the pile, sent over by the hotel to be washed instead of incinerated as Mendel had demanded. He raised the back of his hand to her like a strange greeting; his fingernail, tapered and sculpted, began to grow out of his index finger into thirty fatal centimeters of talon.

Daughters of John Demetrius. Photo by Elena

“It there a bloody tunic in your laundry?” he asked in Spanish.

“No, lord,” she answered, emotionless.

He sheathed the claw back into his hand. “Is there a back door?”

“It leads to our house, lord.”

He asked if he could get to the roof by that way. He could. For a short, waddling woman, she moved in a hurry, and silently, and he followed her into a dusty cinderblock courtyard with a legion of geraniums growing in old rusted cans. The lip of the roof hung three meters or o above the ground; Mendel leapt, caught the lip, and vaulted himself up. He looked back at her only a moment to say in his antique Spanish: “From the day the gods bless your house.” Then, with the some finger that a moment before had been a blade of fingernail, he exhorted her to be silent. He stayed not a moment to see her bowing deferentially, but like a loon lifting off from the water he glided across the roof and leapt into the street behind, and then he ran faster than any lilith dep into the mirages of the desert.

He took a roundabout way back to Dessecant Wells, running far to the west into the creosote and circling back southeast. It was nearly noo when he arrived, and a call went up when he came into sight of them. By the time he walked into the central courtyyard they were arrayed in front of him in all their scabby glory like a choir. In the center of the formation, looking more desolate even than the day before. Yet at the girl’s feet was a backpack, and she stood dressed and washed and combed like a lamb for sacrifice.

The headwoman was the first to speak: “Will you, lord, cure us of our sickness?”

He showed them the trick with the water and ashes that would soften the corn kernels, that trick which even the poorest village in Mexico would have known in the last age, that trick which in fact had been discovered not far from Dessicant Wells nearly four thousand years before. As far as the villagers were concerned, Chloe Hansen was a fair trade for such knowledge.

During the celebratory dinner the little girl looked at him balefully and silently. If she had cried on learning that she would go with him, or if she was to cry about it later, she wasn’t crying now. Of course, Mendel had taken the other children whether they had cried or not. But it was always easier for him if they didn’t cry.

The sun was low before they were ready to set out. The headwoman and others clamored for him to stay one more night, to leave in the morning – give the girl one more night with her mother. But the girl would be safe at night, Mendel assured them and no marauder on the road would be so foolish that he would try to steal a child from a god

Hello, Hello; Can You Hear Me, Hello

Hello, Hello; Can You Hear Me, Hello

Seanan McGuire

An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow – whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary – gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.

“All right, Paulson, this was a funny prank, but you’ve used up over a dozen computing hours,” said Mike, pushing away from his own monitor. “Time to pack it in.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Just… just wait, all right?” There’s one thing we haven’t tried yet.”

Mike looked at me and frowned. I looked pleadingly back. Finally, he sighed.

“Admittedly, you’ve encouraged the neural net to make some great improvements. You can have one more try. But that’s it! After that, we need this lab back.”

“One more is all I need.”

Can you hear me? Photo by Elena

I’d been hoping to avoid this. It would’ve been easier if I could have replicated the original results without restoring to recreation of all factors. Not easier for the bird: easier for my nerves. Angie was already mad at me, and Tasha was unsettled, and I was feeling about as off-balance as I ever did.

Opening the door and sticking my head out into the hall, I looked to my left, where my wife and children were settled in ergonomic desk chairs. Angie was focused on her tablet, composing an email to her work with quick swipes of her fingers, like she was trying to wipe them clean of some unseen, clinging film. Billes was sitting next to her, attention fixed on a handheld game device. Greg sat on the floor between them. He had several of his toy trains and was rolling them around an imaginary track, making happy humming noises.

He was the first one to notice me. He looked up and beamed, calling, “Mama.”

“Hi, buddy,” I said. Angie and Billie were looking up as well. I offered my wife a sheepish smile. “Hi, hon. We’re almost done in here. I just need to borrow Billie for a few minutes, if that’s okay?”

It wasn’t okay: I could see that in her eyes. We were going to fight about this later, and I was going to lose. Billie, however, bounced right to her feet, grinning ear to ear as she dropped her game on the chair where she’d been siting. “Do I get to work science with you?”

“I want science!” Greg protested, his own smile collapsing into the black hole of toddler unhappiness.

“Oh, no, bud.” I crouched down, putting myself on as much of a level with him as I could. “We’ll do some science when we get home, okay?” Water science. With the hose. I just need Billie right now, and I need you to stay here with Mumma and keep her company. She’ll get lonely if you both come with me.”

Greg gave me a dubious look before twisting to look suspiciously up at Angie. She nodded quickly.

“She’s right,” she said. “I would be so lonely out here all by myself. Please stat and keep me company.”

“Okay,” said Greg, after weighing his options. He reached contentedly for his train. “Water science later.”

Aware that I had just committed myself to being squirted by the hose in our backyard for at least an hour, I took Billie’s hand and ushered her quickly away before anything else could go wrong.

The terminal she’d be using to make her call was waiting for us when we walked back into the room. I ushered her over to the chair, ignoring the puzzled looks from my colleagues. “Remember the lady who kept calling the house?” I asked. “Would you like to talk to her again?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers,” said Billie, eyeing me warily as she waited for the catch. She was old enough to know that when a parent offered to break the rules, there was always a catch

Emergence

Emergence

By Gwyneth Jones (excerpt)

Dr. Lena’s failure to put me in touch with a past patient was covered by a perfectly normal confidentiality clause. But if Lei was still around (and nobody of that identity seemed to have left Earth; that was easy to check), I thought I knew how to find her. I tried my luck in the former USA first, inspired by that conversation with Charlie Newark of Washington. He had to have met the Underground somehow, or he’d never have talked to me like that. I crossed the continent to the Republic of California, and then crossed the Pacific. I didn’t linger anywhere much. The natives seemed satisfied with their vas thriving cities, and tiny “wildeerness” enclaves, but I remembered something different. I finally made contact with a cell in Harbin, North East China. But I was a danger and a disappointment to them: too conspicuous, and useless as a potential courier. There are ways of smuggling sentient Ais (none of them safe) but I’d get flagged up the moment I booked a passage, and with my ancient record, I’d be ripped to shreds before I was allowed to board, Senior Magistrate or no –

I moved on quickly.

I think it was in Harbin that I first saw Lei, but I have a feeling I’d been primed, by glimpses that didn’t register, before I turned my head one day and there she was. She was eating a smoked sausage sandwich, I was eating salad (a role reversal). I thought she smiled.

My old friend looked extraordinarily vivid. The food stall was crowded: next moment she was gone.

Emergence and calm and quiet. Photo by Elena.

Media scouts assailed me all the time: pretending to be innocent strangers. If I was trapped I answered the questions as briefly as possible. Yes, I was probably one of the oldest people alive. Yes, I’d been treated at Weigen Schnee, at my own expense. No, I would not discuss my medical history. No, I did not feel threatened living in Outer Reaches. No, it was not true I’d changed my mind about “so called AI slavery…”

I’d realized I probably wasn’t part of a secrete cull. Overpopulation wasn’t the problem it had been. And why start with the terminally ill, anyway? But I was seeing the world through a veil. The strange absences; abstractions grew on me. The hallucinations more pointed; more personal… I was no longer sure I was dying, but something was happening. How long before the message was made plain?