Table of Contents

- INTRODUCTION by John Joseph Adams

- AMARYLLIS by Carrie Vaughn

- THE THINGS THAT MAKE ME WEAK AND STRANGE GET ENGINEERED AWAY by Cory Doctorow

- IS THIS YOUR DAY TO JOIN THE REVOLUTION? by Genevieve Valentine

- JUST DO IT by Heather Lindsley

- ARTIES AREN’T STUPID by Jeremiah Tolbert

- OF A SWEET SLOW DANCE IN THE WAKE OF TEMPORARY DOGS by Adam-Troy Castro

- RESISTANCE by Tobias Buckell

- CIVILIZATION by Vylar Kaftan

- FOR FURTHER READING compiled by Ross E. Lockhart

- ENJOYED THIS SAMPLER?

- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SELECTIONS FROM

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

SAN FRANCISCO

Other Books edited by John Joseph Adams

Wastelands

Seeds of Change

The Living Dead

By Blood We Live

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Living Dead 2

The Way of the Wizard

Forthcoming Anthologies

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

The Book of Cthulhu

Brave New Worlds © 2011 by John Joseph Adams

This edition of Selections from Brave New Worlds

© 2011 by Night Shade Books

This sampler is licensed for individual use only.

Cover art and design © 2011 by Cody Tilson

Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

All rights reserved

Introduction © 2011 John Joseph Adams

Author Notes © 2011 John Joseph Adams and Wendy N. Wagner

An extension of this copyright page can be found on page 125.

Internet Edition

Look for Brave New Worlds (ISBN 978-1-59780-221-5)

at better booksellers near you.

Night Shade Books

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For Christie

INTRODUCTION

by John Joseph Adams

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, and, of course, the book this anthology is named for—Brave New World—are the cornerstones of dystopian literature in novel form, but there has never, to my knowledge, been an anthology collecting all the best, classic works of dystopian short fiction in one volume. This book aims to do exactly that, spanning from 1948 to the present day, from what is perhaps the classic dystopian short story—“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson—to stories just published in the last two years but which will surely stand the test of time.

The roots of the word dystopia—dys-and -topia—are from the Ancient Greek for “bad” and “place,” and so we use the term to describe an unfavorable society in which to live. “Dystopia” is not a synonym for “post-apocalyptic”; it also is not a synonym for a bleak, or darkly imagined future. In a dystopian story, society itself is typically the antagonist; it is society that is actively working against the protagonist’s aims and desires. This oppression frequently is enacted by a totalitarian or authoritarian government, resulting in the loss of civil liberties and untenable living conditions, caused by any number of circumstances, such as world overpopulation, laws controlling a person’s sexual or reproductive freedom, and living under constant surveillance.

Whether or not a society is perceived as a dystopia is usually determined by one’s point of view; what one person may consider to be a horrible dystopia, another may find completely acceptable or even nigh-utopian. For instance, if you don’t care about procreating, then living in a world in which the birth rate is strictly regulated wouldn’t seem very dystopic to you; to someone who values that very much, however, having society tell you how, when (or how often) you can procreate would seem like something out of a nightmare. Or a person who doesn’t enjoy reading or intellectual thinking might not care if books are banned… or even hunted down and destroyed, as in Fahrenheit 451, whereas you, dear reader, would probably care very much.

Many societies in fiction are depicted as utopias when in fact they are dystopias; like angels and demons, the two are sides of the same coin. This seemingly paradoxical situation can arise because, in a dystopia, the society often gives up A in exchange for B, but the benefit of B blinds the society to the loss of A; it is often not until many years later that the loss of A is truly felt, and the citizens come to realize that the world they once thought acceptable (or even ideal) is not the world they thought it was. That’s part of what is so compelling—and insidious—about dystopian fiction: the idea that you could be living in a dystopia and not even know it.

Dystopias are often seen as “cautionary tales,” but the best dystopias are not didactic screeds, and the best dystopias do not draw their power from whatever political/societal point they might be making; the best dystopias speak to the deeper meanings of what it is to be one small part of a teeming civilization… and of what it is to be human.

And so here are thirty-three such stories, representing the best of what dystopian fiction has to offer. So read them, and be glad that doing so won’t bring firemen to your door to burn all your books—and your house with them.

AMARYLLIS

by Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, which started with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. Her latest books are Kitty Goes to War;a young adult novel, Voices of Dragons; and a stand-alone fantasy novel, Discord’s Apple. Her short work has appeared many times in Realms of Fantasy and in a number of anthologies, such as By Blood We Live; The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance; Fast Ships, Black Sails; and Warriors. She has a story forthcoming in my anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, and this story first appeared in my online science fiction magazine, Lightspeed.

“Amaryllis” gives us a world that, compared to some dystopias, feels downright wholesome. No one is tortured; no one lives under scrutiny; no one is executed. But the characters are caught in a society that has taken away their reproductive control. For most of us, that’s a pretty basic human right.

But there’s a good reason to take family size out of individual control, with the world’s population spinning out of control. As the author says: “in the industrialized world at least, a financially successful family or individual can stay pretty isolated from their community, if they so choose. But if there’s ever a cataclysmic loss of resources, that could change.” And in the future Carrie Vaughn spins, a desperate community must contain its population—or die.

Our next story’s debatable dystopic quotient aside, this story explores the idea that while one never sets out to create a dystopia, in order for a society to survive, sometimes it is necessary to become one.

I never knew my mother, and I never understood why she did what she did. I ought to be grateful that she was crazy enough to cut out her implant so she could get pregnant. But it also meant she was crazy enough to hide the pregnancy until termination wasn’t an option, knowing the whole time that she’d never get to keep the baby. That she’d lose everything. That her household would lose everything because of her.

I never understood how she couldn’t care. I wondered what her family thought when they learned what she’d done, when their committee split up the household, scattered them—broke them, because of her. Did she think I was worth it?

It was all about quotas.

“They’re using cages up north, I heard. Off shore, anchored,” Nina said. “Fifty feet across—twice as much protein grown with half the resources, and we’d never have to touch the wild population again. We could double our quota.”

I hadn’t really been listening to her. We were resting, just for a moment; she sat with me on the railing at the prow of Amaryllis and talked about her big plans.

Wind pulled the sails taut and the fiberglass hull cut through waves without a sound, we sailed so smooth. Garrett and Sun hauled up the nets behind us, dragging in the catch. Amaryllis was elegant, a 30-foot sleek vessel with just enough cabin and cargo space—an antique but more than seaworthy. She was a good boat, with a good crew. The best.

“Marie—” Nina said, pleading.

I sighed and woke up. “We’ve been over this. We can’t just double our quota.”

“But if we got authorization—”

“Don’t you think we’re doing all right as it is?” We had a good crew—we were well fed and not exceeding our quotas; I thought we’d be best off not screwing all that up. Not making waves, so to speak.

Nina’s big brown eyes filled with tears—I’d said the wrong thing, because I knew what she was really after, and the status quo wasn’t it.

“That’s just it,” she said. “We’ve met our quotas and kept everyone healthy for years now. I really think we should try. We can at least ask, can’t we?”

The truth was: No, I wasn’t sure we deserved it. I wasn’t sure that kind of responsibility would be worth it. I didn’t want the prestige. Nina didn’t even want the prestige—she just wanted the baby.

“It’s out of our hands at any rate,” I said, looking away because I couldn’t bear the intensity of her expression.

Pushing herself off the rail, Nina stomped down Amaryllis’ port side to join the rest of the crew hauling in the catch. She wasn’t old enough to want a baby. She was lithe, fit, and golden, running barefoot on the deck, sun-bleached streaks gleaming in her brown hair. Actually, no, she was old enough. She’d been with the house for seven years—she was twenty, now. It hadn’t seemed so long.

“Whoa!” Sun called. There was a splash and a thud as something in the net kicked against the hull. He leaned over the side, the muscles along his broad, coppery back flexing as he clung to a net that was about to slide back into the water. Nina, petite next to his strong frame, reached with him. I ran down and grabbed them by the waistbands of their trousers to hold them steady. The fourth of our crew, Garrett, latched a boat hook into the net. Together we hauled the catch onto the deck. We’d caught something big, heavy, and full of powerful muscles.

We had a couple of aggregators—large buoys made of scrap steel and wood— anchored fifty miles or so off the coast. Schooling fish were attracted to the aggregators, and we found the fish—mainly mackerel, sardines, sablefish, and whiting. An occasional shark or marlin found its way into the nets, but those we let go; they were rare and outside our quotas. That was what I expected to see—something unusually large thrashing among the slick silvery mass of smaller fish. This thing was large, yes, as big as Nina—no wonder it had almost pulled them over—but it wasn’t the right shape. Sleek and streamlined, a powerful swimmer. Silvery like the rest of the catch.

“What is it?” Nina asked.

“Tuna,” I said, by process of elimination. I had never seen one in my life. “Bluefin, I think.”

“No one’s caught a bluefin in thirty years,” Garrett said. Sweat was dripping onto his face despite the bandanna tying back his shaggy dark hair.

I was entranced, looking at all that protein. I pressed my hand to the fish’s flank, feeling its muscles twitch. “Maybe they’re back.”

We’d been catching the tuna’s food all along, after all. In the old days the aggregators attracted as many tuna as mackerel. But no one had seen one in so long, everyone assumed they were gone.

“Let’s put him back,” I said, and the others helped me lift the net to the side. It took all of us, and when we finally got the tuna to slide overboard, we lost half the net’s catch with it, a wave of silvery scales glittering as they hit the water. But that was okay: Better to be under quota than over.

The tuna splashed its tail and raced away. We packed up the rest of the catch and set sails for home.

The Californian crew got their banner last season, and flew its red and green— power and fertility—from the top of the boat’s mast for all to see. Elsie of the Californian was due to give birth in a matter of weeks. As soon as her pregnancy was confirmed, she stopped sailing and stayed in the household, sheltered and treasured. Loose hands resting atop mountainous belly, she would sometimes come out to greet her household’s boat as it arrived. Nina would stare at her. Elsie might have been the first pregnant woman Nina had seen, as least since surviving puberty and developing thoughts of carrying a mountainous belly of her own.

Elsie was there now, an icon cast in bronze before the setting sun, her body canted slightly against the weight in her belly, like a ship leaning away from the wind.

We furled the sails and rowed to the pier beside the scale house. Nina hung over the prow, looking at Elsie, who was waving at Californian’s captain, on the deck of the boat. Solid and dashing, everything a captain ought to be, he waved back at her. Their boat was already secured in its home slip, their catch weighed, everything tidy. Nina sighed at the image of a perfect life, and nobody yelled at her for not helping. Best thing to do in a case like this was let her dream until she grew out of it. Might take decades, but still…

My Amaryllis crew handed crates off to the dockhand, who shifted our catch to the scale house. Beyond that were the processing houses, where onshore crews smoked, canned, and shipped the fish inland. The New Oceanside community provided sixty percent of the protein for the whole region, which was our mark of pride, our reason for existing. Within the community itself, the ten sailing crews were proudest of all. A fishing crew that did its job well and met its quotas kept the whole system running smoothly. I was lucky to even have the Amaryllis and be a part of it.

I climbed up to the dock with my folk after securing the boat, and saw that Anders was the scalemaster on duty. The week’s trip might as well have been for nothing, then.

Thirty-five years ago, my mother ripped out her implant and broke up her household. Might as well have been yesterday to a man like Anders.

The old man took a nail-biting forty minutes to weigh our catch and add up our numbers, at which point he announced, “You’re fifty pounds over quota.”

Quotas were the only way to keep the stock healthy, to prevent overfishing, shortages, and ultimately starvation. The committee based quotas on how much you needed, not how much you could catch. To exceed that—to pretend you needed more than other people—showed so much disrespect to the committee, the community, to the fishing stock.

My knees weak, I almost sat down. I’d gotten it exactly right, I knew I had. I glared at him. Garrett and Sun, a pair of brawny sailors helpless before the scalemaster in his dull gray tunic of authority, glared at him. Some days felt like nothing I did would ever be enough. I’d always be too far one way or the other over the line of “just right.” Most days, I’d accept the scalemaster’s judgment and walk away, but today, after setting loose the tuna and a dozen pounds of legitimate catch with it, it was too much.

“You’re joking,” I said. “Fifty pounds?”

“Really,” Anders said, marking the penalty on the chalkboard behind him where all the crews could see it. “You ought to know better, an experienced captain like you.”

He wouldn’t even look at me. Couldn’t look me in the eye while telling me I was trash.

“What do you want me to do, throw the surplus overboard? We can eat those fifty pounds. The livestock can eat those fifty pounds.”

“It’ll get eaten, don’t worry. But it’s on your record.” Then he marked it on his clipboard, as if he thought we’d come along and alter the public record.

“Might as well not sail out at all next week, eh?” I said.

The scalemaster frowned and turned away. A fifty pound surplus—if it even existed—would go to make up another crew’s shortfall, and next week our catch would be needed just as much as it had been this week, however little some folk wanted to admit it. We could get our quota raised like Nina wanted, and we wouldn’t have to worry about surpluses at all. No, then we’d worry about shortfalls, and not earning credits to feed the mouths we had, much less the extra one Nina wanted.

Surpluses must be penalized, or everyone would go fishing for surpluses and having spare babies, and then where would we be? Too many mouths, not enough food, no resiliency to survive disaster, and all the disease and starvation that followed. I’d seen the pictures in the archives, of what happened after the big fall.

Just enough and no more. Moderation. But so help me I wasn’t going to dump fifty pounds just to keep my record clean.

“We’re done here. Thank you, Captain Marie,” Anders said, his back to me, like he couldn’t stand the sight of me.

When we left, I found Nina at the doorway, staring. I pushed her in front of me, back to the boat, so we could put Amaryllis to bed for the night.

“The Amaryllis’ scales aren’t that far off,” Garrett grumbled as we rowed to her slip. “Ten pounds, maybe. Not fifty.”

“Anders had his foot on the pad, throwing it off. I’d bet on it,” Sun said. “Ever notice how we’re only ever off when Anders is running the scales?”

We’d all noticed.

“Is that true? But why would he do that?” said Nina, innocent Nina.

Everyone looked at me. A weight seemed to settle on us.

“What?” Nina said. “What is it?”

It was the kind of thing no one talked about, and Nina was too young to have grown up knowing. The others had all known what they were getting into, signing on with me. But not Nina.

I shook my head at them. “We’ll never prove that Anders has it in for us so there’s no good arguing. We’ll take our licks and that’s the end of it.”

Sun said, “Too many black marks like that they’ll break up the house.”

That was the worry, wasn’t it?

“How many black marks?” Nina said. “He can’t do that. Can he?”

Garrett smiled and tried to take the weight off. He was the first to sign on with me when I inherited the boat. We’d been through a lot together. “We’ll just have to find out Anders’ schedule and make sure we come in when someone else is on duty.”

But most of the time there were no schedules—just whoever was on duty when a boat came in. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Anders kept a watch for us, just to be here to rig our weigh-in.

Amaryllis glided into her slip, and I let Garrett and Sun secure the lines. I leaned back against the side, stretching my arms, staring up along the mast. Nina sat nearby, clenching her hands, her lips. Elsie and Californian’s captain had gone.

I gave herapained smile. “You might have a better chance of getting your extra mouth if you went to a different crew. The Californian, maybe.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Nina said.

Sitting up, I put my arms across her shoulders and pulled her close. Nina came to me a clumsy thirteen-year old from Bernardino, up the coast. My household had a space for her, and I was happy to get her. She’d grown up smart and eager.

She could take my place when I retired, inherit Amaryllis in her turn. Not that I’d told her that yet.

“Never. Never ever.” She only hesitated a moment before wrapping her arms around me and squeezing back.

Our household was an oasis. We’d worked hard to make it so. I’d inherited the boat, attracted the crew one by one—Garrett and Sun to run the boat, round and bustling Dakota to run the house, and she brought the talented J.J., and we fostered Nina. We’d been assigned fishing rights, and then we earned the land allocation. Ten years of growing, working, sweating, nurturing, living, and the place was gorgeous.

We’d dug into the side of a hill above the docks and built with adobe. In the afternoon sun, the walls gleamed golden. The part of the house projecting out from the hill served as a wall protecting the garden and well. Our path led around the house and into the courtyard. We’d found flat shale to use as flagstones around the cultivated plots, and to line the well, turning it into a spring. A tiny spring, but any open fresh water seemed like a luxury. On the hill above were the windmill and solar panels.

Everyone who wanted a private room had one, but only Sun did—the detached room dug into the hill across the yard. Dakota, J.J., and Nina had pallets in the largest room. Garret and I shared a bed in the smaller room. What wasn’t house was garden. We had producing fruit trees, an orange and a lemon, that also shaded the kitchen space. Corn, tomatoes, sunflowers, green beans, peas, carrots, radishes, two kinds of peppers, and anything else we could make grow on a few square feet. A pot full of mint and one of basil. For the most part we fed ourselves and so could use our credits on improving Amaryllis and bringing in specialties like rice and honey, or fabric and rope that we couldn’t make in quantity. Dakota wanted to start chickens next season, if we could trade for the chicks.

I kept wanting to throw that in the face of people like Anders. It wasn’t like I didn’t pay attention. I wasn’t a burden.

The crew arrived home; J.J. had supper ready. Dakota and J.J. had started out splitting household work evenly, but pretty quickly they were trading chores— turning compost versus hanging laundry, mending the windmill versus cleaning the kitchen—until J.J. did most everything involving the kitchen and living spaces and Dakota did everything with the garden and mechanics.

By J.J.’s sympathetic expression when he gave me my serving—smoked mackerel and vegetables tonight—someone had already told him about the run-in with the scalemaster. Probably to keep him or Dakota from asking how my day went.

I stayed out later than usual making a round of the holding. Not that I expected to find anything wrong. It was for my own peace of mind, looking at what we’d built with my own eyes, putting my hand on the trunk of the windmill, running the leaves of the lemon tree across my palms, ensuring that none of it had vanished, that it wasn’t going to. It had become a ritual.

In bed I held tight to Garrett, to give and get comfort, skin against skin, under the sheet, under the warm air coming in through the open skylight above our bed.

“Bad day?” he said.

“Can never be a bad day when the ship and crew come home safe,” I said. But my voice was flat.

Garrett shifted, running a hand down my back, arranging his arms to pull me tight against him. Our legs twined together. My nerves settled.

He said, “Nina’s right, we can do more. We can support an extra mouth. If we appealed—”

“You really think that’ll do any good?” I said. “I think you’d all be better off with a different captain.”

He tilted his face toward mine, touched my lips with his, pressed until I responded. A minute of that and we were both smiling.

“You know we all ended up here because we don’t get along with anyone else. But you make the rest of us look good.”

I squirmed against him in mock outrage, giggling.

“Plenty of crews—plenty of households—don’t ever get babies,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I don’t care about a baby so much,” I said. “I’m just tired of fighting all the time.”

It was normal for children to fight with their parents, their households, and even their committees as they grew. But it wasn’t fair, for me to feel like I was still fighting with a mother I’d never known.

The next day, when Nina and I went down to do some cleaning on Amaryllis, I tried to convince myself it was my imagination that she was avoiding me. Not looking at me. Or pretending not to look, when in fact she was stealing glances. The way she avoided meeting my gaze made my skin crawl a little. She’d decided something. She had a secret.

We caught sight of Elsie again, walking up from the docks, a hundred yards away but her silhouette was unmistakable. That distracted Nina, who stopped to stare.

“Is she really that interesting?” I said, smiling, trying to make it a joke.

Nina looked at me sideways, as if deciding whether she should talk to me. Then she sighed. “I wonder what it’s like. Don’t you wonder what it’s like?”

I thought about it a moment and mostly felt fear rather than interest. All the things that could go wrong, even with a banner of approval flying above you. Nina wouldn’t understand that. “Not really.”

“Marie, how can you be so…so indifferent?”

“Because I’m not going to spend the effort worrying about something I can’t change. Besides, I’d much rather be captain of a boat than stuck on shore, watching.”

I marched past her to the boat, and she followed, head bowed.

We washed the deck, checked the lines, cleaned out the cabin, took inventory, and made a stack of gear that needed to be repaired. We’d take it home and spend the next few days working on it before we went to sea again. Nina was quiet most of the morning, and I kept glancing at her, head bent to her work, biting her lip, wondering what she was thinking on so intently. What she was hiding.

Turned out she was working up the courage.

I handed the last bundle of net to her, then went back to double check that the hatches were closed and the cabin was shut up. When I went to climb off the boat myself, she was sitting at the edge of the dock, her legs hanging over the edge, swinging a little. She looked ten years younger, like she was a kid again, like she had when I first saw her.

I regarded her, brows raised, questioning, until finally she said, “I asked Sun why Anders doesn’t like you. Why none of the captains talk to you much.”

So that was what had happened. Sun—matter-of-fact and sensible—would have told her without any circumspection. And Nina had been horrified.

Smiling, I sat on the gunwale in front of her. “I’d have thought you’d been here long enough to figure it out on your own.”

“I knew something had happened, but I couldn’t imagine what. Certainly not—I mean, no one ever talks about it. But…what happened to your mother? Her household?”

I shrugged, because it wasn’t like I remembered any of it. I’d pieced the story together, made some assumptions. Was told what happened by people who made their own assumptions. Who wanted me to understand exactly what my place in the world was.

“They were scattered over the whole region, I think. Ten of them—it was a big household, successful, until I came along. I don’t know where all they ended up. I was brought to New Oceanside, raised up by the first Amaryllis crew. Then Zeke and Ann retired, took up pottery, went down the coast, and gave me the ship to start my own household. Happy ending.”

“And your mother—they sterilized her? After you were born, I mean.”

“I assume so. Like I said, I don’t really know.”

“Do you suppose she thought it was worth it?”

“I imagine she didn’t,” I said. “If she wanted a baby, she didn’t get one, did she? But maybe she just wanted to be pregnant for a little while.”

Nina looked so thoughtful, swinging her feet, staring at the rippling water where it lapped against the hull, she made me nervous. I had to say something.

“You’d better not be thinking of pulling something like that,” I said. “They’d split us up, take the house, take Amaryllis—”

“Oh no,” Nina said, shaking her head quickly, her denial vehement. “I would never do that, I’d never do anything like that.”

“Good,” I said, relieved. I trusted her and didn’t think she would. Then again, my mother’s household probably thought that about her too. I hopped over to the dock. We collected up the gear, slinging bags and buckets over our shoulders and starting the hike up to the house.

Halfway there Nina said, “You don’t think we’ll ever get a banner, because of your mother. That’s what you were trying to tell me.”

“Yeah.” I kept my breathing steady, concentrating on the work at hand.

“But it doesn’t change who you are. What you do.”

“The old folk still take it out on me.”

“It’s not fair,” she said. She was too old to be saying things like that. But at least now she’d know, and she could better decide if she wanted to find another household.

“If you want to leave, I’ll understand,” I said. “Any house would be happy to take you.”

“No,” she said. “No, I’ll stay. None of it—it doesn’t change who you are.”

I could have dropped everything and hugged her for that. We walked awhile longer, until we came in sight of the house. Then I asked, “You have someone in mind to be the father? Hypothetically.”

She blushed berry red and looked away. I had to grin—so that was how it stood.

When Garrett greeted us in the courtyard, Nina was still blushing. She avoided him and rushed along to dump her load in the workshop.

Garrett blinked after her. “What’s up with her?”

“Nina being Nina.”

The next trip on Amaryllis went well. We made quota in less time than I expected, which gave us half a day’s vacation. We anchored off a deserted bit of shore and went swimming, lay on deck and took in the sun, ate the last of the oranges and dried mackerel that J.J. had sent along with us. It was a good day.

But we had to head back some time and face the scales. I weighed our haul three times with Amaryllis’ scale, got a different number each time, but all within ten pounds of each other, and more importantly twenty pounds under quota. Not that it would matter. We rowed into the slip at the scale house, and Anders was the scalemaster on duty again. I almost hauled up our sails and turned us around, never to return. I couldn’t face him, not after the perfect trip. Nina was right—it wasn’t fair that this one man could ruin us with false surpluses and black marks.

Silently, we secured Amaryllis to the dock and began handing up our cargo. I managed to keep from even looking at Anders, which probably made me look guilty in his eyes. But we’d already established I could be queen of perfection and he would consider me guilty.

Anders’ frown was smug, his gaze judgmental. I could already hear him tell me I was fifty pounds over quota. Another haul like that, he’d say, we’ll have to see about yanking your fishing rights. I’d have to punch him. I almost told Garrett to hold me back if I looked like I was going to punch him. But he was already keeping himself between the two of us, as if he thought I might really do it.

If the old scalemaster managed to break up Amaryllis, I’d murder him. And wouldn’t that be a worse crime than any I might represent?

Anders drew out the moment, looking us all up and down before finally announcing, “Sixty over this time. And you think you’re good at this.”

My hands tightened into fists. I imagined myself lunging at him. At this point, what could I lose?

“We’d like an audit,” Nina said, slipping past Sun, Garrett, and me to stand before the stationmaster, frowning, hands on her hips.

“Excuse me?” Anders said.

“An audit. I think your scale is wrong, and we’d like an audit. Right?” She looked at me.

It was probably better than punching him. “Yes,” I said, after a flabbergasted moment. “Yes, we would like an audit.”

That set off two hours of chaos in the scale house. Anders protested, hollered at us, threatened us. I sent Sun to the committee house to summon official oversight—he wouldn’t try to play nice, and they couldn’t brush him off. June and Abe, two senior committee members, arrived, austere in gray and annoyed.

“What’s the complaint?” June said.

Everyone looked at me to answer. I almost denied it—that was my first impulse. Don’t fight, don’t make waves. Because maybe I deserved the trash I got. Or my mother did, but she wasn’t here, was she?

But Nina was looking at me with her innocent brown eyes, and this was for her.

I wore a perfectly neutral, business-like expression when I spoke to June and Abe. This wasn’t about me, it was about business, quotas, and being fair.

“Scalemaster Anders adjusts the scale’s calibration when he sees us coming.”

I was amazed when they turned accusing gazes at him and not at me. Anders’ mouth worked, trying to stutter a defense, but he had nothing to say.

The committee confirmed that Anders was rigging his scale. They offered us reparations, out of Anders’ own rations. I considered—it would mean extra credits, extra food and supplies for the household. We’d been discussing getting another windmill, petitioning for another well. Instead, I recommended that any penalties they wanted to levy should go to community funds. I just wanted Amaryllis treated fairly.

And I wanted a meeting, to make one more petition before the committee.

Garrett walked with me to the committee office the next morning.

“I should have been the one to think of requesting an audit,” I said.

“Nina isn’t as scared of the committee as you are. As you were,” he said.

“I’m not—” But I stopped, because he was right.

He squeezed my hand. His smile was amused, his gaze warm. He seemed to find the whole thing entertaining. Me—I was relieved, exhausted, giddy, ashamed. Mostly relieved.

We, Amaryllis, had done nothing wrong. I had done nothing wrong.

Garrett gave me a long kiss, then waited outside while I went to sit before the committee.

June was in her chair, along with five other committee members, behind their long table with their slate boards, tally sheets, and lists of quotas. I sat across from them, alone, hands clenched in my lap, trying not to tap my feet. Trying to appear as proud and assured as they did. A stray breeze slipped through the open windows and cooled the cinderblock room.

After polite greetings, June said, “You wanted to make a petition?”

“We—the Amaryllis crew—would like to request an increase in our quota. Just a small one.”

June nodded. “We’ve already discussed it and we’re of a mind to allow an increase. Would that be suitable?”

Suitable as what? As reparation? As an apology? My mouth was dry, my tongue frozen. My eyes stung, wanting to weep, but that would have damaged our chances, as much as just being me did.

“There’s one more thing,” I managed. “With an increased quota, we can feed another mouth.”

It was an arrogant thing to say, but I had no reason to be polite.

They could chastise me, send me away without a word, lecture me on wanting too much when there wasn’t enough to go around. Tell me that it was more important to maintain what we had rather than try to expand—expansion was arrogance. We simply had to maintain. But they didn’t. They didn’t even look shocked at what I had said.

June, so elegant, I thought, with her long gray hair braided and resting over her shoulder, a knitted shawl draped around her, as much for decoration as for warmth, reached into the bag at her feet and retrieved a folded piece of cloth, which she pushed across the table toward me. I didn’t want to touch it. I was still afraid, as if I’d reach for it and June would snatch it away at the last moment. I didn’t want to unfold it to see the red and green pattern in full, in case it was some other color instead.

But I did, even though my hand shook. And there it was. I clenched the banner in my fist; no one would be able to pry it out.

“Is there anything else you’d like to speak of?” June asked.

“No,” I said, my voice a whisper. I stood, nodded at each of them. Held the banner to my chest, and left the room.

Garrett and I discussed it on the way back to the house. The rest of the crew was waiting in the courtyard for us: Dakota in her skirt and tunic, hair in a tangled bun; J.J. with his arms crossed, looking worried; Sun, shirtless, hands on hips, inquiring. And Nina, right there in front, bouncing almost.

I regarded them, trying to be inscrutable, gritting my teeth to keep from bursting into laughter. I held our banner behind my back to hide it. Garrett held my other hand.

“Well?” Nina finally said. “How did it go? What did they say?”

The surprise wasn’t going to get any better than this. I shook out the banner and held it up for them to see. And oh, I’d never seen all of them wide-eyed and wondering, mouths gaping like fish, at once.

Nina broke the spell, laughing and running at me, throwing herself into my arms. We nearly fell over.

Then we were all hugging, and Dakota started worrying right off, talking about what we needed to build a crib, all the fabric we’d need for diapers, and how we only had nine months to save up the credits for it.

I recovered enough to hold Nina at arm’s length, so I could look her in the eyes when I pressed the banner into her hands. She nearly dropped it at first, skittering from it as if it were fire. So I closed her fingers around the fabric and held them there.

“It’s yours,” I said. “I want you to have it.” I glanced at Garrett to be sure. And yes, he was still smiling.

Staring at me, Nina held it to her chest, much like I had. “But…you. It’s yours…” She started crying. Then so did I, gathering her close and holding her tight while she spoke through tears, “Don’t you want to be a mother?”

In fact, I rather thought I already was.

THE THINGS THAT MAKE ME WEAK AND STRANGE GET ENGINEERED AWAY

by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is the author of the novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town, Makers, For the Win, and the dystopian young adult novel Little Brother. His short fiction, which has appeared in a variety of magazines—from Asimov’s Science Fiction to Salon.com—has been collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More and in Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. He is a four-time winner of the Locus Award, a winner of the Canadian Starburst Award, has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and in 2000, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Doctorow is also the co-editor of Boing Boing, the online “directory of wonderful things.”

Big Brother is watching you.

When George Orwell wrote those words in 1949, the notion of a surveillance state was the stuff of absolute science fiction. Today, in an era of security cameras, wire taps and radio-frequency ID tags, surveillance is constant, and privacy a privilege. If no one is watching you, it’s not because they can’t—it’s simply because so far, no one has decided it’s worthwhile.

But in the future Cory Doctorow describes in our next story, someone has decided to watch everyone, all the time, every day. Just think a moment about what your daily life is like. Have you ever run a red light? Have you stayed parked longer than the meter would allow? Have you ever rounded down on your taxes?

Here is a world where the minor infractions get noticed. Here is a world where everyone is going to get caught sometime and everyone is some kind of criminal. Forget Big Brother. In this dystopian surveillance state, the watchers are more like the Godfather and his dons.

’Cause it’s gonna be the future soon,

And I won’t always be this way,

When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

—Jonathan Coulton, “The Future Soon”

Lawrence’s cubicle was just the right place to chew on a thorny logfile problem: decorated with the votive fetishes of his monastic order, a thousand calming, clarifying mandalas and saints devoted to helping him think clearly.

From the nearby cubicles, Lawrence heard the ritualized muttering of a thousand brothers and sisters in the Order of Reflective Analytics, a susurration of harmonized, concentrated thought. On his display, he watched an instrument widget track the decibel level over time, the graph overlaid on a 3D curve of normal activity over time and space. He noted that the level was a little high, the room a little more anxious than usual.

He clicked and tapped and thought some more, massaging the logfile to see if he could make it snap into focus and make sense, but it stubbornly refused to be sensible. The data tracked the custody chain of the bitstream the Order munged for the Securitat, and somewhere in there, a file had grown by sixty-eight bytes, blowing its checksum and becoming An Anomaly.

Order lore was filled with Anomalies, loose threads in the fabric of reality—bugs to be squashed in the data-set that was the Order’s universe. Starting with the pre-Order sysadmin who’d tracked a $0.75 billing anomaly back to a foreign spy-ring that was using his systems to hack his military, these morality tales were object lessons to the Order’s monks: pick at the seams and the world will unravel in useful and interesting ways.

Lawrence had reached the end of his personal picking capacity, though. It was time to talk it over with Gerta.

He stood up and walked away from his cubicle, touching his belt to let his sensor array know that he remembered it was there. It counted his steps and his heartbeats and his EEG spikes as he made his way out into the compound.

It’s not like Gerta was in charge—the Order worked in autonomous little units with rotating leadership, all coordinated by some groupware that let them keep the hierarchy nice and flat, the way that they all liked it. Authority sucked.

But once you instrument every keystroke, every click, every erg of productivity, it soon becomes apparent who knows her shit and who just doesn’t. Gerta knew the shit cold.

“Question,” he said, walking up to her. She liked it brusque. No nonsense.

She batted her handball against the court wall three more times, making long dives for it, sweaty grey hair whipping back and forth, body arcing in graceful flows. Then she caught the ball and tossed it into the basket by his feet. “Lester, huh? All right, surprise me.”

“It’s this,” he said, and tossed the file at her pan. She caught it with the same fluid gesture and her computer gave it to her on the handball court wall, which was the closest display for which she controlled the lockfile. She peered at the data, spinning the graph this way and that, peering intently.

She pulled up some of her own instruments and replayed the bitstream, recalling the logfiles from many network taps from the moment at which the file grew by the anomalous sixty-eight bytes.

“You think it’s an Anomaly, don’t you?” She had a fine blond mustache that was beaded with sweat, but her breathing had slowed to normal and her hands were steady and sure as she gestured at the wall.

“I was kind of hoping, yeah. Good opportunity for personal growth, your Anomalies.”

“Easy to say why you’d call it an Anomaly, but look at this.” She pulled the checksum of the injected bytes, then showed him her network taps, which were playing the traffic back and forth for several minutes before and after the insertion. The checksummed block moved back through the routers, one hop, two hops, three hops, then to a terminal. The authentication data for the terminal told them who owned its lockfile then: Zbigniew Krotoski, login zbigkrot. Gerta grabbed his room number.

“Now, we don’t have the actual payload, of course, because that gets flushed. But we have the checksum, we have the username, and look at this, we have him typing sixty-eight unspecified bytes in a pattern consistent with his biometrics five minutes and eight seconds prior to the injection. So, let’s go ask him what his sixty-eight characters were and why they got added to the Securitat’s data-stream.”

He led the way, because he knew the corner of the campus where zbigkrot worked pretty well, having lived there for five years when he first joined the Order. Zbigkrot was probably a relatively recent inductee, if he was still in that block.

His belt gave him a reassuring buzz to let him know he was being logged as he entered the building, softer haptic feedback coming as he was logged to each floor as they went up the clean-swept wooden stairs. Once, he’d had the work-detail of re-staining those stairs, stripping the ancient wood, sanding it baby-skin smooth, applying ten coats of varnish, polishing it to a high gloss. The work had been incredible, painful and rewarding, and seeing the stairs still shining gave him a tangible sense of satisfaction.

He knocked at zbigkrot’s door twice before entering. Technically, any brother or sister was allowed to enter any room on the campus, though there were norms of privacy and decorum that were far stronger than any law or rule.

The room was bare, every last trace of its occupant removed. A fine dust covered every surface, swirling in clouds as they took a few steps in. They both coughed explosively and stepped back, slamming the door.

“Skin,” Gerta croaked. “Collected from the ventilation filters. DNA for every person on campus, in a nice, even, Gaussian distribution. Means we can’t use biometrics to figure out who was in this room before it was cleaned out.”

Lawrence tasted the dust in his mouth and swallowed his gag reflex. Technically, he knew that he was always inhaling and ingesting other peoples’ dead skin-cells, but not by the mouthful.

“All right,” Gerta said. “Now you’ve got an Anomaly. Congrats, Lawrence. Personal growth awaits you.”

The campus only had one entrance to the wall that surrounded it. “Isn’t that a fire-hazard?” Lawrence asked the guard who sat in the pillbox at the gate.

“Naw,” the man said. He was old, with the serene air of someone who’d been in the Order for decades. His beard was combed and shining, plaited into a thick braid that hung to his belly, which had only the merest hint of a little pot. “Comes a fire, we hit the panic button, reverse the magnets lining the walls, and the foundations destabilize at twenty sections. The whole thing’d come down in seconds. But no one’s going to sneak in or out that way.”

“I did not know that,” Lawrence said.

“Public record, of course. But pretty obscure. Too tempting to a certain prankster mindset.”

Lawrence shook his head. “Learn something new every day.”

The guard made a gesture that caused something to depressurize in the gateway. A primed hum vibrated through the floorboards. “We keep the inside of the vestibule at ten atmospheres, and it opens inward from outside. No one can force that door open without us knowing about it in a pretty dramatic way.”

“But it must take forever to re-pressurize?”

“Not many people go in and out. Just data.”

Lawrence patted himself down.

“You got everything?”

“Do I seem nervous to you?”

The old timer picked up his tea and sipped at it. “You’d be an idiot if you weren’t. How long since you’ve been out?”

“Not since I came in. Sixteen years ago. I was twenty-one.”

“Yeah,” the old timer said. “Yeah, you’d be an idiot if you weren’t nervous. You follow politics?”

“Not my thing,” Lawrence said. “I know it’s been getting worse out there—”

The old timer barked a laugh.“Not your thing? It’s probably time you got out into the wide world, son. You might ignore politics, but it won’t ignore you.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“You going armed?”

“I didn’t know that was an option.”

“Always an option. But not a smart one. Any weapon you don’t know how to use belongs to your enemy. Just be circumspect. Listen before you talk. Watch before you act. They’re good people out there, but they’re in a bad, bad situation.”

Lawrence shuffled his feet and shifted the straps of his bindle. “You’re not making me very comfortable with all this, you know.”

“Why are you going out anyway?”

“It’s an Anomaly. My first. I’ve been waiting sixteen years for this. Someone poisoned the Securitat’s data and left the campus. I’m going to go ask him why he did it.”

The old man blew the gate. The heavy door lurched open, revealing the vestibule. “Sounds like an Anomaly all right.” He turned away and Lawrence forced himself to move toward the vestibule. The man held his hand out before he reached it. “You haven’t been outside in fifteen years, it’s going to be a surprise. Just remember, we’re a noble species, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Then he gave Lawrence a little shove that sent him into the vestibule. The door slammed behind him. The vestibule smelled like machine oil and rubber, gaskety smells. It was dimly lit by rows of white LEDs that marched up the walls like drunken ants. Lawrence barely had time to register this before he heard a loud thunk from the outer door and it swung away.

Lawrence walked down the quiet street, staring up at the same sky he’d lived under, breathing the same air he’d always breathed, but marveling at how different it all was. His heartbeat and respiration were up—the tips of the first two fingers on his right hand itched slightly under his feedback gloves—and his thoughts were doing that race-condition thing where every time he tried to concentrate on something he thought about how he was trying to concentrate on something and should stop thinking about how he was concentrating and just concentrate.

This was how it had been sixteen years before, when he’d gone into the Order. He’d been so angry all the time then. Sitting in front of his keyboard, looking at the world through the lens of the network, suffering all the fools with poor grace. He’d been a bright fourteen-year-old, a genius at sixteen, a rising star at eighteen, and a failure by twenty-one. He was depressed all the time, his weight had ballooned to nearly 300 pounds, and he had been fired three times in two years.

One day he stood up from his desk at work—he’d just been hired at a company that was selling learning, trainable vision-systems for analyzing images, who liked him because he’d retained his security clearance when he’d been fired from his previous job—and walked out of the building. It had been a blowing, wet, grey day, and the streets of New York were as empty as they ever got.

Standing on Sixth Avenue, looking north from midtown, staring at the buildings the cars and the buses and the people and the tallwalkers, that’s when he had his realization: He was not meant to be in this world.

It just didn’t suit him. He could see its workings, see how its politics and policies were flawed, see how the system needed debugging, see what made its people work, but he couldn’t touch it. Every time he reached in to adjust its settings, he got mangled by its gears. He couldn’t convince his bosses that he knew what they were doing wrong. He couldn’t convince his colleagues that he knew best. Nothing he did succeeded—every attempt he made to right the wrongs of the world made him miserable and made everyone else angry.

Lawrence knew about humans, so he knew about this: this was the exact profile of the people in the Order. Normally he would have taken the subway home. It was forty blocks to his place, and he didn’t get around so well anymore. Plus there was the rain and the wind.

But today, he walked, huffing and limping, using his cane more and more as he got further and further uptown, his knee complaining with each step. He got to his apartment and found that the elevator was out of service—second time that month—and so he took the stairs. He arrived at his apartment so out of breath he felt like he might vomit.

He stood in the doorway, clutching the frame, looking at his sofa and table, the piles of books, the dirty dishes from that morning’s breakfast in the little sink. He’d watched a series of short videos about the Order once, and he’d been struck by the little monastic cells each member occupied, so neat, so tidy, everything in its perfect place, serene and thoughtful.

So unlike his place.

He didn’t bother to lock the door behind him when he left. They said New York was the burglary capital of the developed world, but he didn’t know anyone who’d been burgled. If the burglars came, they were welcome to everything they could carry away and the landlord could take the rest. He was not meant to be in this world.

He walked back out into the rain and, what the hell, hailed a cab, and, hail mary, one stopped when he put his hand out. The cabbie grunted when he said he was going to Staten Island, but, what the hell, he pulled three twenties out of his wallet and slid them through the glass partition. The cabbie put the pedal down. The rain sliced through the Manhattan canyons and battered the windows and they went over the Verrazano Bridge and he said goodbye to his life and the outside world forever, seeking a world he could be a part of.

Or at least, that’s how he felt, as his heart swelled with the drama of it all. But the truth was much less glamorous. The brothers who admitted him at the gate were cheerful and a little weird, like his co-workers, and he didn’t get a nice clean cell to begin with, but a bunk in a shared room and a detail helping to build more quarters. And they didn’t leave his stuff for the burglars—someone from the Order went and cleaned out his place and put his stuff in a storage locker on campus, made good with his landlord and so on. By the time it was all over, it all felt a little…ordinary. But in a good way, Ordinary was good. It had been a long time since he’d felt ordinary. Order, ordinary. They went together. He needed ordinary.

The Securitat van played a cheerful engine-tone as it zipped down the street towards him. It looked like a children’s drawing—a perfect little electrical box with two seats in front and a meshed-in lockup in the rear. It accelerated smoothly down the street towards him, then braked perfectly at his toes, rocking slightly on its suspension as its doors gull-winged up.

“Cool!” he said, involuntarily, stepping back to admire the smart little car. He reached for the lifelogger around his neck and aimed it at the two Securitat officers who were debarking, moving with stiff grace in their armor. As he raised the lifelogger, the officer closest to him reached out with serpentine speed and snatched it out of his hands, power-assisted fingers coming together on it with a loud, plasticky crunk as the device shattered into a rain of fragments. Just as quickly, the other officer had come around the vehicle and seized Lawrence’s wrists, bringing them together in a painful, machine-assisted grip.

The one who had crushed his lifelogger passed his palms over Lawrence’s chest, arms and legs, holding them a few millimeters away from him. Lawrence’s pan went nuts, intrusion detection sensors reporting multiple hostile reads of his identifiers, millimeter-wave radar scans, HERF attacks, and assorted shenanigans. All his feedback systems went to full alert, going from itchy, back-of-theneck liminal sensations into high intensity pinches, prods and buzzes. It was a deeply alarming sensation, like his internal organs were under attack.

He choked out an incoherent syllable, and the Securitat man who was handwanding him raised a warning finger, holding it so close to his nose he went cross-eyed. He fell silent while the man continued to wand him, twitching a little to let his pan know that it was all OK.

“From the cult, then, are you?” the Securitat man said, after he’d kicked Lawrence’s ankles apart and spread his hands on the side of the truck.

“That’s right,” Lawrence said. “From the Order.” He jerked his head toward the gates, just a few tantalizing meters away. “I’m out—”

“You people are really something, you know that? You could have been killed. Let me tell you a few things about how the world works: when you are approached by the Securitat, you stand still with your hands stretched straight out to either side. You do not raise unidentified devices and point them at the officers. Not unless you’re trying to commit suicide by cop. Is that what you’re trying to do?”

“No,” Lawrence said. “No, of course not. I was just taking a picture for—”

“And you do not photograph or log our security procedures. There’s a war on, you know.” The man’s forehead bunched together. “Oh, for shit’s sake. We should take you in now, you know it? Tie up a dozen people’s day, just to process you through the system. You could end up in a cell for, oh, I don’t know, a month. You want that?”

“Of course not,” Lawrence said. “I didn’t realize—”

“You didn’t, but you should have. If you’re going to come walking around here where the real people are, you have to learn how to behave like a real person in the real world.”

The other man, who had been impassively holding Lawrence’s wrists in a crushing grip, eased up. “Let him go?” he said.

The first officer shook his head. “If I were you, I would turn right around, walk through those gates, and never come out again. Do I make myself clear?”

Lawrence wasn’t clear at all. Was the cop ordering him to go back? Or just giving him advice? Would he be arrested if he didn’t go back in? It had been a long time since Lawrence had dealt with authority and the feeling wasn’t a good one. His chest heaved, and sweat ran down the his back, pooling around his ass, then moving in rivulets down the backs of his legs.

“I understand,” he said. Thinking: I understand that asking questions now would not be a good idea.

The subway was more or less as he remembered it, though the long line of people waiting to get through the turnstiles turned out to be a line to go through a security checkpoint, complete with bag-search and X-ray. But the New Yorkers were the same—no one made eye contact with anyone else, but if they did, everyone shared a kind of bitter shrug, as if to say, Ain’t it the fuckin’ truth?

But the smell was the same—oil and damp and bleach and the indefinable, human smell of a place where millions had passed for decades, where millions would pass for decades to come. He found himself standing before a subway map, looking at it, comparing it to the one in his memory to find the changes, the new stations that must have sprung up during his hiatus from reality.

But there weren’t new stations. In fact, it seemed to him that there were a lot fewer stations—hadn’t there been one at Bleecker Street, and another at Cathedral Parkway? Yes, there had been—but look now, they were gone, and…and there were stickers, white stickers over the places where the stations had been. He reached up and touched the one over Bleecker Street.

“I still can’t get used to it,either,”said a voice at his side.“I used to change for the F Train there every day when I was a kid.” It was a woman, about the same age as Gerta, but more beaten down by the years, deeper creases in her face, a stoop in her stance. But her face was kind, her eyes soft.

“What happened to it?”

She took a half-step back from him. “Bleecker Street,” she said. “You know, Bleecker Street? Like 9/11? Bleecker Street?” Like the name of the station was an incantation.

It rang a bell. It wasn’t like he didn’t ever read the news, but it had a way of sliding off of you when you were on campus, as though it was some historical event in a book, not something happening right there, on the other side of the wall.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been away. Bleecker Street, yes, of course.”

She gave him a squinty stare. “You must have been very far away.”

He tried out a sheepish grin. “I’m a monk,” he said. “From the Order of Reflective Analytics. I’ve been out of the world for sixteen years. Until today, in fact. My name is Lawrence.” He stuck his hand out and she shook it like it was made of china.

“A monk,” she said. “That’s very interesting. Well, you enjoy your little vacation.” She turned on her heel and walked quickly down the platform. He watched her for a moment, then turned back to the map, counting the missing stations.

When the train ground to a halt in the tunnel between 42nd and 50th street, the entire car let out a collective groan. When the lights flickered and went out, they groaned louder. The emergency lights came on in sickly green and an incomprehensible announcement played over the loudspeakers. Evidently, it was an order to evacuate, because the press of people began to struggle through the door at the front of the car, then further and further. Lawrence let the press of bodies move him too.

Once they reached the front of the train, they stepped down onto the tracks, each passenger turning silently to help the next, again with that Ain’t it the fuckin’ truth? look. Lawrence turned to help the person behind him and saw that it was the woman who’d spoken to him on the platform. She smiled a little smile at him and turned with practiced ease to help the person behind her.

They walked single file on a narrow walkway beside the railings. Securitat officers were strung out at regular intervals, wearing night scopes and high, rubberized boots. They played flashlights over the walkers as they evacuated.

“Does this happen often?” Lawrence said over his shoulder. His words were absorbed by the dead subterranean air and he thought that she might not have heard him but then she sighed.

“Only every time there’s an anomaly in the head-count—when the system says there’s too many or too few people in the trains. Maybe once a week.” He could feel her staring at the back of his head. He looked back at her and saw her shaking her head. He stumbled and went down on one knee, clanging his head against the stone walls made soft by a fur of condensed train exhaust, cobwebs and dust.

She helped him to his feet. “You don’t seem like a snitch, Lawrence. But you’re a monk. Are you going to turn me in for being suspicious?”

He took a second to parse this out. “I don’t work for the Securitat,” he said. It seemed like the best way to answer.

She snorted. “That’s not what we hear. Come on, they’re going to start shouting at us if we don’t move.”

They walked the rest of the way to an emergency staircase together, and emerged out of a sidewalk grating, blinking in the remains of the autumn sunlight, a bloody color on the glass of the highrises. She looked at him and made a face. “You’re filthy, Lawrence.” She thumped at his sleeves and great dirty clouds rose off them. He looked down at the knees of his pants and saw that they were hung with boogers of dust.

The New Yorkers who streamed past them ducked to avoid the dirty clouds. “Where can I clean up?” he said.

“Where are you staying?”

“I was thinking I’d see about getting a room at the Y or a backpacker’s hostel, somewhere to stay until I’m done.”

“Done?”

“I’m on a complicated errand. Trying to locate someone who used to be in the Order.”

Her face grew hard again. “No one gets out alive, huh?”

He felt himself blushing. “It’s not like that. Wow, you’ve got strange ideas about us. I want to find this guy because he disappeared under mysterious circumstances and I want to—” How to explain Anomalies to an outsider? “It’s a thing we do. Unravel mysteries. It makes us better people.”

“Better people?” She snorted again. “Better than what? Don’t answer. Come on, I live near here. You can wash up at my place and be on your way. You’re not going to get into any backpacker’s hostel looking like you just crawled out of a sewer—you’re more likely to get detained for being an ‘indigent of suspicious character.’”

He let her steer him a few yards uptown. “You think that I work for the Securitat but you’re inviting me into your home?”

She shook her head and led him around a corner, along a long crosstown block, and then turned back uptown. “No,” she said. “I think you’re a confused stranger who is apt to get himself into some trouble if someone doesn’t take you in hand and help you get smart, fast. It doesn’t cost me anything to lend a hand, and you don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d mug, rape and kill an old lady.”

“The discipline,” he said, “is all about keeping track of the way that the world is, and comparing it to your internal perceptions, all the time. When I entered the Order, I was really big. Fat, I mean. The discipline made me log every bit of food I ate, and I discovered a few important things: first, I was eating about twenty times a day, just grazing on whatever happened to be around. Second, that I was consuming about 4,000 calories a day, mostly in industrial sugars like high-fructose corn syrup. Just knowing how I ate made a gigantic difference. I felt like I ate sensibly, always ordering a salad with lunch and dinner, but I missed the fact that I was glooping on half a cup of sweetened, high-fat dressing, and having a cookie or two every hour between lunch and dinner, and a half-pint of ice-cream before bed most nights.

“But it wasn’t just food—in the Order, we keep track of everything; our typing patterns, our sleeping patterns, our moods, our reading habits. I discovered that I read faster when I’ve been sleeping more, so now, when I need to really get through a lot of reading, I make sure I sleep more. Used to be I’d try to stay up all night with pots of coffee to get the reading done. Of course, the more sleep-deprived I was, the slower I read; and the slower I read the more I needed to stay up to catch up with the reading. No wonder college was such a blur.

“So that’s why I’ve stayed. It’s empiricism, it’s as old as Newton, as the Enlightenment.” He took another sip of his water, which tasted like New York tap water had always tasted (pretty good, in fact), and which he hadn’t tasted for sixteen years. The woman was called Posy, and her old leather sofa was worn but well-loved, and smelled of saddle soap. She was watching him from a kitchen chair she’d brought around to the living room of the tiny apartment, rubbing her stockinged feet over the good wool carpet that showed a few old stains hiding beneath strategically placed furnishings and knick-knacks.

He had to tell her the rest, of course. You couldn’t understand the Order unless you understood the rest. “I’m a screwup, Posy. Or at least, I was. We all were. Smart and motivated and promising, but just a wretched person to be around. Angry, bitter, all those smarts turned on biting the heads off of the people who were dumb enough to care about me or employ me. And so smart that I could talk myself into believing that it was all everyone else’s fault, the idiots. It took instrumentation, empiricism, to get me to understand the patterns of my own life, to master my life, to become the person I wanted to be.”

“Well, you seem like a perfectly nice young man now,” Posy said.

That was clearly his cue to go, and he’d changed into a fresh set of trousers, but he couldn’t go, not until he’d picked apart something she’d said earlier. “Why did you think I was a snitch?”

“I think you know that very well, Lawrence,” she said. “I can’t imagine someone who’s so into measuring and understanding the world could possibly have missed it.”

Now he knew what she was talking about. “We just do contract work for the Securitat. It’s just one of the ways the Order sustains itself.” The founders had gone into business refilling toner cartridges, which was like the 21st century equivalent of keeping bees or brewing dark, thick beer. They’d branched out into remote IT administration, then into data-mining and security, which was a natural for people with Order training. “But it’s all anonymized. We don’t snitch on people. We report on anomalous events. We do it for lots of different companies, too—not just the Securitat.”

Posy walked over to the window behind her small dining room table, rolling away a couple of handsome old chairs on castors to reach it. She looked down over the billion lights of Manhattan, stretching all the way downtown to Brooklyn. She motioned to him to come over, and he squeezed in beside her. They were on the twenty-third floor, and it had been many years since he’d stood this high and looked down. The world is different from high up.

“There,” she said, pointing at an apartment building across the way. “There, you see it? With the broken windows?” He saw it, the windows covered in cardboard. “They took them away last week. I don’t know why. You never know why. You become a person of interest and they take you away and then later, they always find a reason to keep you away.”

Lawrence’s hackles were coming up. He found stuff that didn’t belong in the data—he didn’t arrest people. “So if they always find a reason to keep you away, doesn’t that mean—”

She looked like she wanted to slap him and he took a step back. “We’re all guilty of something, Lawrence. That’s how the game is rigged. Look closely at anyone’s life and you’ll find, what, a little black-marketeering, a copyright infringement, some cash economy business with unreported income, something obscene in your Internet use, something in your bloodstream that shouldn’t be there. I bought that sofa from a cop, Lawrence, bought it ten years ago when he was leaving the building. He didn’t give me a receipt and didn’t collect tax, and technically that makes us offenders.” She slapped the radiator. “I overrode the governor on this ten minutes after they installed it. Everyone does it. They make it easy—you just stick a penny between two contacts and hey presto, the city can’t turn your heat down anymore. They wouldn’t make it so easy if they didn’t expect everyone to do it—and once everyone’s done it, we’re all guilty.

“The people across the street, they were Pakistani or maybe Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi. I’d see the wife at the service laundry. Nice professional lady, always lugging around a couple kids on their way to or from day-care. She—” Posy broke off and stared again. “I once saw her reach for her change and her sleeve rode up and there was a number tattooed there, there on her wrist.” Posy shuddered. “When they took her and her husband and their kids, she stood at the window and pounded at it and screamed for help. You could hear her from here.”

“That’s terrible,” Lawrence said. “But what does it have to do with the Order?”

She sat back down. “For someone who is supposed to know himself, you’re not very good at connecting the dots.”

Lawrence stood up. He felt an obscure need to apologize. Instead, he thanked her and put his glass in the sink. She shook his hand solemnly.

“Take care out there,” she said. “Good luck finding your escapee.”

Here’s what Lawrence knew about Zbigniew Krotoski. He had been inducted into the Order four years earlier. He was a native-born New Yorker. He had spent his first two years in the Order trying to coax some of the elders into a variety of pointless flamewars about the ethics of working for the Securitat, and then had settled into being a very productive member. He spent his 20 percent time—the time when each monk had to pursue non-work-related projects—building aerial photography rigs out of box-kites and tiny cameras that the Monks installed on their systems to help them monitor their body mechanics and ergonomic posture.

Zbigkrot performed in the eighty-fifth percentile of the Order, which was respectable enough. Lawrence had started there and had crept up and down as low as 70 and as high as 88, depending on how he was doing in the rest of his life. Zbigkrot was active in the gardens, both the big ones where they grew their produce and a little allotment garden where he indulged in baroque cross-breeding experiments, which were in vogue among the monks then.

The Securitat stream to which he’d added sixty-eight bytes was long gone, but it was the kind of thing that the Order handled on a routine basis: given the timing and other characteristics, Lawrence thought it was probably a stream of purchase data from hardware and grocery stores, to be inspected for unusual patterns that might indicate someone buying bomb ingredients. Zbigkrot had worked on this kind of data thousands of times before, six times just that day. He’d added the sixty-eight bytes and then left, invoking his right to do so at the lone gate. The gatekeeper on duty remembered him carrying a little rucksack, and mentioning that he was going to see his sister in New York.

Zbigkrot once had a sister in New York—that much could be ascertained. Anja Krotoski had lived on 23rd Street in a co-op near Lexington. But that had been four years previous, when he’d joined the Order, and she wasn’t there anymore. Her numbers all rang dead.

The apartment building had once been a pleasant, middle-class sort of place, with a red awning and a niche for a doorman. Now it had become more run down, the awning’s edges frayed, one pane of lobby glass broken out and replaced with a sheet of cardboard. The doorman was long gone.

It seemed to Lawrence that this fate had befallen many of the City’s buildings. They reminded him of the buildings he’d seen in Belgrade one time, when he’d been sent out to brief a gang of outsource programmers his boss had hired—neglected for years, indifferently patched by residents who had limited access to materials.

It was the dinner hour, and a steady trickle of people were letting themselves into Anja’s old building. Lawrence watched a couple of them enter the building and noticed something wonderful and sad: as they approached the building, their faces were the hard masks of city-dwellers, not meeting anyone’s eye, clipping along at a fast pace that said, “Don’t screw with me.” But once they passed the threshold of their building and the door closed behind them, their whole affect changed. They slumped, they smiled at one another, they leaned against the mailboxes and set down their bags and took off their hats and fluffed their hair and turned back into people.

He remembered that feeling from his life before, the sense of having two faces: the one he showed to the world and the one that he reserved for home. In the Order, he only wore one face, one that he knew in exquisite detail.

He approached the door now, and his pan started to throb ominously, letting him know that he was enduring hostile probes. The building wanted to know who he was and what business he had there, and it was attempting to fingerprint everything about him from his pan to his gait to his face.

He took up a position by the door and dialed back the pan’s response to a dull pulse. He waited for a few minutes until one of the residents came down: a middle-aged man with a dog, a little sickly-looking schnauzer with grey in its muzzle.

“Can I help you?” the man said, from the other side of the security door, not unlatching it.

“I’m looking for Anja Krotoski,” he said. “I’m trying to track down her brother.”

The man looked him up and down. “Please step away from the door.”

He took a few steps back. “Does Ms. Krotoski still live here?”

The man considered. “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t help you.” He waited for Lawrence to react.

“You don’t know, or you can’t help me?”

“Don’t wait under this awning. The police come if anyone waits under this awning for more than three minutes.”

The man opened the door and walked away with his dog.

His phone rang before the next resident arrived. He cocked his head to answer it, then remembered that his lifelogger was dead and dug in his jacket for a mic. There was one at his wrist pulse-points used by the health array. He unvelcroed it and held it to his mouth.

“Hello?”

“It’s Gerta, boyo. Wanted to know how your Anomaly was going.”

“Not good,” he said. “I’m at the sister’s place and they don’t want to talk to me.”

“You’re walking up to strangers and asking them about one of their neighbors, huh?”

He winced. “Put it that way, yeah, OK, I understand why this doesn’t work. But Gerta, I feel like Rip Van Winkle here. I keep putting my foot in it. It’s so different.”

“People are people, Lawrence. Every bad behavior and every good one lurks within us. They were all there when you were in the world—in different proportion, with different triggers. But all there. You know yourself very well. Can you observe the people around you with the same keen attention?”

He felt slightly put upon. “That’s what I’m trying—”

“Then you’ll get there eventually. What, you’re in a hurry?”

Well, no. He didn’t have any kind of timeline. Some people chased Anomalies for years. But truth be told, he wanted to get out of the City and back onto campus. “I’m thinking of coming back to Campus to sleep.”

Gerta clucked. “Don’t give in to the agoraphobia, Lawrence. Hang in there. You haven’t even heard my news yet, and you’re already ready to give up?”

“What news? And I’m not giving up, just want to sleep in my own bed—”

“The entry checkpoints, Lawrence. You cannot do this job if you’re going to spend four hours a day in security queues. Anyway, the news.

“It wasn’t the first time he did it. I’ve been running the logs back three years and I’ve found at least a dozen streams that he tampered with. Each time he used a different technique. This was the first time we caught him. Used some pretty subtle tripwires when he did it, so he’d know if anyone ever caught on. Must have spent his whole life living on edge, waiting for that moment, waiting to bug out. Must have been a hard life.”

“What was he doing? Spying?”

“Most assuredly,” Gerta said. “But for whom? For the enemy? The Securitat?”

They’d considered going to the Securitat with the information, but why bother? The Order did business with the Securitat, but tried never to interact with them on any other terms. The Securitat and the Order had an implicit understanding: so long as the Order was performing excellent data-analysis, it didn’t have to fret the kind of overt scrutiny that prevailed in the real world. Undoubtedly, the Securitat kept satellite eyes, data-snoopers, wiretaps, millimeter radar and every other conceivable surveillance trained on each Campus in the world, but at the end of the day, they were just badly socialized geeks who’d left the world, and useful geeks at that. The Securitat treated the Order the way that Lawrence’s old bosses treated the company sysadmins: expendable geeks who no one cared about—so long as nothing went wrong.

No, there was no sense in telling the Securitat about the sixty-eight bytes.

“Why would the Securitat poison its own data-streams?”

“You know that when the Soviets pulled out of Finland, they found forty kilometers of wire-tapping wire in KGB headquarters? The building was only twelve stories tall! Spying begets spying. The worst, most dangerous enemy the Securitat has is the Securitat.”

There were Securitat vans on the street around him, going past every now and again, eerily silent engines, playing their cheerful music. He stepped back into shadow, then thought better of it and stood under a pool of light.

“OK, so it was a habit. How do I find him? No one in the sister’s building will talk to me.”

“You need to put them at their ease. Tell them the truth, that often works.”

“You know how people feel about the Order out here?” He thought of Posy. “I don’t know if the truth is going to work here.”

“You’ve been in the order for sixteen years. You’re not just some fumble-tongued outcast anymore. Go talk to them.”

“But—”

“Go, Lawrence. Go. You’re a smart guy, you’ll figure it out.”

He went. Residents were coming home every few minutes now, carrying grocery bags, walking dogs, or dragging their tired feet. He almost approached a young woman, then figured that she wouldn’t want to talk to a strange man on the street at night. He picked a guy in his thirties, wearing jeans and a huge old vintage coat that looked like it had come off the eastern front.

“’Scuse me,” he said. “I’m trying to find someone who used to live here.”

The guy stopped and looked Lawrence up and down. He had a handsome sweater on underneath his coat, design-y and cosmopolitan, the kind of thing that made Lawrence think of Milan or Paris. Lawrence was keenly aware of his generic Order-issued suit, a brown, rumpled, ill-fitting thing, topped with a polymer coat that, while warm, hardly flattered.

“Good luck with that,” he said, then started to move past.

“Please,” Lawrence said. “I’m—I’m not used to how things are around here. There’s probably some way I could ask you this that would put you at your ease, but I don’t know what it is. I’m not good with people. But I really need to find this person, she used to live here.”

The man stopped, looked at him again. He seemed to recognize something in Lawrence, or maybe it was that he was disarmed by Lawrence’s honesty.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “Basically, though: I’m a monk from the Order of Reflective Analytics and one of our guys has disappeared. His sister used to live here—maybe she still does—and I wanted to ask her if she knew where I could find him.”

“Let me guess, none of my neighbors wanted to help you.”

“You’re only the second guy I’ve asked, but yeah, pretty much.”

“Out here in the real world, we don’t really talk about each other to strangers. Too much like being a snitch. Lucky for you, my sister’s in the Order, out in Oregon, so I know you’re not all a bunch of snoops and stoolies. Who’re you looking for?”

Lawrence felt a rush of gratitude for this man. “Anja Krotosky, number 11-J?”

“Oh,” the man said. “Well, yeah, I can see why you’d have a hard time with the neighbors when it comes to old Anja. She was well-liked around here, before she went.”

“Where’d she go? When?”

“What’s your name, friend?”

“Lawrence.”

“Lawrence, Anja went. Middle of the night kind of thing. No one heard a thing. The CCTVs stopped working that night. Nothing on the drive the next day. No footage at all.”

“Like she skipped out?”

“They stopped delivering flyers to her door. There’s only one power stronger than direct marketing.”

“The Securitat took her?”

“That’s what we figured. Nothing left in her place. Not a stick of furniture. We don’t talk about it much. Not the thing that it pays to take an interest in.”

“How long ago?”

“Two years ago,” he said. A few more residents pushed past them. “Listen, I approve of what you people do in there, more or less. It’s good that there’s a place for the people who don’t—you know, who don’t have a place out here. But the way you make your living. I told my sister about this, the last time she visited, and she got very angry with me. She didn’t see the difference between watching yourself and being watched.”

Lawrence nodded. “Well, that’s true enough. We don’t draw a really sharp distinction. We all get to see one another’s stats. It keeps us honest.”

“That’s fine, if you have the choice. But—” He broke off, looking self-conscious. Lawrence reminded himself that they were on a public street, the cameras on them, people passing by. Was one of them a snitch? The Securitat had talked about putting him away for a month, just for logging them. They could watch him all they wanted, but he couldn’t look at them.

“I see the point.” He sighed. He was cold and it was full autumn dark now. He still didn’t have a room for the night and he didn’t have any idea how he’d find Anja, much less zbigkrot. He began to understand why Anomalies were such a big deal.

He’d walked 18,453 steps that day, about triple what he did on campus. His heart rate had spiked several times, but not from exertion. Stress. He could feel it in his muscles now. He should really do some biofeedback, try to calm down, then run back his lifelogger and make some notes on how he’d reacted to people through the day.

But the lifelogger was gone and he barely managed twenty-two seconds his first time on the biofeedback. His next ten scores were much worse.

It was the hotel room. It had once been an office, and before that, it had been half a hotel-room. There were still scuff-marks on the floor from where the wheeled office chair had dug into the scratched lino. The false wall that divided the room in half was thin as paper and Lawrence could hear every snuffle from the other side. The door to Lawrence’s room had been rudely hacked in, and weak light shone through an irregular crack over the jamb.

The old New Yorker Hotel had seen better days, but it was what he could afford, and it was central, and he could hear New York outside the window—he’d gotten the half of the hotel room with the window in it. The lights twinkled just as he remembered them, and he still got a swimmy, vertiginous feeling when he looked down from the great height.

The clerk had taken his photo and biometrics and had handed him a tracker-key that his pan was monitoring with tangible suspicion. It radiated his identity every few yards, and in the elevator. It even seemed to track which part of the minuscule room he was in. What the hell did the hotel do with all this information?

Oh, right—it shipped it off to the Securitat, who shipped it to the Order, where it was processed for suspicious anomalies. No wonder there was so much work for them on campus. Multiply the New Yorker times a hundred thousand hotels, two hundred thousand schools, a million cabs across the nation—there was no danger of the Order running out of work.

The hotel’s network tried to keep him from establishing a secure connection back to the Order’s network, but the Order’s countermeasures were better than the half-assed ones at the hotel. It took a lot of tunneling and wrapping, but in short measure he had a strong private line back to the Campus—albeit a slow line, what with all the jiggery-pokery he had to go through.

Gerta had left him with her file on zbigkrot and his activities on the network. He had several known associates on Campus, people he ate with or playing on intramural teams with, or did a little extreme programming with. Gerta had bulk-messaged them all with an oblique query about his personal life and had forwarded the responses to Lawrence. There was a mountain of them, and he started to plow through them.

He started by compiling stats on them—length, vocabulary, number of paragraphs—and then started with the outliers. The shortest ones were polite shrugs, apologies, don’t have anything to say. The long ones—whew! They sorted into two categories: general whining, mostly from noobs who were still getting accustomed to the way of the Order; and protracted complaints from old hands who’d worked with zbigkrot long enough to decide that he was incorrigible. Lawrence sorted these quickly, then took a glance at the median responses and confirmed that they appeared to be largely unhelpful generalizations of the sort that you might produce on a co-worker evaluation form—a proliferation of null adjectives like “satisfactory,” “pleasant,” “fine.”

Somewhere in this haystack—Lawrence did a quick word-count and came back with 140,000 words, about two good novels’ worth of reading—was a needle, a clue that would show him the way to unravel the Anomaly. It would take him a couple days at least to sort through it all in depth. He ducked downstairs and bought some groceries at an all-night grocery store in Penn Station and went back to his room, ready to settle in and get the work done. He could use a few days’ holiday from New York, anyway.

> About time Zee Big Noob did a runner. He never had a moment’s happiness here, and I never figured out why he’d bother hanging around when he hated it all so much.

> Ever meet the kind of guy who wanted to tell you just how much you shouldn’t be enjoying the things you enjoy? The kind of guy who could explain, in detail, *exactly* why your passions were stupid? That was him.

> “Brother Antony, why are you wasting your time collecting tin toys? They’re badly made, unlovely, and represent, at best, a history of slave labor, starting with your cherished ‘Made in Occupied Japan,’ tanks. Christ, why not collect rape-camp macrame while you’re at it?” He had choice words for all of us about our passions, but I was singled out because I liked to extreme program in my room, which I’d spent a lot of time decorating. (See pic, below, and yes, I built and sanded and mounted every one of those shelves by hand) (See magnification shot for detail on the joinery. Couldn’t even drive a nail when I got here) (Not that there are any nails in there, it’s all precision-fitted tongue and groove) (holy moley, lasers totally rock)

> But he reserved his worst criticism for the Order itself. You know the litany: we’re a cult, we’re brainwashed, we’re dupes of the Securitat. He was convinced that every instrument in the place was feeding up to the Securitat itself. He’d mutter about this constantly, whenever we got a new stream to work on—“Is this your lifelog, Brother Antony? Mine? The number of flushes per shitter in the west wing of campus?”

> And it was no good trying to reason with him. He just didn’t acknowledge the benefit of introspection. “It’s no different from them,” he’d say, jerking his thumb up at the ceiling, as though there was a Securitat mic and camera hidden there. “You’re just flooding yourself with useless information, trying to find the useful parts. Why not make some predictions about which part of your life you need to pay attention to, rather than spying on every process? You’re a spy in your own body.”

> So why did I work with him? I’ll tell you: first, he was a shit-hot programmer. I know his stats say he was way down in the 78th percentile, but he could make every line of code that *I* wrote smarter. We just don’t have a way of measuring that kind of effect (yes, someone should write one; I’ve been noodling with a framework for it for months now).

> Second, there was something dreadfully fun about listening him light into *other* people, *their* ridiculous passions and interests. He could be incredibly funny, and he was incisive if not insightful. It’s shameful, but there you have it. I am imperfect.

> Finally, when he wasn’t being a dick, he was a good guy to have in your corner. He was our rugby team’s fullback, the baseball team’s shortstop, the tank on our MMOG raids. You could rely on him.

> So I’m going to miss him, weirdly. If he’s gone for good. I wouldn’t put it past him to stroll back onto campus someday and say, “What, what? I just took a little French Leave. Jesus, overreact much?”

Plenty of the notes ran in this direction, but this was the most articulate. Lawrence read it through three times before adding it to the file of useful stuff. It was a small pile. Still, Gerta kept forwarding him responses. The late responders had some useful things to say:

> He mentioned a sister. Only once. A whole bunch of us were talking about how our families were really supportive of our coming to the Order, and after it had gone round the whole circle, he just kind of looked at the sky and said, “My sister thought I was an idiot to go inside. I asked her what she thought I should do and she said, ‘If I was you, kid, I’d just disappear before someone disappeared me.’” Naturally we all wanted to know what he meant by that. “I’m not very good at bullshitting, and that’s a vital skill in today’s world. She was better at it than me, when she worked at it, but she was the kind of person who’d let her guard slip every now and then.”

Lawrence noted that zbigkrot had used the past-tense to describe his sister. He’d have known about her being disappeared then.

He stared at the walls of his hotel room. The room next door was occupied by at least four people and he couldn’t even imagine how you’d get that many people inside—he didn’t know how four people could all stand in the room, let alone lie down and sleep. But there were definitely four voices from next door, talking in Chinese.

New York was outside the window and far below, and the sun had come up far enough that everything was bright and reflective, the cars and the buildings and the glints from sunglasses far below. He wasn’t getting anywhere with the docs, the sister, the datastreams. And there was New York, just outside the window.

He dug under the bed and excavated his boots, recoiling from soft, dust-furred old socks and worse underneath the mattress.

The Securitat man pointed to Lawrence as he walked past Penn Station. Lawrence stopped and pointed at himself in a who-me? gesture. The Securitat man pointed again, then pointed to his alcove next to the entrance.

Lawrence’s pan didn’t like the Securitat man’s incursions and tried to wipe itself.

“Sir,” he said. “My pan is going nuts. May I put down my arms so I can tell it to let you in?”

The Securitat man acted as though he hadn’t heard, just continued to wave his hands slowly over Lawrence’s body.

“Come with me,” the Securitat man said, pointing to the door on the other side of the alcove that led into a narrow corridor, into the bowels of Penn Station. The door let out onto the concourse, thronged with people shoving past each other, disgorged by train after train. Though none made eye contact with them or each other, they parted magically before them, leaving them with a clear path.

Lawrence’s pan was not helping him. Every inch of his body itched as it nagged at him about the depredations it was facing from the station and the Securitat man. This put him seriously on edge and made his heart and breathing go crazy, triggering another round of warnings from his pan, which wanted him to calm down, but wouldn’t help. This was a bad failure mode, one he’d never experienced before. He’d have to file a bug report.

Some day.

The Securitat’s outpost in Penn Station was as clean as a dentist’s office, but with mesh-reinforced windows and locks that made three distinct clicks and a soft hiss when the door closed. The Securitat man impersonally shackled Lawrence to a plastic chair that was bolted into the floor and then went off to a check-in kiosk that he whispered into and prodded at. There was no one else in evidence, but there were huge CCTV cameras, so big that they seemed to be throwbacks to an earlier era, some paleolithic ancestor of the modern camera. These cameras were so big because they were meant to be seen, meant to let you know that you were being watched.

The Securitat man took him away again, stood him in an interview room where the cameras were once again in voluble evidence.

“Explain everything,” the Securitat man said. He rolled up his mask so that Lawrence could see his face, young and hard. He’d been in diapers when Lawrence went into the Order.

And so Lawrence began to explain, but he didn’t want to explain everything. Telling this man about zbigkrot tampering with Securitat data-streams would not be good; telling him about the disappearance of Anja Krotoski would be even worse. So—he lied. He was already so stressed out that there was no way the lies would register as extraordinary to the sensors that were doubtless trained on him.

He told the Securitat man that he was in the world to find an Order member who’d taken his leave, because the Order wanted to talk to him about coming back. He told the man that he’d been trying to locate zbigkrot by following up on his old contacts. He told the Securitat man that he expected to find zbigkrot within a day or two and would be going back to the Order. He implied that he was crucial to the Order and that he worked for the Securitat all the time, that he and the Securitat man were on the same fundamental mission, on the same team.

The Securitat man’s face remained an impassive mask throughout. He touched an earbead from time to time, cocking his head slightly to listen. Someone else was listening to Lawrence’s testimony and feeding him more material.

The Securitat man scooted his chair closer to Lawrence, leaned in close, searching his face. “We don’t have any record of this Krotoski person,”he said. “I advise you to go home and forget about him.”

The words were said without any inflection at all, and that was scariest of all—Lawrence had no doubt about what this meant. There were no records because Zbigniew Krotoski was erased.

Lawrence wondered what he was supposed to say to this armed child now. Did he lay his finger alongside of his nose and wink? Apologize for wasting his time? Everyone told him to listen before he spoke here. Should he just wait?

“Thank you for telling me so,” he said. “I appreciate the advice.” He hoped it didn’t sound sarcastic.

The Securitat man nodded. “You need to adjust the settings on your pan. It reads like it’s got something to hide. Here in the world, it has to accede to lawful read attempts without hesitation. Will you configure it?”

Lawrence nodded vigorously. While he’d recounted his story, he’d imagined spending a month in a cell while the Securitat looked into his deeds and history. Now it seemed like he might be on the streets in a matter of minutes.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” The man didn’t say it. It was a recording, played by hidden speakers, triggered by some unseen agency, and on hearing it, the Securitat man stood and opened the door, waiting for the three distinct clicks and the hiss before tugging at the handle.

They stood before the door to the guard’s niche in front of Penn Station and the man rolled up his mask again. This time he was smiling an easy smile and the hardness had melted a little from around his eyes. “You want a tip, buddy?”

“Sure.”

“Look, this is New York. We all just want to get along here. There’s a lot of bad guys out there. They got some kind of beef. They want to fuck with us. We don’t want to let them do that. You want to be safe here, you got to show New York that you’re not a bad guy. That you’re not here to fuck with us.

We’re the city’s protectors, and we can spot someone who doesn’t belong here the way your body can spot a cold-germ. The way you’re walking around here, looking around, acting—I could tell you didn’t belong from a hundred yards. You want to avoid trouble, you get less strange, fast. You get me?”

“I get you,”he said. “Thank you, sir.”Before the Securitat man could say any more, Lawrence was on his way.

The man from Anja’s building had a different sweater on, but the new one—bulky wool the color of good chocolate—was every bit as handsome as the one he’d had on before. He was wearing some kind of citrusy cologne and his hair fell around his ears in little waves that looked so natural they had to be fake. Lawrence saw him across the Starbucks and had a crazy urge to duck away and change into better clothes, just so he wouldn’t look like such a fucking hayseed next to this guy. I’m a New Yorker, he thought, or at least I was. I belong here.

“Hey, Lawrence, fancy meeting you here!” He shook Lawrence’s hand and gave him a wry, you-and-me-in-it-together smile. “How’s the vision quest coming?”

“Huh?”

“The Anomaly—that’s what you’re chasing, aren’t you? It’s your little rite of passage. My sister had one last year. Figured out that some guy who travelled from Fort Worth to Portland, Oregon every week was actually a fictional construct invented by cargo smugglers who used his seat to plant a series of mules running heroin and cash. She was so proud afterwards that I couldn’t get her to shut up about it. You had the holy fire the other night when I saw you.”

Lawrence felt himself blushing. “It’s not really ‘holy’—all that religious stuff, it’s just a metaphor. We’re not really spiritual.”

“Oh, the distinction between the spiritual and the material is pretty arbitrary anyway. Don’t worry, I don’t think you’re a cultist or anything. No more than any of us, anyway. So, how’s it going?”

“I think it’s over,” he said. “Dead end. Maybe I’ll get an easier Anomaly next time.”

“Sounds awful! I didn’t think you were allowed to give up on Anomalies?”

Lawrence looked around to see if anyone was listening to them. “This one leads to the Securitat,” he said. “In a sense, you could say that I’ve solved it. I think the guy I’m looking for ended up with his sister.”

The man’s expression froze, not moving one iota. “You must be disappointed,” he said, in neutral tones. “Oh well.” He leaned over the condiment bar to get a napkin and wrestled with the dispenser for a moment. It didn’t cooperate, and he ended up holding fifty napkins. He made a disgusted noise and said, “Can you help me get these back into the dispenser?”

Lawrence pushed at the dispenser and let the man feed it his excess napkins, arranging them neatly. While he did this, he contrived to hand Lawrence a card, which Lawrence cupped in his palm and then ditched into his inside jacket pocket under the pretense of reaching in to adjust his pan.

“Thanks,” the man said. “Well, I guess you’ll be going back to your campus now?”

“In the morning,” Lawrence said. “I figured I’d see some New York first. Play tourist, catch a Broadway show.”

The man laughed. “All right then—you enjoy it.” He did nothing significant as he shook Lawrence’s hand and left, holding his paper cup. He did nothing to indicate that he’d just brought Lawrence into some kind of illegal conspiracy.

Lawrence read the note later, on a bench in Bryant Park, holding a paper bag of roasted chestnuts and fastidiously piling the husks next to him as he peeled them away. It was a neatly cut rectangle of card sliced from a health-food cereal box. Lettered on the back of it in pencil were two short lines:

Wednesdays 8:30PM

Half Moon Café 164 2nd Ave

The address was on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that had been scorchingly trendy the last time Lawrence had been there. More importantly: it was Wednesday.

The Half Moon Café turned out to be one of those New York places that are so incredibly hip they don’t have a sign or any outward indication of their existence. Number 164 was a frosted glass door between a dry-cleaner’s and a Pakistani grocery store, propped open with a squashed Mountain Dew can. Lawrence opened the door, heart pounding, and slipped inside. A long, dark corridor stretched away before him, with a single door at the end, open a crack, dim light spilling out of it. He walked quickly down the corridor, sure that there were cameras observing him.

The door at the end of the hallway had a sheet of paper on it, with HALF MOON CAFÉ laser-printed in its center. Good food smells came from behind it, and the clink of cutlery, and soft conversation. He nudged it open and found himself in a dim, flickering room lit by candles and draped with gathered curtains that turned the walls into the proscenia of a grand and ancient stage. There were four or five small tables and a long one at the back of the room, crowded with people, with wine in ice-buckets at either end.

A very pretty girl stood at the podium before him, dressed in a conservative suit, but with her hair shaved into a half-inch brush of electric blue. She lifted an eyebrow at him as though she was sharing a joke with him and said, “Welcome to the Half Moon. Do you have a reservation?”

Lawrence had carefully shredded the bit of cardboard and dropped its tatters in six different trash cans, feeling like a real spy as he did so (and realizing at the same time that going to all these different cans was probably anomalous enough in itself to draw suspicion).

“A friend told me he’d meet me here,” he said.

“What was your friend’s name?”

Lawrence stuck his chin in the top of his coat to tell his pan to stop warning him that he was breathing too shallowly. “I don’t know,” he said. He craned his neck to look behind her at the tables. He couldn’t see the man, but it was so dark in the restaurant—

“You made it, huh?” The man had yet another fantastic sweater on, this one with a tight herringbone weave and ribbing down the sleeves. He caught Lawrence sizing him up and grinned. “My weakness—the world’s wool farmers would starve if it wasn’t for me.” He patted the greeter on the hand. “He’s at our table.” She gave Lawrence a knowing smile and the tiniest hint of a wink.

“Nice of you to come,” he said as they threaded their way slowly through the crowded tables, past couples having murmured conversations over candlelight, intense business dinners, an old couple eating in silence with evident relish. “Especially as it’s your last night in the city.”

“What kind of restaurant is this?”

“Oh, it’s not any kind of restaurant at all. Private kitchen. Ormund, he owns the place and cooks like a wizard. He runs this little place off the books for his friends to eat in. We come every Wednesday. That’s his vegan night. You’d be amazed with what that guy can do with some greens and a sweet potato. And the cacao nib and avocado chili chocolate is something else.”

The large table was crowded with men and women in their thirties, people who had the look of belonging. They dressed well in fabrics that draped or clung like someone had thought about it, with jewelry that combined old pieces of brass with modern plastics and heavy clay beads that clicked like pool-balls. The women were beautiful or at least handsome—one woman with cheekbones like snowplows and a jawline as long as a ski-slope was possibly the most striking person he’d ever seen up close. The men were handsome or at least craggy, with three-day beards or neat, full mustaches. They were talking in twos and threes, passing around overflowing dishes of steaming greens and oranges and browns, chatting and forking by turns.

“Everyone, I’d like you to meet my guest for the evening.” The man gestured at Lawrence. Lawrence hadn’t told the man his name yet, but he made it seem like he was being gracious and letting Lawrence introduce himself.

“Lawrence,” he said, giving a little wave. “Just in New York for one more night,” he said, still waving. He stopped waving. The closest people—including the striking woman with the cheekbones—waved back, smiling. The furthest people stopped talking and tipped their forks at him or at least cocked their heads.

“Sara,” the cheekbones woman said, pronouncing the first “a” long, “Sah-rah,” and making it sound unpretentious. The low-key buzzing from Lawrence’s pan warned him that he was still overwrought, breathing badly, heart thudding. Who were these people?

“And I’m Randy,” the man said. “Sorry, I should have said that sooner.”

The food was passed down to his end. It was delicious, almost as good as the food at the campus, which was saying something—there was a dedicated cadre of cooks there who made gastronomy their 20 percent projects, using elaborate computational models to create dishes that were always different and always delicious.

The big difference was the company. These people didn’t have to retreat to belong, they belonged right here. Sara told him about her job managing a specialist antiquarian bookstore and there were a hundred stories about her customers and their funny ways. Randy worked at an architectural design firm and he had done some work at Sara’s bookstore. Down the table there were actors and waiters and an insurance person and someone who did something in city government, and they all ate and talked and made him feel like he was a different kind of man, the kind of man who could live on the outside.

The coals of the conversation banked over port and coffees as they drifted away in twos and threes. Sara was the last to leave and she gave him a little hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Safe travels, Lawrence.” Her perfume was like an orange on Christmas morning, something from his childhood. He hadn’t thought of his childhood in decades.

Randy and he looked at each other over the litter on the table. The server brought a check over on a small silver tray and Randy took a quick look at it. He drew a wad of twenties in a bulldog clip out of his inside coat pocket and counted off a large stack, then handed the tray to the server, all before Lawrence could even dig in his pocket.

“Please let me contribute,” he managed, just as the server disappeared.

“Not necessary,” Randy said, setting the clip down on the table. There was still a rather thick wad of money there. Lawrence hadn’t been much of a cash user before he went into the Order and he’d seen hardly any spent since he came back out into the world. It seemed rather antiquarian, with its elaborate engraving. But the notes were crisp, as though freshly minted. The government still pressed the notes, even if they were hardly used any longer. “I can afford it.”

“It was a very fine dinner. You have interesting friends.”

“Sara is lovely,” he said. “She and I—well, we had a thing once. She’s a remarkable person. Of course, you’re a remarkable person, too, Lawrence.”

Lawrence’s pan reminded him again that he was getting edgy. He shushed it.

“You’re smart, we know that. 88th percentile. Looks like you could go higher, judging from the work we’ve evaluated for you. I can’t say your performance as a private eye is very good, though. If I hadn’t intervened, you’d still be standing outside Anja’s apartment building harassing her neighbors.”

His pan was ready to call for an ambulance. Lawrence looked down and saw his hands clenched into fists. “You’re Securitat,” he said.

“Let me put it this way,” the man said, leaning back. “I’m not one of Anja’s neighbors.”

“You’re Securitat,” Lawrence said again. “I haven’t done anything wrong—”

“You came here,” Randy said. “You had every reason to believe that you were taking part in something illegal. You lied to the Securitat man at Penn Station today—”

Lawrence switched his pan’s feedback mechanisms off altogether. Posy, at her window, a penny stuck in the governor of her radiator, rose in his mind.

“Everyone was treating me like a criminal—from the minute I stepped out of the Order, you all treated me like a criminal. That made me act like one—everyone has to act like a criminal here. That’s the hypocrisy of the world, that honest people end up acting like crooks because the world treats them like crooks.”

“Maybe we treat them like crooks because they act so crooked.”

“You’ve got it all backwards,” Lawrence said. “The causal arrow runs the other direction. You treat us like criminals and the only way to get by is to act criminal. If I’d told the Securitat man in Penn Station the truth—”

“You build a wall around the Order, don’t you? To keep us out, because we’re barbarians? To keep you in, because you’re too fragile? What does that treatment do, Lawrence?”

Lawrence slapped his hand on the table and the crystal rang, but no one in the restaurant noticed. They were all studiously ignoring them. “It’s to keep you out! All of you, who treated us—”

Randy stood up from the table. Bulky figures stepped out of the shadows behind them. Behind their armor, the Securitat people could have been white or black, old or young. Lawrence could only treat them as Securitat. He rose slowly from his chair and put his arms out, as though surrendering. As soon as the Securitat officers relaxed by a tiny hair—treating him as someone who was surrendering—he dropped backwards over the chair behind him, knocking over a little two-seat table and whacking his head on the floor so hard it rang like a gong. He scrambled to his feet and charged pell-mell for the door, sweeping the empty tables out of the way as he ran.

He caught a glimpse of the pretty waitress standing by her podium at the front of the restaurant as he banged out the door, her eyes wide and her hands up as though to ward off a blow. He caromed off the wall of the dark corridor and ran for the glass door that led out to Second Avenue, where cars hissed by in the night.

He made it onto the sidewalk, crashed into a burly man in a Mets cap, bounced off him, and ran downtown, the people on the sidewalk leaping clear of him. He made it two whole storefronts—all the running around on the Campus handball courts had given him a pretty good pace and wind—before someone tackled him from behind.

He scrambled and squirmed and turned around. It was the guy in the Mets hat. His breath smelled of onions and he was panting, his lips pulled back. “Watch where you’re going—” he said, and then he was lifted free, jerked to his feet.

The blood sang in Lawrence’s ears and he had just enough time to register that the big guy had been lifted by two blank, armored Securitat officers before he flipped over onto his knees and used the posture like a runner’s crouch to take off again. He got maybe ten feet before he was clobbered by a bolt of lightning that made every muscle in his body lock into rigid agony. He pitched forward face-first, not feeling anything except the terrible electric fire from the taser-bolt in his back. His pan died with a sizzle up and down every haptic point in his suit, and between that and the electricity, he flung his arms and legs out in an agonized X while his neck thrashed, grating his face over the sidewalk. Something went horribly crunch in his nose.

The room had the same kind of locks as the Securitat room in Penn Station. He’d awakened in the corner of the room, his face taped up and aching. There was no toilet, but there was a chair, bolted to the floor, and three prominent video cameras.

They left him there for some time, alone with his thoughts and the deepening throb from his face, his knees, the palms of his hands. His hands and knees had been sanded raw and there was grit and glass and bits of pebble embedded under the skin, which oozed blood.

His thoughts wanted to return to the predicament. They wanted to fill him with despair for his situation. They wanted to make him panic and weep with the anticipation of the cells, the confession, the life he’d had and the life he would get.

He didn’t let them. He had spent sixteen years mastering his thoughts and he would master them now. He breathed deeply, noticing the places where his body was tight and trembling, thinking each muscle into tranquillity, even his aching face, letting his jaw drop open.

Every time his thoughts went back to the predicament, he scrawled their anxious message on a streamer of mental ribbon which he allowed to slip through his mental fingers and sail away.

Sixteen years of doing this had made him an expert, and even so, it was not easy. The worries rose and streamed away as fast as his mind’s hand could write them. But as always, he was finally able to master his mind, to find relaxation and calm at the bottom of the thrashing, churning vat of despair.

When Randy came in, Lawrence heard each bolt click and the hiss of air as from a great distance, and he surfaced from his calm, watching Randy cross the floor bearing his own chair.

“Innocent people don’t run, Lawrence.”

“That’s a rather self-serving hypothesis,” Lawrence said. The cool ribbons of worry slithered through his mind like satin, floating off into the ether around them.“You appear to have made up your mind,though.I wonder at you—you don’t seem like an idiot. How’ve you managed to convince yourself that this—” he gestured around at the room “—is a good idea? I mean, this is just—”

Randy waved him silent.“The interrogation in this room flows in one direction, Lawrence. This is not a dialogue.”

“Have you ever noticed that when you’re uncomfortable with something, you talk louder and lean forward a little? A lot of people have that tell.”

“Do you work with Securitat data streams, Lawrence?”

“I work with large amounts of data, including a lot of material from the Securitat. It’s rarely in cleartext, though. Mostly I’m doing sigint—signals intelligence. I analyze the timing, frequency and length of different kinds of data to see if I can spot anomalies. That’s with a lower-case ‘a’, by the way.” He was warming up to the subject now. His face hurt when he talked, but when he thought about what to say, the hurt went away, as did the vision of the cell where he would go next. “It’s the kind of thing that works best when you don’t know what’s in the payload of the data you’re looking at. That would just distract me. It’s like a magician’s trick with a rabbit or a glass of water. You focus on the rabbit or on the water and what you expect of them, and are flummoxed when the magician does something unexpected. If he used pebbles, though, it might seem absolutely ordinary.”

“Do you know what Zbigniew Krotoski was working on?”

“No, there’s no way for me to know that. The streams are enciphered at the router with his public key, and rescrambled after he’s done with them. It’s all zero-knowledge.”

“But you don’t have zero knowledge, do you?”

Lawrence found himself grinning, which hurt a lot, and which caused a little more blood to leak out of his nose and over his lips in a hot trickle. “Well, signals intelligence being what it is, I was able to discover that it was a Securitat stream, and that it wasn’t the first one he’d worked on, nor the first one he’d altered.”

“He altered a stream?”

Lawrence lost his smile. “I hadn’t told you that part yet, had I?”

“No.” Randy leaned forward. “But you will now.”

The blue silk ribbons slid through Lawrence’s mental fingers as he sat in his cell, which was barely lit and tiny and padded and utterly devoid of furniture. High above him, a ring of glittering red LEDs cast no visible light. They would be infrared lights, the better for the hidden cameras to see him. It was dark, so he saw nothing, but for the infrared cameras, it might as well have been broad daylight. The asymmetry was one of the things he inscribed on a blue ribbon and floated away.

The cell wasn’t perfectly soundproof. There was a gaseous hiss that reverberated through it every forty six to fifty three breaths, which he assumed was the regular opening and shutting of the heavy door that led to the cell-block deep within the Securitat building. That would be a patrol, or a regular report, or someone with a weak bladder.

There was a softer, regular grinding that he felt more than heard—a subway train, running very regular. That was the New York rumble, and it felt a little like his pan’s reassuring purring.

There was his breathing, deep and oceanic, and there was the sound in his mind’s ear, the sound of the streamers hissing away into the ether.

He’d gone out in the world and now he’d gone back into a cell. He supposed that it was meant to sweat him, to make him mad, to make him make mistakes. But he had been trained by sixteen years in the Order and this was not sweating him at all.

“Come along then.” The door opened with a cotton-soft sound from its balanced hinges, letting light into the room and giving him the squints.

“I wondered about your friends,” Lawrence said. “All those people at the restaurant.”

“Oh,” Randy said. He was a black silhouette in the doorway. “Well, you know. Honor among thieves. Rank hath its privileges.”

“They were caught,” he said.

“Everyone gets caught,” Randy said.

“I suppose it’s easy when everybody is guilty.” He thought of Posy. “You just pick a skillset, find someone with those skills, and then figure out what that person is guilty of. Recruiting made simple.”

“Not so simple as all that,” Randy said. “You’d be amazed at the difficulties we face.”

“Zbigniew Krotoski was one of yours.”

Randy’s silhouette—now resolving into features, clothes (another sweater, this one with a high collar and squared-off shoulders)—made a little movement that Lawrence knew meant yes. Randy was all tells, no matter how suave and collected he seemed. He must have been really up to something when they caught him.

“Come along,” Randy said again, and extended a hand to him. He allowed himself to be lifted. The scabs at his knees made crackling noises and there was the hot wet feeling of fresh blood on his calves.

“Do you withhold medical attention until I give you what you want? Is that it?”

Randy put an affectionate hand on his shoulder. “You seem to have it all figured out, don’t you?”

“Not all of it. I don’t know why you haven’t told me what it is you want yet. That would have been simpler, I think.”

“I guess you could say that we’re just looking for the right way to ask you.”

“The way to ask me a question that I can’t say no to. Was it the sister? Is that what you had on him?”

“He was useful because he was so eager to prove that he was smarter than everyone else.”

“You needed him to edit your own data-streams?”

Randy just looked at him calmly. Why would the Securitat need to change its own streams? Why couldn’t they just arrest whomever they wanted on whatever pretext they wanted? Who’d be immune to—

Then he realized who’d be immune to the Securitat: the Securitat would be.

“You used him to nail other Securitat officers?”

Randy’s blank look didn’t change.

Lawrence realized that he would never leave this building. Even if his body left, now he would be tied to it forever. He breathed. He tried for that oceanic quality of breath, the susurration of the blue silk ribbons inscribed with his worries. It wouldn’t come.

“Come along now,” Randy said, and pulled him down the corridor to the main door. It hissed as it opened and behind it was an old Securitat man, legs crossed painfully. Weak bladder, Lawrence knew.

“Here’s the thing,” Randy said. “The system isn’t going to go away, no matter what we do. The Securitat’s here forever. We’ve treated everyone like a criminal for too long now—everyone’s really a criminal now. If we dismantled tomorrow, there’d be chaos, bombings, murder sprees. We’re not going anywhere.”

Randy’s office was comfortable. He had some beautiful vintage circus post-ers—the bearded lady, the sword swallower, the hoochie-coochie girl—framed on the wall, and a cracked leather sofa that made amiable exhalations of good tobacco smell mixed with years of saddle soap when he settled into it. Randy reached onto a tall mahogany bookcase and handed him down a first-aid kit. There was a bottle of alcohol in it and a lot of gauze pads. Gingerly, Lawrence began to clean out the wounds on his legs and hands, then started in on his face. The blood ran down and dripped onto the slate tiled floor, almost invisible. Randy handed him a waste-paper bin and it slowly filled with the bloody gauze.

“Looks painful,” Randy said.

“Just skinned. I have a vicious headache, though.”

“That’s the taser hangover. It goes away. There’s some codeine tablets in the pill-case. Take it easy on them, they’ll put you to sleep.”

While Lawrence taped large pieces of gauze over the cleaned-out corrugations in his skin, Randy tapped idly at a screen on his desk. It felt almost as though he’d dropped in on someone’s hot-desk back at the Order. Lawrence felt a sharp knife of homesickness and wondered if Gerta was OK.

“Do you really have a sister?”

“I do. In Oregon, in the Order.”

“Does she work for you?”

Randy snorted. “Of course not. I wouldn’t do that to her. But the people who run me, they know that they can get to me through her. So in a sense, we both work for them.”

“And I work for you?”

“That’s the general idea. Zbigkrot spooked when you got onto him, so he’s long gone.”

“Long gone as in—”

“This is one of those things where we don’t say. Maybe he disappeared and got away clean, took his sister with him. Maybe he disappeared into our…operations. Not knowing is the kind of thing that keeps our other workers on their game.”

“And I’m one of your workers.”

“Like I said, the system isn’t going anywhere. You met the gang tonight. We’ve all been caught at one time or another. Our little cozy club manages to make the best of things. You saw us—it’s not a bad life at all. And we think that all things considered, we make the world a better place. Someone would be doing our job, might as well be us. At least we manage to weed out the real retarded sadists.” He sipped a little coffee from a thermos cup on his desk. “That’s where Zbigkrot came in.”

“He helped you with ‘retarded sadists’?”

“For the most part. Power corrupts, of course, but it attracts the corrupt, too. There’s a certain kind of person who grows up wanting to be a Securitat officer.”

“And me?”

“You?”

“I would do this too?”

“You catch on fast.”

The outside wall of Campus was imposing. Tall, sheathed in seamless metal painted uniform grey. Nothing grew for several yards around it, as though the world was shrinking back from it.

How did Zbigkrot get off campus?

That’s a question that should have occurred to him when he left the campus. He was embarrassed that it took him this long to come up with it. But it was a damned good question. Trying to force the gate—what was it the old Brother on the gate had said? Pressurized, blowouts, the walls rigged to come down in an instant.

If Zbigkrot had left, he’d walked out, the normal way, while someone at the gate watched him go. And he’d left no record of it. Someone, working on Campus, had altered the stream of data fountaining off the front gate to remove the record of it. There was more than one forger there—it hadn’t just been zbigkrot working for the Securitat.

He’d belonged in the Order. He’d learned how to know himself, how to see himself with the scalding, objective logic that he’d normally reserved for everyone else. The Anomaly had seemed like such a bit of fun, like he was leveling up to the next stage of his progress.

He called Greta. They’d given him a new pan, one that had a shunt that delivered a copy of all his data to the Securitat. Since he’d first booted it, it had felt strange and invasive, every buzz and warning coming with the haunted feeling, the watched feeling.

“You, huh?”

“It’s very good to hear your voice,” he said. He meant it. He wondered if she knew about the Securitat’s campus snitches. He wondered if she was one. But it was good to hear her voice. His pan let him know that whatever he was doing was making him feel great. He didn’t need his pan to tell him that, though.

“I worried when you didn’t check in for a couple days.”

“Well, about that.”

“Yes?”

If he told her, she’d be in it too—if she wasn’t already. If he told her, they’d figure out what they could get on her. He should just tell her nothing. Just go on inside and twist the occasional data-stream. He could be better at it than zbigkrot. No one would ever make an Anomaly out of him. Besides, so what if they did? It would be a few hours, days, months or years that he could live on Campus.

And if it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.

It would be someone else.

“I just wanted to say good bye, and thanks. I suspect I’m not going to see you again.”

Off in the distance now, the sound of the Securitat van’s happy little song. His pan let him know that he was breathing quickly and shallowly and he slowed his breathing down until it let up on him.

“Lawrence?”

He hung up. The Securitat van was visible now, streaking toward the Campus wall.

He closed his eyes and watched the blue satin ribbons tumble, like silky water licking over a waterfall. He could get to the place that Campus took him to, from anywhere. That was all that mattered.

IS THIS YOUR DAY TO JOIN THE REVOLUTION?

by Genevieve Valentine

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology Running with the Pack and in the magazines Strange Horizons, Futurismic, Clarkesworld, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Escape Pod, and more. Her work can also be found in my anthologies Federations, The Way of the Wizard, The Living Dead 2, and in my online magazine Lightspeed. In addition to writing fiction, Valentine is a columnist for Fantasy Magazine. She is a finalist for the 2010 World Fantasy Award.

The Tupolev ANT-20, completed in 1934, was one of the largest fixed-winged aircrafts ever built. It featured remarkable engineering features that outshone any other airplane of the 1930s. Big and fast, it was loaded to the gills with wonders: an in-flight film projector, its own printing equipment, a darkroom, and most importantly, the radio broadcasting unit known as the “Voice from the Sky.” It was no ordinary airplane. The ANT-20 was the jewel of Stalin’s propaganda machine.

Propaganda doesn’t have to be evil. But it exists to convince people—and those who use it are often willing to skew the truth or obscure it entirely in order to create an influential product. In the past, propaganda was an important part of the war efforts of many countries, from Nazi Germany to the United States. But in the future, who knows how propaganda might be used?

Our next tale is the story of a new kind of propaganda, filled with a message so large it has changed the living fabric of a nation.  But is the message true?

In this grim new world, there’s no way to know. And even if it’s not, who’s brave enough to ask?

When Liz left her building, Disease Control workers were standing on the corners, handing out pills and little paper cups of Coke.

“Do you need one?” the old lady asked, holding up a handful of paper masks stamped with ads for Lavender Fields Sterile-Milled Soap. Liz pulled out the one she kept in her bag, and the lady smiled.

The TV in her subway car showed “What You Can Do on a Date.” The young man and woman went to the fair twice—once where he screwed everything up, and again where he helped her into the Ferris Wheel and handed her a paper mask before he put on his own.

The movie closed with swelling music and a reminder in cursive: ARE YOU DUE FOR A DATE? CHECK WITH YOUR DOCTOR.

Liz worked the reception desk on the sixth floor of the Department of Information Affairs.

“That Greg’s a lucky man,” said Mr. Randall, the District Manager, when he came in every morning. “Too bad I didn’t get matched with you first!”

Liz chuckled, because a District Manager’s jokes were always funny.

Above her, on a loop, the introduction video played for anyone coming into the Department. It showed a woman on the street overhearing pieces of information she didn’t know how to report; it reviewed the details of filing a claim as a man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit signed in at the desk, took the elevator to the eighteenth floor, shook hands with a smiling agent.

“What do you know that we should know?” the narrator asked at the end, right before the two actors turned to the camera and the man in the jumpsuit said, “More than I thought, that’s for sure!”

Liz couldn’t see it from where she was sitting, but she didn’t need to. She’d seen the film during orientation; the last time anyone at the Department suggested she had anything anyone needed to know.

Greg waited outside her building for their scheduled date, and when he saw her coming, he smiled.

Greg had been studying for a job at Disease Control, before the Bang. His viable sperm knocked him out of line for any Sector-C jobs; he answered phones at a law office. They had been matched three years ago, and had been evaluated “Above Average” Sweethearts three years running by the Society Council. Their chances of marriage had been rated by the doctors as close to 80%.

Greg was gay as a Maypole, but they made do.

When she was just far enough away, she called, “Hello, darling.” (You never knew when the Society Council was monitoring.)

He smiled. “Hello, honey. How was your day?”

“Some concern over Disease, I think. Someone from Film Production signed in this morning; they might be making a new film about how the Disease is going.”

Greg whistled. “That’s no good.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t understand the delay—we’ve been wearing the masks for weeks already, they should have delivered a new movie by now.”

“They should have,” Greg said, frowning.

Liz patted her boyfriend’s arm and dropped the subject; every once in a while, the government wasn’t above a little mistake.

They hit up The Shindig at the Three-Screen. The tag line had caused a little scandal (“Vane and Murray spark more fireworks than the Bang!”), but it was just a romantic musical. Liz liked the dancing. Greg liked Joe Murray.

The cashier stamped their tickets. “Please don’t forget to get them stamped on the way out or the purchase is ineligible for reimbursement from the Department of Society,” he droned.

Once they were in their seats, Greg put his arm around her like all the other guys had done to their dates. (You never knew who was a Society Council inspector.) “Is there a plan for after this?”

“Well, if you really enjoy Joe Murray, we can go to a Society hotel if you want, after.”

He looked over, understanding. “Due for the doctor?”

She smiled thinly. “We have a year left before they re-match me.” She thought about Mr. Randall finding out and filing a request, and shuddered. “I’d rather stick it out with you.”

Greg nodded, and when the movie titles came up, he held her hand.

Murray and Vane were in the middle of their meet-cute dance routine when the film stuttered, pixelated, and blinked out.

“Refund!” someone shouted before the screen was even black.

The screen flared back to life, with the title: YOU ARE BEING LIED TO.

“So, no refund?” asked Greg. The people near them laughed.

The screen cards kept flashing. THERE ARE NO PATHOGENS. THERE IS NO DISEASE CONTROL.

THERE IS NO DISEASE.

Now no one was laughing.

Someone got up and ran out of the theatre.

Liz craned her neck, trying to see what was happening in the projection booth.

The screen cut to a grainy shot of a computer screen; a shadowy figure sat beside it, typing and talking to the camera.

“We are John Doe,” it said—its voice had been distorted, like film played at halfspeed—“and we have tuned the network. We have proof the Disease is a lie.”

Now people were beginning to murmur. Some got up and scurried for the exit like it was a Security Department trap. It probably was.

Liz hoped this kid was lying. She thought, annoyed, about the stupid paper mask she wore three days a week when the Pathogen Alert was high.

The computer screen showed a mail exchange with the header DAMAGE CONTROL TO INTERCEPT INFORMATION LEAK.

“Every citizen MUST ACT,” the voice was saying. “Don’t take the pills from Disease Control!”

By now the figure was agitated, gesturing at the camera. “Ask yourselves: who’s ever really gotten sick? How can the Bang’s pathogens strike such small areas? Why are they always near the borders? How does Disease Control respond so quickly? The pills have kept us docile, but the time has come to act! We’ve made contact with—”

The doors behind them crashed open, the doorway filled with plainclothes SD and uniformed cops, guns out.

“Hold it!” someone shouted, and the police charged the projector booth.

A young man jumped out of the booth and crash-landed in the aisle, grabbing Greg’s seat to pull himself up—the boy was young, blond, his face tight with pain or fear, and for a moment he was just staring at them, his hands flexed on Greg’s armrest.

Then he sprinted for the exit and disappeared.

The cops and SDs tripped over themselves back down the projection-room stairs, and they scattered—some for the exits, some for the audience.

Greg and Liz were yanked out of their seats and dragged outside into a holding pen of cop cars, along with the rest of the audience. Liz saw a few of the ones who had tried to run and hadn’t made it.

“I don’t want to go into the station,” Greg told her. “It could end up on my record.”

He still hoped that someday he could get closer—any closer—to Disease Control.

Liz faked a storm of tears when the cops were close enough to see it, and they handed Greg a printout and stamped his ticket stubs and told him to be a gentleman and take her home, already.

“I’m looking for a refund for this prank,” Greg told them half-seriously, “I want you to know that.”

On the walk home, Greg read from the printout; a standard-issue distribution, without a date on it. They’d had it ready to go, just in case.

Greg flashed the picture of a frowning boy dragging a skull-emblazoned bag behind him.

Pranks are FOOLISH and WASTE THE TIME of VALUABLE CITIZENS. They DISTRACT from safety work and INTERFERE with your government. If you see a PRANKSTER, contact your local precinct.

The bottom read, in large block letters, TODAY’S DELINQUENT IS TOMORROW’S CRIMINAL.

“Hold it,” said the blond kid from behind her, and Liz felt the point of a knife in her back.

“Or today’s criminal,” Liz said.

Greg leveled a look at the kid. “Keep it cool, Johnny Doe. What do you want?”

“Your car.”

“Don’t have one.”

Johnny pulled a face. “Shit. Well. Give me your money,” he said, and nudged Liz with his shoulder (not, she noted, with the knife).

“What, you’re going to buy a bus pass and ride out of town on the local?” Liz asked, but she handed over her purse. “Seventeen dollars. Enjoy.”

Johnny thumbed through the wallet with his free hand. “They’ve got my car,” he told them like they were all friends. “I need to get out of here. They’ll kill me.”

Liz didn’t doubt that.

Greg glanced around at the quiet street. Ahead of them was the main drag, swarming with people going out to the City Fair on subsidized dates.

“You should go,” said Johnny. “You’ll be in trouble if they see you with me.”

Greg looked like he was in the middle of a magnificent adventure, and was sneaking looks at Johnny’s sharp profile when he thought Johnny wasn’t looking, and Liz knew what was coming before Greg even opened his mouth.

Gred asked, “What do you need?”

Liz and Greg signed into a Society hotel just off the main drag. The concierge registered them, stamped their paper, and smiled politely. No speeches about exit stamps this time—it was gauche for concierges to keep track of that sort of thing.

They closed the door and looked at one another like it was their first date again. Liz felt an itch just under her skin, like she was sick, like she needed to run until she dropped. She felt like Greg looked.

Greg laid his tie over the chair and looked at her. “What if they trace him to my apartment? What if they find him there?”

Liz figured if they found a good-looking young man in Greg’s apartment, he’d be in trouble for a lot more than harboring a fugitive.

“Come on,” said Liz, tugging gently at the tongue of his belt. “We have work to do. Just close your eyes and think of Johnny.”

At the door of the hotel, Greg kissed her cheek goodnight. He seemed surprised when she fell into step beside him instead of turning for her street, but he took her arm without hesitation.

“Just curious to see what he does in civilization,” she said when she felt him looking at her. “Besides, I’m your alibi if anyone’s found him.”

“God, that’s the truth,” he said, and pressed her hand more tightly into the crook of his arm.

John Doe was gone, having availed himself of Greg’s good raincoat and a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, and Greg’s sadness at the end of their adventure was mitigated by the fact that he’d have to replace a very pricey coat.

Liz figured that wasn’t the last of Johnny Doe, though when Greg wistfully asked her, “Do you think he might ever…?” she said, “Nope,” just to keep him from getting tied up in knots about it.

Secretly, she guessed that a rebel wouldn’t abandon a safe harbor, but that was really only from the films (“Is Your Neighbor a Traitor?”) and she couldn’t be sure, now.

Sometimes when they were at the movies and the screen skipped a frame, Greg tensed, and Liz dreaded the day Johnny ever came back and swept Greg off his feet and into some mission, living in a ghost town smack in the middle of the Pathogen Fields.

Liz would have to go on the group dates in the Society Center where they observed you behind the mirror and marked your body language and assigned you someone, and Liz would have to learn to live with someone entirely new.

Above her head, the woman in the video was shopping for groceries. A man behind her said to someone, “We’ll have to hurry, the pickup happens tonight,” and the woman frowned at an apple; the narrator said, “Mary knows something’s not quite right, but what can she do? She can do what we ALL should do: report suspicions. Today’s alert citizen is tomorrow’s hero.”

On the screen behind her, the man in the jumpsuit opened the lobby door and approached the desk to make his complaint. (He never actually made it, Liz knew; he just went up in the elevator and shook hands with the other actor, every ten minutes, all day.)

“It’s easy to be a good citizen!” the narrator said. “We need what you know.”

John Doe was standing at the corner of her street, dressed like a Disease Control agent, when she saw him next.

When he saw her, he went white as a sheet. Then he fumbled for the tray, handed her a cup.

“What’s in here?” she asked under her breath. “You poisoning us now?”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s the same as the rest,” he said. “I’m just waiting here to be taken back to Disease Control.”

So he was going to sneak in that way.

“Is it true you work for the DOI?”

She blinked as his question settled in. Then she shook her head. “Oh, no, Johnny. Don’t.”

“How can you say no?” he handed off a paper cup to a passerby, turned back to her. This close, she could see the vein of green in his blue eyes.

“You’re not stupid,” he said. “You know I’m telling the truth. Won’t you help me?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m getting into Disease Control,” he said. “I’m getting proof that this is all just to keep us in line, and I’m going to air it across the country. People are going to have a nasty wake-up.”

She wondered how he planned to organize the nation full of people he was going to wake up. “I can’t help you,” she said.

“I know where you work,” he said, pleading. “You can help me get the message out. All you have to do is let me in. I’ll go upstairs on my own, I can get the message out from there.”

She took a step back. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“No one will know it was you.”

That much she knew for sure—she said, “Someone will.”

“How can you be such a coward?” He was louder now—too loud, the other Disease Control agent looked concerned—and Liz took a step back as Johnny stepped forward. His eyes were sharp and bright. “Don’t you see what they’ve done to you?”

“Leave me alone,” she said. She wished Greg or someone was here, just in case.

He dropped the tray with a clang; paper cups and pills skittered across the pavement, bounced off Liz’s shoes.

“It’s over,” he said. “They’ll kill me if you don’t help me. You’ve killed me.”

Liz couldn’t breathe. She felt dizzy. She didn’t understand what he meant.

The next moment she was on the ground, being handcuffed, and Johnny was being picked up (five cops, maybe more) and carried, kicking, into the back of a van that had appeared out of nowhere.

As the two policemen walked Liz to the car, they passed the van, blaring the last swells of a familiar tune through its speakers.

“Are you due for a date?” called the announcer. “Check with your doctor.”

Mr. Randall was waiting for her on the eighteenth floor of the Department.

She waited. She tried to think how many people who came up to report something to the Department had ever come down again.

“We’d like to congratulate you,” said Mr. Randall.

Liz blinked. “Pardon?”

“Your John Doe was part of a series of test runs we did around the city to gauge the audience for a new instructional film. Marketing has been working with us for months.”

Relief flooded her. “Oh, I see,” she said.

“Our field man did his damnedest, but I told him—I said, That girl has her head on straight, you won’t get her to help you! He tried twice, the theatre and the street, but did Elizabeth fold?” He laughed. “I told him he’d have as much luck getting help from me as from you.”

She thought about giving Johnny her keys to Greg’s place, telling him the fastest way to get there, taking Greg’s arm to go for an alibi date.

No one had told Randall about that. This was no undercover job, then; Johnny Doe had died and taken that secret with him.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

When she got back to her desk, she called Greg. “Want to get married?”

He only hesitated a moment. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said, a little too brightly, but only just. “I’ll pick you up tonight and we’ll go to City Hall and your doctor.”

She wanted to tell Greg what had happened; how she had been too afraid to help Johnny, and what must have happened to him by now. “See you soon,” she said, hung up as he was saying, “Goodbye, darling.” Above her, the film was ending, the Department actor grinning through the last frames of twinkling music. “What do you know that we should know?”

JUST DO IT

by Heather Lindsley

Heather Lindsley’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, and Strange Horizons. This story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was reprinted in Year’s Best SF #12 and Escape Pod, and has been translated into Polish and Romanian. Lindsley is also a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.

As America’s largest chemical company, DuPont is best known for its work creating fibers like nylon, Kevlar, and Teflon… and for developing CFCs, the refrigerants responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. But beyond its products, DuPont has given society a special gift. In 1935, DuPont adopted the slogan “Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry.” Other advertisers and cultural figures immediately jumped on this slogan, creating the infamous phrase better living through chemistry.

Chemistry has a bad rap these days. The late twentieth-century is riddled with environmental and health disasters stemming from human abuse of chemistry. From thalidomide babies to endangered eagles, it’s difficult to see a good side of the chemical industry.

And our next tale turns a scathing eye upon it. Lindsley says “it’s about desire and how easy that is to manipulate. But I’ll go a bit further and say I was also thinking about the ongoing conflict between doing the right thing and doing the comfortable, pleasurable thing. It’s about having a compelling excuse to take the easier, ethically questionable path. To just do it and blame somebody else’s chemical.”

Sometimes the only warning is a flash of sun on the lens of a sniper’s scope. Today I’m lucky enough to catch the mistake. Funny, I think as I duck down behind the nearest parked car, I don’t feel lucky. The car is a tiny thing, an ultra enviro-friendly Honda Righteous painted an unambiguous green. Good for the planet, bad for cover. Ahead there’s an

H5 so massive and red I first take it for a fire truck. The selfish bastard parked illegally, blocking an alley, and for that I’m grateful.

I take a quick look at the roof of the building across the street before starting my dash to the Hummer. Halfway there a woman in plastic devil horns steps into my attempt to dodge her and her clipboard.

“Would-you-care-to-sign-our-petiton-in-favor-of-the-effort-against-ending-the-Florida-blockade?” Damn, she’s good. She sounds like she trained with a preBay auctioneer.

I feint left and dart right, putting her between me and the Shooter and countering, “I-already-signed-it-thanks!” so she won’t follow. It’s not the first lie I’ve told today, and it’s not likely to be the last.

Temporarily safe behind the Hummer, I lean against the heavily tinted windows of the far back seat door, glad to be standing upright but panting and sweating and wishing I wasn’t wearing the black jumpsuit I reserve for funerals and job interviews. Nanofiber, my ass—it can’t even keep up with a little physical activity on a hot April day.

I start the long walk toward the front bumper, figuring I’ll duck into the alley and continue on my way one block over. It seems like a good plan until another Shooter steps out of the alley.

This one has a pistol. I’d go cross-eyed if I tried to look down the barrel.

“Oh, come on,” I say, backing away slowly. “Not the face.”

He dips the barrel down a bit. I sigh and start pulling the zipper at the high neck of my jumpsuit in the same direction. I stop just shy of revealing cleavage—I’ll get shot in the face before I give this punk an eyeful.

He shrugs and fires.

“You little bastard!” I yell at his retreating back as I pull out the dart out of my forehead. “I want your license number!”

Of course he doesn’t bother to stop. They never do.

The itching starts almost immediately, and I reflexively reach up and touch the bump above my eyes. I know better than to scratch it, but I do anyway. The scratching releases a flood of chemicals that create a powerful and specific food craving. I brace myself.

French fries. French fries from the den of the evil clown, where they don’t even pretend to use potatoes anymore. I hate those french fries, so golden and crispy on the outside, so moist and fluffy on the inside—

No no no no no, I do not want them.

I manage to get past the first shadow the clown casts on my route with relative calm, but by the second the itching is more intense and all I can imagine are french fries. Disgusting, nasty, tasty, delicious french fries.

This is not the way to walk into a job interview.

The site of my two o’clock appointment looms in the office tower ahead… right behind a third opportunity to relieve the craving. I keep moving, trying not to think about how well the diabetes-inducing corn syrupy sweet ketchup complements the blood pressure-raising salty savor of the fries.

I make a full circuit through the revolving doors of the office building before going back toward the object of my involuntary, chemically-enhanced desire.

The food odors pounce immediately and I can almost feel the molecules sticking to my clothes. Even if I turn around now I’ll smell like fast food.

“Let’s get this over with,” I say unnecessarily to the credit scanner, staring it down until it greenlights my ability to pay for food I don’t really want. None of the automat compartments contain fries, which is unusual, so I punch hard at a picture of french fries on the order panel. The dents in the panel tell me I’m not the only customer who feels antagonistic about buying food here.

It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two for the fries to appear in a compartment, so when they don’t I start pounding on the automat.

“Hey, hurry it up!” I yell, scratching furiously at the bump on my forehead.

The back door of the empty fry compartment slides open. An eye stares out at me.

“What?”

“Fries. I need fries.”

“We’re out of fries,” the voice behind the automat says.

“How can you be out of fries? You’ve got Shooters out there making people crave the damned things!”

“That’s why we’re out.”

“Doesn’t the head office coordinate this stuff?”

The eye blinks twice and the door slides shut.

It’s 1:47, enough time to go back to the second place if I hurry. But I don’t hurry. I pace in the street, muttering to myself like a lunatic. It’s almost five minutes before I quit trying to control the craving and dash back the way I came.

I give the next credit scanner an especially dirty look, then yank open the one compartment with fries. I stop only to pump blobs of ketchup from the dispenser. On my way out I pass an old man scratching his arm as he raves through an open compartment, “How can you be out of fish sandwiches?!”

“Try the one on Third and Pine,” I say around a mouthful of fries.

CraveTech’s offices are both plush and haphazard, the combined result of a record-breaking IPO and the latest design fad: early dot-com retro. I arrive sweaty, greasy, nauseated, and thoroughly pissed off. I smile at the receptionist anyway, a fashionably sulky blonde boy seated in a vintage Aeron chair behind a desk made out of two sawhorses topped with an old door and a crystal vase.

“Alex Monroe. I have a two o’clock with Mr. Avery.”

“Two o’clock?” he says pointedly. It’s 2:02. “Have a seat. Something to drink while you’re waiting?”

“Water please.” I’ll probably retain every ounce. Damn salty french fries. There are pills that reduce bloating, of course—they sell them out of the same automat—but I wouldn’t hand over any more of my money.

I’ve just taken my first sip when a young man pops out of the office. He looks like a typical startup manager: handsome, well-dressed, and almost certainly in over his head.

“Ms. Monroe, welcome!” He bounds up to me, hand extended. During the handshake he nods toward my forehead. “Ah, I see you use our products!” He laughs heartily at his own joke. I laugh back. I want this job.

“It’s a wonderful time to be in chemical advertising, Ms. Monroe,” he says, shepherding me into his office. I notice he has a proper desk. “We have some exciting deals in the works. Exciting, exciting deals.”

“Really?” I say, distracted by the fry-lump in my stomach.

“Oh, yes. Now that the Supreme Court has reversed most of those class action suits, Shooters don’t have to be stealthy. We’ve had to discontinue the tobacco lines for the time being, but otherwise it’s open season on consumers.”

I make another effort to join in his laughter, and reaching toward the bump on my head add, “It certainly is effective.”

“Indeed.” He smiles like he loaded the dart himself. “So,” he says, picking up my resume, “I see your background is in print.”

“Yes, but I’ve done some work in fragrance influence, and I’m very interested in chemical advertising’s potential.”

“Well, it is a growing field, plenty of room for trailblazers, especially with campaigns as impressive as these.” He sets my resume aside. “And of course we still have quite a lot of synergy with print.” He pulls an inch-long Crave dart out of a drawer and drops it on the desk between us. I resist the urge to cringe at the sight of the wretched thing.

“What do you see?” he asks.

I want to say a menace, but instead I tap the delivery barrel and give the context-appropriate answer. “Unused ad space.”

Suddenly he’s a schoolmaster who has finally found a bright pupil in a classroom full of dunces.

“Exactly, Ms. Monroe. Exactly. No square millimeter wasted, that’s what I say.” He leans across the table and whispers conspiratorially, “We’re looking at co-branding an AOL-Time-Warner-Starbucks Lattepalooza Crave with a Forever Fitness session discount.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. Coupons on the darts. How does that grab you?”

“Coupons.”

“Tiny coupons, like the ones on swizzle sticks. Can’t you just see it? You get Stuck, so you want the product, but you’re also concerned about your weight. The coupon helps. The coupon tells you the provider cares about your concerns. It tells you they understand.” He leans back in his chair, my cue to speak.

“Interesting. But I’d go log-in rebate rather than immediate discount. Same message, same coverage, easier on the bottom line.”

He leans forward again. “I like the way you think, Ms. Monroe.”

I hate meeting at Sandra’s house—her cats are constantly trying to climb up on my lap, I suspect because they know I’m allergic to them. But Sandra is my best friend from college, and also my cell leader, so I usually end up here at least once a week.

“Whoa, right in the forehead,” she says when she opens the door.

“Yeah, and that’s an ugly one on your neck.”

“That’s a hickey.”

“Oh, uh, sorry. Or congratulations, I guess.”

“Eh,” she shrugs, heading to the kitchen.

I follow. “Um, aren’t you a little old to be getting those?”

“Maybe, but Liam’s not too old to be giving them.” Sandra has a taste for idealistic young revolutionaries.

She starts to make herbal tea, and I know enough not to ask for coffee instead.

We take the tea to the lumpy, cat-hair covered futon in the living room. “How’d the interview go?”

“Shaky start. Getting Stuck really threw me off. But I did manage to laugh at his jokes, and, sad to say, I’m more or less qualified.”

“You do speak their language.” Sandra likes to remind me that I’ve only recently stopped being part of the problem. “So where do things stand?” she asks.

“He said he only had one more interview, and he’d call to let me know by the end of the week.”

“Did you pick up anything while you were there?”

“Not much about the next formulas. AOL-Time-Warner-Starbucks is definitely in now, but that’s old news.”

“But you think you can get access? The job’s in the right division?”

“Close enough. Marketing’s always looking over R&D’s shoulder. It won’t seem strange for me to be poking around.”

“What should I tell our counter-formula development contact?”

“Well, assuming I get the job, and assuming I can start right away, three weeks. Maybe four. It’ll depend on their security.”

She seems satisfied with this answer. “What about Plan B? How’s the Mata Hari routine working on our favorite evil genius?”

“He’s not evil—he’s just oblivious.”

She raises an eyebrow at this. “Dangerously oblivious.”

“Yes, I know.” I concentrate on picking cat hair off my clothes. “It’s going fine. Fourth date tonight. Expensive place. I should get going, actually.” I rise and head for the door. She stops me and stares pointedly at my forehead.

“Alex, don’t forget—he’s the enemy.” I consciously abort an eye-roll and substitute a smile.

“Dangerously oblivious genius equals enemy. Check.” I give her a little wave as I step outside.

“Which restaurant are you going to?” Sandra asks from the doorway.

“Prima.”

Her brow furrows. “Don’t they serve real meat?”

“Oh yes—and I’ll be ordering a steak,” I say, taking a moment to enjoy her disapproving look.

“I’ll have the porterhouse. Rare, please.”

“Make that two,” Tom says. “Mine medium.”

“Very good,”the server says. “I’ll be back with the first course shortly.” He gives us each a prim little four-star nod as he leaves.

I put my elbows on the white linen tablecloth and rest my chin on my interlaced fingers. “I’m not sure I can ever love a man who would ruin a perfectly good steak.”

Tom leans into the candlelight, too. “And I’m not sure I can trust a woman who likes her meat nearly raw.”

“I guess we’ll just have to stay together for the sex.”

“And the children.” He raises his glass to his lips.

“I’m not having sex with children, you pervert.”

He chokes on his wine and grabs his napkin. I have to give him points for not looking around to make sure we haven’t been overheard.

“If I’d known you’d be shooting wine out of your nose I’d have suggested a Merlot,” I say as innocently as I can manage.

“How,” he coughs, “did I ever end up in such hazardous company?”

We met accidentally at a Better Living Through Chemistry Expo sponsored by Dow-DuPont-Bristol-Myers-Squibb-PepsiCo six weeks ago.

Actually, we met at a hotel bar during the expo.

I was running my report through my head, thinking about the companies that had the most bad news for humanity in the works. He sat down a couple of bar-stools away. We traded a little eye contact and a few shy smiles in the dim light.

“So which of these evil bastards are you representing?”

He laughed. “CraveTech.”

“Ooh, a startup. Exciting.”

“Yeah. What about you?”

“Me? I’m with an underground group whose goal is to liberate people from the tyranny of corporate chemical dependence.”

“Huh. Underground, you said?”

“Yeah, we’re not very good at that part.” I was already starting to like his laugh, especially since it came so easily. “Actually, I freelance in marketing.”

“Anything I might have seen?”

“Maybe the Junior Chemical Engineer campaign.”

“‘Big Molecules for Little Hands.’”

“That’s the one,” I said, suddenly aware I was twisting a lock of my hair around my finger. I reached for my drink.

“Wasn’t there a massive judgment against them in one of the last big class action suits?”

“No, that was Union-Pfizer’s My First Exothermic Reaction. Ours were just repackaged Make Your Own Cologne! kits left over from the last Queer Eye reunion tour.”

“Clever.” He got up and closed the barstool gap between us.

“Despicable. So what do you do at CraveTech?”

“I run the place.”

“That’s funny,” I said, laughing until he slid the nearest candle closer. I squinted at a face I almost recognized from the cover of Time-Newsweek.

“Where are your glasses?”

“Contacts tonight.”

“You lose the glasses when you don’t want to be recognized.”

“Yeah, sort of a—”

“Reverse Clark Kent thing.”

He smiled. “Yeah,” and I could feel his geeky little heart reaching out for mine.

Tonight he’s wearing his glasses. He looks cute in them.

“Of course, the really exciting work is in BeMod,” he says, slicing into his steak.

“BeMod?” This seems like a good time to play dumb.

“Behavior Modification. The current dart formulas can make you want to ingest something—food, smoke, whatever. That’s easy.”

“Easy for you,” I say, raising my eyebrows toward the bump that’s only just beginning to subside.

At least he has the grace to look embarrassed. “Yeah, uh, sorry about that. But once we ship the darts to the providers, it’s pretty much out of CraveTech’s hands. I get Stuck sometimes, too, you know.”

I spell the word oblivious in my head over and over, until I lose the urge to punch him. It takes four this time, so I miss hearing yet another version of the “If It Wasn’t CraveTech It Would Be Someone Else” speech.

“…anyway, it’s all just using the chemistry of cravings,” he’s saying when I’m calm enough to tune back in. “The fact that you have to buy whatever it is you’re craving is an indirect consequence.”

“An awfully profitable indirect consequence.” I stab at a carrot.

“Yes, but see, that’s the thing: the next big leap in the field is to skip straight to the buying part. We’ve been doing some promising work with what happens to brain chemistry when avid consumers watch successful commercials.”

“So you’re trying to synthesize a drug that will make people go out and buy MaxWhite toothpaste.”

“Or a pair of NeoNikes. Or an H5.”

“Oh my God.”

He unleashes his Boy Genius grin. “Yeah. Pretty cool, huh?”

I report for my first day at CraveTech two weeks later. No one mentions that I’m dating the CEO, so I assume it hasn’t gotten out. Still, I make a point of flirting back—and being overheard—when the cute young thing from Amazon-FedExKinko’s makes her rounds.

I’d told Tom up front that I was applying for the job. He was encouraging, but made it clear he would keep his nose out of it and leave things to Avery. I never see Tom around the marketing department—he seems more interested in making things than selling them, which I find endearing. If only he weren’t making such awful things.

I flop down on Sandra’s futon, narrowly missing a cat.

She puts mugs of tea on the table while I fish an envelope out of my shoulder bag. When she sits down next to me I place the envelope in her hands.

“Information,” I say, “and lots of it.” She takes the data card out of the envelope and peers at it as if she can actually make sense of what it contains.

“This is all of them?”

“All the formulas set to come out over the next six months. I’ve included a release schedule so you’ll know which ones will be hitting the street first.”

“The counter-formula team is gonna love this.”

“They’d better. That little card represents a month of my life spent smiling at banalities and pretending to care about other people’s kids.”

“So you’re ready to quit.” She sounds relieved.

“I’d love to, but I don’t think I can just yet. I still haven’t found anything about this BeMod stuff. Tom keeps going on about it, but as far as I can tell it hasn’t surfaced in R&D.”

“Isn’t it weird that he seems so serious about BeMod but you can’t find it at CraveTech?”

I laugh. “So you think he has some other lab where he’s developing chemicals he can use to rule the world?”

“Maybe not rule the world…just make a shitload of money, which is close enough.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

She shifts uncomfortably on the futon. “It just seems like he’s been awfully specific about this BeMod stuff, and it hasn’t turned up where you’d expect it.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“I think it’s time you broke up with him, and maybe quit CraveTech, too.”

“But if this BeMod stuff is in development somewhere, we’ll need to get our hands on it and start on a counter-formula as soon as we can.”

“That’s true.”

“And how do we do that if I don’t keep seeing him?”

The cell leader finally overcomes the college buddy. “Just be careful. Don’t get too attached to him.”

I pick up the data card, two gig worth of corporate espionage. “Does this seem like I’m too attached?”

I arrive at Tom’s place in a foul mood. He doesn’t notice. Dangerously oblivious.

We’re still in the foyer when he starts in about BeMod.

“I read a fascinating study on endorphins today. Apparently you can stimulate—”

“Can we please talk about something other than biochemistry?” I drop my bag on the floor.

He looks surprised and a little hurt. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was boring you.”

“You’re not boring me.” I reach for his hand as we head into the living room. “I just think we have more in common than an interest in BeMods and DC Comics.”  I haven’t gotten around to telling him I prefer Marvel.

He stops and pulls me back toward him. “I love you.”

“See, there you go—I love me, too.  Something else we have in common.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” he sighs, collapsing on his down-filled couch. “I’m trying to be serious.”

“I know.”  I sit down next to him. “I’m sorry.  I just need a little more time.”

“Okay. A little more time,” he says, kissing my forehead and then my neck.

It’s so easy to kiss him back.

The next time I go to Sandra’s, she has a data card for me.

“What’s this?”

“A press release. It says CraveTech is voluntarily recalling all darts because internal studies have shown them to trigger heart attacks and strokes in a small but substantial segment of the population. We need you to send it out from the CraveTech network.”

I hand the card back to her. “The media will figure out it’s bogus.”

“Not before the stock plummets. We’re set up to trigger a small drop, and the release will do the rest.”

“You know I won’t be able to go back there after I send it. They’ll trace it to me.”

“I know.”  I stare hard at her.  She doesn’t flinch.

“And I’ll have to break up with Tom.”

“You need to do that anyway, Alex. It’s been almost six months. That’s too long.  It’s longer than you’ve dated anyone for real.”

“Sandra, sending this press release is just throwing a brick through a window. It’s meaningless in the long run. They’ll replace the window. The stock price will readjust.”

“But it will slow them down.”

“Sandra, if it isn’t CraveTech, it’ll be…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”  I take the card.

“You’ll send the release?”

“I’ll send it.”

I put the few personal items that decorated my cubicle in a gym bag. I never had a picture of Tom on my desk.  That would have been indiscreet.

The press release glows on my work station, one twitch away from every major news outlet and the most incendiary of the minor ones. If I had a picture of Tom, I might have stared at it for a while, maybe even whispered Sorry to it.

But I don’t, so I just flick Send.

I’ve come to break up with him. “You’re early,” he says when he greets me at the door. “I’ve planned something special.”  I follow him out to the deck.

“For what?”

“Our six-month anniversary.” There’s a cloth-covered table and dining chairs, a silver champagne bucket on a stand. “In another twenty minutes there’ll be a sunset, too.” He says this like he paid for it. “But, you know,” he looks oddly apologetic, “you’re early.”

“Tom, I’m sorry…we’re not going to have a six-month anniversary.”

I expect anything from him but the crooked Boy Genius smile I love so much. “This isn’t about the press release, is it?”

I sit, a little inelegantly in my surprise.

“What press release?”

He laughs. “This conversation will probably be less awkward if I just tell you I had all your CraveTech e-mails routed to me before they went out.”

Ah.

“I was a little surprised that you actually sent it, but I do understand. I appreciate your beliefs. I love you for them—I want you to know that.” He pours us each a glass of champagne. “And besides, you really helped me out with those counter-formulas.”

I pick up my glass then set it down again. “Helped you out?”

“Absolutely. My people made a couple of tweaks, though. Your group’s design wasn’t very cost effective at the ten thousand unit level.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re going to manufacture our counter-formulas?”

“Oh, yes. The marketing campaign has been in development at a subsidiary company for weeks now. And the profit projections—Alex, you wouldn’t believe it. Apparently people really, really hate the craving darts.” Oh, my oblivious darling. “They’ll pay twice the cost of the actual food just to make the cravings go away.”

“But they won’t have to. We’ll be giving away the counter-formula for free.”

“Funny thing about that—the research shows people would rather pay a couple of bucks to get the antidote from a familiar, trusted source than from a pack of anarchists with a habit of blowing up buses.”

“Blowing up buses?  What’re you—”

“Oh, it’s a little something we’re planning for the fourth quarter. Disinformation campaign. It’s ready for implementation now, but we think everyone will be more inclined to actively hate you during the holidays.”

“Hate me?”  I stand up and start backing toward the door.

“Well, not you, your group. They’ll love you, Alex. You’ll be managing my charitable organizations, giving away money to worthy causes right and left. People love that. And they’ll love me. People love CEOs whose wives do that kind of stuff.”

“Wives?” He brings out a pistol and fires a dart into my neck. I pull out the dart and drop it on the ground.

“What was in that thing?”

He answers my question with a question as he pops open a little black velvet box.

“Alex, will you marry me?”

“Tom, you sneaky little—” I say, lost between admiration and horror. “Will I marry you?”

Of course I will.

Tom Jr. has a hard time waking up in the morning. He gets it from me, not his father, who is always up before the crack of dawn, especially since the BeMod wide dispersal aerosol went into production.

“Tommy, wake up!” I call out toward his room. There’s only a muffled grumbling in response.

I walk up to his doorway. “Really, Tommy, it’s time to get going. You’ll be late for school.”

He rolls over, groaning, but doesn’t make a move to get up. I unholster my parenting gun and shift the round in the chamber from Go to Bed to Wake Up.

“Get up, Tommy,” I say as I draw a bead on his sleep-tousled head. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

ARTIES AREN’T STUPID

by Jeremiah Tolbert

Jeremiah Tolbert’s fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Ideomancer, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies Federations and Polyphony 4. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and Podcastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist—and he shows off each of those skills in his Dr. Roundbottom project, located at www.clockpunk.com. He lives in Colorado, with his wife and cats. This story first appeared in my anthology Seeds of Change.

Does it hurt an artist to go a week without painting? Does it pain a singer to spend a day without singing? Do creative people suffer when they are denied the chance to create?

Our next story is the story of artists who do suffer when circumstances keep them from creating art. They suffer real pain—because they are genetically engineered constructs whose bodies are specially designed to make art. These “arties” aren’t alone in their specialization. There are “brainiacs” whose bodies are atrophied beneath massive brains, and “thicknecks” and “skinnybois,” too. Each group has their own skills, their own weaknesses, their own strange places in a strange world.

In such a regimented society, it’s not surprising that even a temporary mural needs to be licensed. But when their latest art experiment is rejected, the crew of artists have to find a new kind of creativity, an art so big it will transcend the boundaries between every specialty.

This piece sketches a dark reality where art is dangerous and creativity hurts. It confronts us with the value of art in our own time and place. It asks: can society thrive without art?  Can we live without it?

Would we want to?

A few of us arties were hanging out in Tube Station D, in the dry part that hadn’t flooded. Tin men had busted Blaze and Ransom doing an unlicensed mural on Q Street behind a soytein shop, and a small crowd of

us watching (too chick-shit to Make with the tin men cracking down) scattered when the pig-bots hummed in from every direction like it was some kind of puzzle bust and not just a bunch of arties trying to wind down. We’d all clustered back down in the Station on Niles’s turf. Tin men didn’t bother below ground. So long as the Elderfolk couldn’t see turd, they didn’t give a turd.

Niles wasn’t there, so some rat-faced kid started posing and posturing about taking a little swatch of wall for himself, doing it up special. Pecking order is pecking order, so nobody wanted to be near the turd-head if Niles heard him talking like that, so every bodies was giving him space and lots of it. Look-outs on the street announced with sharp whistles that Niles was headed down, and the kid shut right up.

Niles was a year or two older than the rest of us. Some bodies liked to say he was a proto-arty, but I don’t know about that. He was different, and it didn’t have nothing to do with his age or Make. All age did was give him a few inches of height to make bossing easier. He bossed good, not mean like Elderfolk, but kept us out of trouble with the thicknecks and just-plains. Something about him was plain special. We few girlies knew it, specially.

He was taller than me by a head, hair burnt umber and long, styled nice with lip-curl and spike. He wore a worker man’s jumpsuit adorned with patches and swatches of fabric that he liked. Very anime, very hip. Arties have good fashion sense, but Niles set trends in our clade.

Boo was with him as usual, a stunted runt of a melodie that Niles had found sleeping on his turf. She wore an old fashioned mp3 player around her neck, earbuds nearly soldered into her ear bits. Whenever you got close to her, you could make out tinny music, but what kind of music it was, you couldn’t figure. Unlike other melodies, Boo never sung, not once. Didn’t speak either. Bum batch, probably. It happens, although most get recycled early. Nobody questioned her hanging around, seeing’s how Niles tolerated her.

“This stuff is snazzy,” he said. “No paint, just water and plant stuff. Nozzle works the same though. Sprays right on.” I recognized the stuff. I’d seen advertisements for it on my Elderfolk’s vidiot box. Moss-in-a-can. They sold it to Elderfolk for the recreation yards, for making everything look all old and natural, whatever that meant. Simple biotech, nothing too crazy, nothing like us arties.

Niles tossed us each a metal can from a satchel that Boo carried, except for the rat-faced kid—Niles gave him zip. “You get out of here, go home to your Elderfolk. I heard what you were saying before I stalked a-on down,” he said to him, wagging his finger, and rat-face’s eyes got all comic and big. Rat-face sputtered something about how his Elderfolk didn’t want him around, but Niles just shook his head.

“No bodies do, Zinger.” That’s right, I remembered, rat-face was a new transfer to the city hood named Zinger something-something. Niles was a lot better at names than the rest of us, but you could see that he had to think real hard for it, sometimes. His face’d scrunch up and he’d just freeze to concentrate past all the shapes and colors that dance in an arties head from wake to sleep.

“Yah,” said Tops. He stepped up out of the crowd and gave Zinger a short shove on the shoulder. Tops was Ransom’s best friend, and he’d been spoiling for a fight all day, ever since the Tin Men busted Ransom.

“Cerulean,” Niles said, and the color flashed through our heads and everybody calmed down just a little. “Go on, you can come back tomorrow. This is my studio, don’t forget it, ’kay?”

Zinger nodded, then turned and ran up the stone steps to street level. Niles sighed and finished handing out the moss-in-a-can.

“We supposed to Make with this instead of paint? It’s all one color,” Tops said, his voice all whiny like some spoiled just-plain.

“That’s right,” Niles said. “Better mossy than going in the pokey-pokey.” I winced at the word, which was both the name of a bad place and a description of what they did to you there.

I took my can happy, feeling better already. Design-shapes were practically pushing out my ears. My Elderfolk wouldn’t give me any scratch for paints lately, using it all on themselves and drugas to feel better. Was okay with me, Niles gave stuff that he got from trading to the thicknecks and skinnybois for gang logos. Drugas made my Elderfolk less shouty which was just good-nogreat with me.

I went up and found some alley space and I Made until it all went away into an eggshell white haze.

We messed around with the moss-in-a-can for a few days until the Elderfolk decided they didn’t like the “mess” and the tin men got new marching orders. They started spraying down all the fractals and designs with some kind of ick and it all turned turd-brown and dusted away. Hurt to see it, but what can arties do? Tin men can’t be argued or fought with like Elderfolk.

We were all sulking in Niles’ station, feeling the pain of not-Making like aching all over and Niles got mad and stomped off without even waking up Boo. We were a little scared, because Niles only left Boo behind when he was going to do something that might get him sent into the pokey for a long long time, and without Niles to keep everything straight, we’d all be in trouble. Boo woke up while we were fighting about what to do and came and cuddled up to me. I could almost feel the music vibrating through her into me. It made me feel a little sick.

“Don’t know why she likes you so much,” Tops said with a sneer. “Your Make sucks the big dong.”

I shrugged. Niles knew my Make was okay. Didn’t much care if Tops and the other arties did. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe because Mona isn’t a ‘big dong’ like you,” sneered Tess. She helped whenever the boys thought they could gang-up on me. “And Mona’s Make is okay. You’re just scared because Niles is doing something bad.”

“Shut up,” Tops said and turned away. Tess smiled at me a little. I tried to smile back, but the symmetry felt off.

Boo tapped me on the arm and I looked down. She raised her eyebrows at me, then looked at the steps to the street. I nodded. “He went upside for a while. He’ll be fine.” She didn’t look convinced. Neither was I. We held each other and it made the ache a little better.

I worried sometimes that Boo felt that way all the time. She was a melodie and had to Make just like we poor arties did, but nobody ever heard her sing and bang or anything. Broken little thing made me feel sorry and sad. It was a good thing Niles took care of her, or she’d be used up and swept away just like our mossy Makes.

Nobody went home to their Elderfolk while we waited for Niles to come back. That was a rule. If Niles never came back, then we wouldn’t have to. Nobody wanted to see the meanies anyway. They had us Made and then hated us afterwards, which wasn’t fair. All arties know you love the things you Make no matter what. But Elderfolk were just-plains all grown up and they didn’t make any sense at all. Some of the younger arties started to talk about going back, but we older arties who knew Niles better said no, that we’d wait.

Three days passed before Niles came back. It was dark and everyone was sleeping but me, because little Boo’s music itched in my brain. He came in carrying big boxes, and I cried big tears of happy at that. He’d brought some new supplies, and we’d be Making again in no time flat. I watched him for a while, carrying in box after box, and finally I fell asleep. It felt good knowing he was back.

In the morning, laughing woke me up. I turned to see what arty could be so rude. Niles was sitting in a corner with his back to the room, playing with something. He never laughed when he was Making so he had to be playing.

I left Boo to cuddle into the pile of other arties and crawled over to see what Niles was doing. He had some weird gadget, a silver disk covered in letter-buttons and it was projecting onto the wall some kind of tri-dimensional animal-thing. It had three legs and one arm and was galloping in place like a creature with three legs would, a kind of hop between steps. I laughed too when I looked at the weird little thing.

“What is it?” I asked in a whisper.

“I Made it, just now,” Niles said. “It’s complicated, but the brainiacs on P-Street showed me how. I only sort of made it. It’s just pretend now, but I can send it into the factories,” he pointed at the stack of boxes next to us, “then it’ll Make for real.”

“Wow,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to speak. Niles was like that, always thinking ahead of the Elderfolk and the tin men.

“Does it help the ache?” I asked, my pulse racing. I almost felt good, even with the hurt, just at the chance.

“A-yep,” he said. “Feels good. Like sculpting, sort of. But you can paint on them too. Paint in texture, scales, hair, you know. All sorts of things. But there’s a sense to it, like how you know good colors going together?”

“Yes?”

“Like that. You can’t just do anything,” he said. He nodded, and pressed a large button on the disk. Words came up and the creature disappeared.

“What’s that say?” I asked.

“Dunno,” he answered. “But the brainiacs said if I push that button, the factory will Make.”

A humming sound came just then from one of the boxes, and then the other arties started to stir and wake.

“Here,” Niles said, handing me the disk. “I’ll teach you how it works. We have to teach everybody. The tin men can’t kill animals besides pests, you know!”

We pretend-Made all sorts of little creatures on the screen, then pushed the button that Made for real. The little factories, we set up in one corner of the station, and they hummed and popped out little eggs of all rainbow-colors every few hours. Niles sent the little kids out onto the street with the eggs to hide them where the tin men and Elderfolk wouldn’t see.

“The eggs will hatch and our Makes will come out alive, and the tin men can’t do anything about it!” He said. His eyes were shiny. It made me ache a little, and I worried that maybe pretend-Making didn’t count for arties. But Niles was always making me ache a little like that, especially when he left. It scared me, that maybe I was like little Boo and something wasn’t right with me. Bum batch.

Pretty soon, we started seeing the little animals around the City. They weren’t good Makes, though. They stumbled into traffic sometimes and got splattered. They fell off of roofs, got tangled in wires and cooked like bad soytein on a hot plate. They weren’t there in the head. And they starved. Not a lot of food out in the city just for the taking. They couldn’t take chits and buy it.

We were stumped. The tin men weren’t doing anything, but our little Makes couldn’t last on their own. I hated so much seeing them laying dead in gutters, in the street drains. Their little selves were all over, stinking and falling apart like wind-worn paints.

“I have an idea,” I said to Niles after thinking as hard as I could. “Go to the brainiacs and ask them for help. They will tell us what we can do right.”

Niles thought for a moment and shook his head. “No. This is an arty problem.”

“But arties are too stupid,” I said, raising my voice so everyone could hear it.

Niles bared his teeth at me, and I cried out, scrambling away from him. “Arties aren’t stupid!” he shouted. “Arties aren’t stupid!”

But we are, I said to my own head. We are not smart like brainiacs. I ran away, back to my stupid Elderfolks, but even they were smarter than arties.

I was drawing on the sidewalk, just to ease the ache, when Niles found me. I had stolen a little bit of charcoal from the crematorium and kept it in my pocket. I only used it when things were really bad, really really. And now I didn’t know what to do.

“Your repeating… patterns?” Niles said. “What do you call them?”

I shrugged. “Can’t think of words for it. Maybe your brainiac friends could guess.”

He frowned. “They could, but who cares?” He sat beside me and took out a piece of old paper. It had shapes drawn on it like my patterns, only more random. I was fascinated.

“Where did you get that?” I asked. I reached out to touch it, and he let me take it. I held it up to the light. The little bits were a faded green, like the moss-in-a-can.

“Plants,” he said. “They’re called ‘plants.’”

“Plants,” I said. “Snazzy.”

“A-yap,” he said. “The old world was full of them.”

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“The brainiacs,” he said. I stood up and hugged him tight.

“Make some plants with the factories,” he said. “They’ll be pretty.”

So we did. This time, the eggs were smaller, and we hid everywhere in the city. Niles helped me to make them. He understood the rightness of the animal bits, but to me, plants made more sense. They didn’t move, except to stretch for sun or rain. Wherever you put them, that’s where they stayed, just like murals.

The ache almost went all-away, for a while.

The little plant-eggs hatched and grew quickly all around the city. We Made so much more of them, and they lasted good.  The tin men noticed them.  Everywhere, arties were seeing the tin men staring at the little plants growing bigger every day. They didn’t know what to do, but all arties knew what happened then:  the tin men asked the Elderfolk.

While I Made plants, the other arties Made more little animals. Some that flew in the air, and some that could squeeze into tiny little cracks. This time, the little animals didn’t die. They grew bigger too, like the plants had to come first for them to work. Niles said it was a secret why, and wouldn’t tell me, which made me angry, but the ache was staying away so long as I made my plants, so I couldn’t fight him over it.

Boo spent more time with me, too, when I was Making plants. She loved their shapes and would smile and point and smile whenever we found another one growing up in the cracks out on the street. One night, I even woke up and saw her toying with one of the silver disks when she thought no one was watching. The shapes on the screen were colorful, but they had no coherence, no pattern.

Sad, sad little Boo. She wanted to Make plants and animals too, but she was just a melodie and she couldn’t Make.

I was in the white of Making when I heard the shouts coming down the stairs. “Tin men coming! Tin men!” they cried. “There’s a brainiac with them!” Zinger shouted.

Everyone scattered like moss-dust on the breeze, no direction to go, just bumping around in the station. Only one way out, up, and the tin men had it blocked. I took the silver disk I was using and one of the factories and pushed them into the flooded part of the station, then tried to run for the door.

The tin men galomp-ed down the steps carefully, using their long arms to steady themselves on the uneven steps. They had three brainiacs with them. Each held their big heads in their hands and moaned from all the effort of walking.  Brainiacs didn’t like to do that if they could help it.

The tin man corralled us arties up into a tight bunch and others stole away with the disks and factories. One sheriff tin man, gold-coated and round, prodded the brainiacs, and they pointed at Niles, all three at the same time. Then the tin men took Niles too. We arties tried to fight then, and Boo did too. But we’re not made for fighting, and we all hurt ourselves on the cold sleek shells of the tin men. When Niles was gone, they let us a-go, and left following the sheriff.

We wailed and cried. “Doomed,” Topps moaned. “Doomed.” The ache wasn’t over us yet, but it would be now.

“Every time we find something new to Make, they take it away,” Tess said, dabbing tears from her eyes.

“The tin men don’t care,” Zinger said.

“Of course they don’t,” I said. “They only do what the Elder folk tell them to do. And the Elderfolk don’t care.  They don’t care about anything but themselves.”

“We have to get Niles back,” Topps said, starting to cry again. “Arties are too dumb on their own.  Too dumb!”

I snapped up at that. “No!” I said. “Arties aren’t dumb! Niles said!”

“Doesn’t matter anymore,” Zinger said. “Niles is gone to the pokey-pokey. They’ll never let him out.”

“Then we get him out,” said a tiny voice I had never heard before. It half-sung the words, just like a melodie did whenever it talked, but the sound was wrong, harsh around the edges.  It was a bad Make.

Boo didn’t look scared. She was younger than all of us, but she wasn’t scared. Everyone tried to wipe up tears then, just so they didn’t look like little babies when the real baby didn’t even cry.

“Boo can talk!” Zinger said after a long silence.

“Of course she can talk,” I snapped. “But she didn’t want to before now. This is important.”

Boo nodded. “Hurts. My—” she touched her throat, “not made right.” She winced from the effort of talking.  I grabbed her and held her close.

“Boo is right,” I said. “We arties have to get Niles back.”

“But how?” asked Tess.

I didn’t know.  I looked at Boo.  Boo didn’t know.

“We’ll ask the brainiacs,” I said then. It was what Niles had done, and they owed us after turning Niles in.

The brainiacs spent most of their times at the libraries, and there was one on P-Street that I had remembered because it had pretty statues on each side of its big doors. Boo and I marched inside, past the tin men that watched the door, and inside, before they could get a good sniff of us. The first brainiac we saw, we cornered against a shelf. She was locked into her little wheelchair and couldn’t move very fast.

“Tell us how to rescue Niles,” I demanded. Boo made menacing gestures with her hands that she must have learned from watching thicknecks.

“Who?” said the brainiac. “Oh, that arty kid with the stolen gengineering kits? He’s gone up-tower to see Council. The Elderfolk are real pissed about that little scheme of his. Not even a platoon of thicknecks could get in there. The Tower is crawling with tin men.”

I shuddered. The Council were the Elderfolk to the Elderfolk. They told everyone what to do. If they had Niles, then there really was no hope. The aching bent me over in two like a folded piece of paper.

Boo shook her head and pointed at the brainiac. I guessed at what she was trying to say, and fought through my pains.

“You’re smarter than arties and the just-plains. The Council is just a bunch of just-plains all grown up. You can help us rescue him,” I said, not really believing but hoping.

The brainiac sighed and nodded. “I can think of dozens, thousands of ways to free your friend, but logistically, you arties can’t manage it.”

“What’s logistically?” I said.

“Tools, resources,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’re just a bunch of stupid beatniks. Maybe if you still had some gengineering factories, you could make something, but—”

“I hid one,” I said quickly. “Under the water. When the Tin Men came.”

“Well then, you’ve ruined it. It’s no good.”

“But you could fix it,” Boo rasped in sing-song.  The brainiac nodded.

“I could fix it, but then you’d need to make something that could get you into the Tower without having to fight tin men, and that’d be almost impossible,” said the brainiac.

“Making is what arties do. You fix the factory, and we’ll do the rest,” I said. I could see the shapes forming already.  My fingers itched to work the disk.

“Fine, but this makes the arties and the brainiacs even,” she said.

“Deal,” I said.

The tin men were killing all the animals and plants in the city with ick. Someone must have changed their orders. They weren’t supposed to do that.

It hurt us arties to know, but it kept the tin men busy while we Made in shifts with the factory. We had a plan, one that the brainiacs thought would get us all tossed in the pokey, but Boo and I both believed it would work. The other arties made animals that would go into the Tower and distract, and I worked on special plants with exploding seeds. Weapons, like thicknecks used on one another. We tested the seeds on a lone tin man, and it stunned it. We smashed it up good while it was down.

The brainiac who repaired our factory met us in the shadows outside the Tower before we launched our attack. She pressed a sheet of paper into my hands. “One last little bit of help,” the brainiac said. “This will show you where they’re keeping your friend.”

“Why?” I asked.

The brainiac laughed. “You have no idea how bored we are. Your little creations are an ad-hoc ecosystem springing up all over the city. We’ve been studying things. Your creations are immensely complex and function cohesively, even though they are artificial. This bit of information has vast implications on issues such as the Jungian overmind—” the brainiac blinked and cut off her speech. I hadn’t understood a word of it, only that they liked our Makes. That made me feel good. “Sorry. Anyway, we hope you can make more.”

“It was Niles’ idea,” I said. “Without him, we arties are too stupid to figure anything out.”

The brainiac frowned. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. This plan of yours might actually work. And it looks like your friends are ready.”

Us arties were gathering from all over the city. Each had a wild little animal, frantic and tugging at a leash of plant-rope. Each carried a satchel of bomb-seeds. Across the corner, a few thicknecks had gathered. They made catcalls and threats, but none dared to cross the street. I could hardly believe my eyes.

Everyone waited for my command. I hesitated. If I said so, we arties would all go home to our Elderfolk. Maybe some would get supplies to ease the ache, and maybe some wouldn’t and they might die. Or we could attack the Tower and some would die and the rest would end up in the pokey-pokey or we might win and get back Niles and all his crazy ideas for Making. And it was my decision. Little Mona, whose art nobody understood.

Nobody but Niles.

I gave the word. The arties rushed the tower. Tin men spilled out from the doors, and seeds flew from everywhere. They crashed to the ground in beautiful purple sparks, and we swept past them inside. We arties freed the frantic little animals, and they ran free. The tin men couldn’t decide whether to chase us or chase the animals and split up. I led us arties up, up, following the drawings on the paper.

We pushed past many many tin men, leaving them smoking behind us, and finally we got to the end place, and it was a place we all remembered, a birthing lab, cold, white and metal. And there were just-plains, the birthers, watching Niles, and he was sleeping in the tank, just like a baby arty. We scared away the just-plains. They tried to tell us to stop, that they needed Niles, but we needed him more. So we took him, and we left. We didn’t go back to the station. We found a new hiding place, in the basement of a power station, and there, we waited for Niles to wake up, and we cried, all of us arties, all as one.

We’d done it, but Niles wouldn’t wake up.

He wasn’t dead, we knew that, because he was breathing. At first, no one would leave him, but even arties get hungry, and so we started watching in shifts, taking turns. Every one wanted to be the arty who was there when he woke, but it was me that was there, and it was Boo that woke him up.

She sang; it was beautiful, even if it was broken. The pattern in the sound reminded me of the colors on her screen. The sound grew louder as she continued, and then I saw that little flying animals had come from the sky and joined her, together adding their voices and fixing where hers was broken. It must have been the best sound in the world, because then finally, Niles woke up, and he smiled.

“Hey-a, Boo,” he said. “You can sing.” As if he had always known, and it wasn’t a surprise to him. And maybe he did. Niles was smart, especially for an arty. Then he turned and smiled at me.

“Hey-a, Mona. You rescued me.”

“We did,” I said. “And the brainiacs hardly helped at all.”

He laughed. “That’s good. But I been thinking about what you said. You right. We should ask the brainiacs for help more often. Arties can’t do everything.”

I cried, and hugged, and cried some more.

Niles is getting better. He told me the secret of how the animals work, and at first, it made me sad. But we can eat the plants, and the animals too, so we don’t have to go back to the Elderfolk for chits. We’re staying here in our hiding places, and we’re sharing what we know with the brainiacs. They’re slipping away from their Elderfolk too. We need the thicknecks’ help too, and the brainiacs are talking to them for us. Thicknecks listen to them, at least sometimes.

There are plants and animals everywhere now, and they grow too fast for the tin men to stop them. And the little flying ones, they all sing such sweet songs. Boo, and Niles, and I sit and listen to them for hours. Boo says that she only made some of them, and doesn’t know where the rest of them come from. The brainiacs have theories, but we don’t understand them.

And we still Make, more plants and more animals each day with more stolen factories. The ache is still there, but it’s not the same. It’s the ache you feel when things are good, not when things are bad. And that’s the kind of ache that makes you feel good. Niles says he understands it, but I don’t believe him. Nobody understands that, not even the smartest brainiac of them all.

OF A SWEET SLOW DANCE IN THE WAKE OF TEMPORARY DOGS

by Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro’s work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. His novels include Emissaries from the Dead and The Third Claw of God. He has also collaborated on two alphabet books with artist Johnny Atomic: Z Is for Zombie and V Is for Vampire, which are due to come out next year. Castro’s short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Cemetery Dance, and in a number of anthologies. I previously included his work in The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, and in Lightspeed Magazine. His story collections include A Desperate, Decaying Darkness and Tangled Strings.

We’ve heard it so many times that it has become a cliché: “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.” (Isaiah 22:13). Most of us only dream of living that way, but in our next story, we present a society that makes merry for nine remarkable days—and on the tenth, gives its citizens a taste of a fate worse than death.

Castro says that this story came as a response to New York post-9/11, after he learned that some people didn’t think they could ever visit the city again. His response: “New York is so exciting, so rich, so vibrant, so much a feast for the heart and for the senses, that if anything 9/11 made me want to be there even more.”

But the world of this story is far more intense than that of New York. It raises an interesting question: is it possible to keep living merrily in the face of repeated torment? After all—how can you live through hell without losing a piece of your soul?

Before

1.

On the last night before the end of everything, the stars shine like a fortune in jewels, enriching all who walk the quaint cobblestoned streets of Enysbourg. It is a celebration night, like most nights in the capital city. The courtyard below my balcony is alive with light and music. Young people drink and laugh and dance. Gypsies in silk finery play bouncy tunes on harmonicas and mandolins. Many wave at me, shouting invitations to join them. One muscular young man with impossibly long legs and a face equipped with a permanent grin takes it upon himself to sprint the length of the courtyard only to somersault over the glittering fountain at its center. For a heartbeat out of time he seems to float, enchanted, over the water. Then I join his friends in applause as he belly-flops, drenching himself and the long-haired girls wading at the fountain’s other rim. The girls are not upset but delighted. Their giggles tinkle like wind chimes as they splash across the fountain themselves, flinging curtains of silver water as their shiny black hair bobs back and forth in the night.

2.

Intoxicated from a mixture of the excellent local wine and the even better local weed, I consider joining them, perhaps the boring way via the stairs and perhaps via a great daredevil leap from the balcony. I am, after all, stripped to the waist. The ridiculous boxers I brought on the ship here could double as a bathing suit, and the way I feel right now I could not only make the fountain but also sail to the moon. But after a moment’s consideration I decide not. That’s the kind of grand theatrical gesture visitors to Enysbourg make on their first night, when they’re still overwhelmed by its magic. I have been here nine nights. I have known the festivals that make every night in the capital city a fresh adventure. I have explored the hanging gardens, with all their deceptive challenges. I have climbed the towers of pearl, just down the coast. I have ridden stallions across Enysbourg’s downs, and plunged at midnight into the warm waters of the eastern sea. I have tasted a hundred pleasures, and wallowed in a hundred more, and though far from sick of them, feel ready to take them at a more relaxed pace, partaking not as a starving man but as a connoisseur. I want to be less a stranger driven by lust, but a lover driven by passion.

So I just take a deep breath and bask in the air that wafts over the slanting tiled roofs: a perfume composed of equal parts sex and spice and the tang of the nearby ocean, all the more precious for being part of the last night before the end of everything. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this might be the best moment of my life: a life that, back home, with its fast pace and its anonymous workplaces and climate-controlled, gleaming plastic everything, was so impoverished that it’s amazing I have any remaining ability to recognize joy and transcendence at all. In Enysbourg such epiphanies seem to come several times a minute. The place seems determined to make me a poet, and if I don’t watch out I might hunt down paper and pen and scrawl a few lines, struggling to capture the inexpressible in a cage of fool amateurish june-moonand-spoon.

3.

The curtains behind me rustle, and a familiar presence leaves my darkened hotel room to join me on the balcony. I don’t turn to greet her, but instead close my eyes as she wraps me in two soft arms redolent of wine and perfume and sex. Her hands meet at the center of my chest. She rests a chin on my shoulder and murmurs my name in the musical accent that marks every word spoken by every citizen of Enysbourg.

“Robert,” she says, and there’s something a little petulant about the way she stresses the first syllable, something adorable and mocking in the way she chides me for not paying enough attention to her.

By the time I register the feel of her bare breasts against my bare back, and realize in my besotted way that she’s mad, she’s insane, she’s come out on the balcony in full view of everybody without first throwing on something to cover herself, the youths frolicking in the fountain have already spotted her and begun to serenade us with a chorus of delighted cheers. “Kiss her!” shouts a boy. “Come on!” begs a girl. “Let us see!” yells a third. “Don’t go inside! Make love out here!” When I turn to kiss the woman behind me, I am cheered like a conqueror leading a triumphant army into Rome.

Her name is Caralys, and she is of course one of the flowers of Enysbourg: a rare beauty indeed, even in a country where beauty is everywhere. She is tall and lush, with a dark eyes, skin the color of caramel, and a smile that seems to hint at secrets propriety won’t let her mention. Her shiny black hair cascades down her back in waves, reflecting light even when everything around her seems to be dark.

I met her the day after my arrival, when I was just a dazed and exhausted tourist sitting alone in a café redolent with rich ground coffee. I wasn’t just off the boat then, not really. I’d already enjoyed a long awkward night being swept up by one celebration after another, accepting embraces from strangers determined to become friends, and hearing my name, once given, become a chant of hearty congratulation from those applauding my successful escape from the land of everyday life. I had danced the whole night, cheered at the fires of dawn, wept for reasons that puzzled me still, and stumbled to bed where I enjoyed the dreamless bliss that comes from exhaustion. It was the best night I’d known in a long time. But I was a visitor still, reluctant to surrender even the invisible chains that shackled me; and even as I’d jerked myself awake with caffeine, I’d felt tired, surfeited, at odds.

I was so adrift that when Caralys sauntered in, her hair still tousled and cheeks still shining from the celebrations of the night before, her dress of many patches rustling about her ankles in a riot of multiple colors, I slmost failed to notice her. But then she’d sat down opposite me and declared in the sternest of all possible tones that even foreigners, with all their worries, weren’t allowed to wear grimaces like mine in Enysbourg. I blinked, almost believing her, because I’d heard words just like those the previous night, from a pair of fellow visitors who had caught me lost in a moment of similar repose. Then she tittered, first beneath her breath and then with unguarded amusement, not understanding my resistance to Enysbourg’s charms, but still intrigued, she explained much later, by the great passion she saw imprisoned behind my gray, civilized mein. “You are my project,” she said, in one expansive moment. “I am going to take a tamed man and make him a native of Enysbourg.”

She may well succeed, for we have been in love since that first day, both with each other and with the land whose wonders she has been showing me ever since.

4.

We have fought only once, just yesterday, when in a thoughtless lapse I suggested that she return with me on the ship home. Her eyes flashed the exasperation she always showed at my moments of thoughtless naïveté: an irritation so grand that it bordered on contempt. She told me it was an arrogant idea, the kind only a foreigner could have. Why would she leave this place that has given her life? And why would I think so much of her to believe that she would? Was that all she was to me? A prize to be taken home, like a souvenir to impress my friends with my trip abroad? Didn’t I see how diminished she would be, if I ever did that to her? “Would you blind me?” she demanded. “Would you amputate my limbs? Would you peel strips off my skin, slicing off piece after piece until there was nothing left of me but the parts that remained convenient to you? This is my country, Robert. My blood.” And she was right, for she embodies Enysbourg, as much as the buildings themselves, and for her to abandon it would be a crime against both person and place. Both would be diminished, as much as I’ll be diminished if I have to leave her behind.

5.

We leave the balcony and go back inside where, for a moment in the warm and sweet-smelling room, we come close to collapsing on the bed again, for what seems the thousandth time since we woke sore but passionate this morning. But this is the last night before the end of everything, when Enysbourg’s wonders emerge in their sharpest relief. They are not to be missed just so we can keep to ourselves. And so she touches a finger to the tip of my nose and commands that it’s time to go back into the world. I obey.

We dress. I wear an open vest over baggy trousers, with a great swooping slouch hat glorious in its vivid testimony to Enysbourg’s power to make me play the willing fool. She wears a fringed blouse and another ankle-length skirt of many patches, slit to mid-thigh to expose a magnificent expanse of leg. Dozens of carved wooden bracelets, all loose enough to shift when she moves, clack like maracas along her forearms. Her lips are red, her flowered hair aglow with reflected light. Two curling locks meet in the center of her forehead, right above her eyes, like mischievous parentheses. Somewhere she wears bells.

Laughing, she leads me from the room, and down the narrow stairs, chattering away at our fellow guests as they march in twos and threes toward their own celebrations of this last night. We pass a man festooned with parrots, a woman with a face painted like an Italian landscape, a fire-eater, a juggler in a suit of carnival color, a cavorting clown-faced monkey who hands me a grape and accepts a small coin in payment. Lovers of all possible, and some impossible, gender combinations flash inebriated grins as they surrender their passions in darkened alcoves. Almost everybody we pass is singing or dancing or sharing dizzy, disbelieving embraces. Everytime I pause in sheer amazement at something I see, Caralys chuckles at my saucer-eyed disbelief, and pulls me along, whispering that none of this would be half as marvelous without me there to witness it.

Even the two fellow tourists we jostle, as we pass through the arched entrance-way and into the raucous excitement of the street become part of the excitement, because I know them. They are the ones I met on that first lost day before Caralys, before I learned that Enysbourg was not just a vacation destination offered as brief reward for a earning enough to redeem a year of dullness and conformity, but the repository of everything I’d ever missed in my flavorless excuse for a life. Jerry and Dee Martel are gray retirees from some awful industrial place where Dee had done something or other with decorating and Jerry had managed a firm that molded the plastic shells other companies used to enclose the guts of useful kitchen appliances. When they talk about their jobs now, as they did when they found me that first night, they shudder with the realization that such things swallowed so many years of finite lives. They were delivered when they vacationed in Enysbourg, choosing it at random among all the other oases of tamed exoticism the modern world maintains to make people forget how sterile and homogenous things have become. On arriving they’d discovered that it was not a tourist trap, not an overdeveloped sham, not a fraud, and not an excuse to sell plastic souvenirs that testify to nothing but the inane gullibility of the people who buy them, but the real thing, the special place, the haven that made them the people they had always been meant to be. They’d emigrated, in what Jerry said with a wink was their “alternative to senility.”

“Was it a sacrifice for us?” Jerry asked, when we met. “Did it mean abandoning our security? Did it even mean embracing some hardships? Of course it did. It meant all those things and more. You may not think so, but then you’re a baby; you haven’t even been in Enysbourg long enough to know. But our lives back home were empty. They were nothing. At least here, life has a flavor. At least here, life is something to be treasured.”

Living seven years later as natives, spending half their time in the capital and half their time out in the country exploring caves and fording rivers and performing songs they make up on the spot, they each look thirty years younger than their mere calendar ages: with Jerry lean and robust and tanned, Dee shorter and brighter and interested in everything. They remember me from nine days ago and embrace me like a son, exclaiming how marvelous I look, how relaxed I seem in comparison to the timid creature they met then. They want to know if this means I’m going to stay. I blush and admit I don’t know. I introduce them to Caralys and they say it seems an easy choice to them. The women hit it off. Jerry suggests a local inn where we can hear a guitarist he knows, and before long we’re there, claiming a corner table between dances, listening to his friend: another old man, an ancient man really, with twinkling eyes and spotted scalp and a wispy comic-opera moustache that, dangling to his collarbone, looks like a boomerang covered with lint.

6.

“It’s not that I hate my country,” Jerry says, when the women have left together, in the way that women have. His eyes shine and his voice slurs from the effects of too much drink. “I can’t. I know my history. I know the things she’s accomplished, the principles she’s stood for, the challenges she’s faced. I’ve even been around for more of it than I care to remember. But coming here was not abandoning her. It was abandoning what she’d become. It was abandoning the drive-throughs and the ATMs and the talking heads who pretend they have the answers but would be lucky to remember how to tie their shoes. It was remembering what life was supposed to be all about, and seizing it with both hands while we still had a few good years still left in us. It was victory, Robert; an act of sheer moral victory. Do you see, Robert? Do you see?”

I tell him I see.

“You think you do. But you still have a ticket out, day after tomorrow. Sundown, right? Ach. You’re still a tourist. You’re still too scared to take the leap. But stay here a few more weeks and then tell me that you see.”

I might just do that, I say. I might stay here the rest of my life.

He dismisses me with a wave of his hand. “Sure you say that. You say that now. You say that because you think it’s so easy to say that. You haven’t even begun to imagine the commitment it takes.”

But I love Caralys.

“Of course you do. But will you be fair to her, in the end? Will you? You’re not her first tourist, you know.”

7.

Jerry has become too intense for me, in a way utterly at odds with the usual flavor of life in Enysbourg. If he presses on I might have to tell him to stop.

But I am rescued. The man with the wispy moustache returns from the bar with a fresh mug of beer, sets it beside him on a three-legged stool, picks up a stringed instrument a lot like a misshapen guitar, and begins to sing a ballad in a language I don’t understand. It’s one of Enysbourg’s many dialects, a tongue distinguished by deep rolling consonants and rich sensual tones, so expressive in its the way it cavorts the length of an average sentence that I don’t need a translation to know that he’s singing a hymn to lost love long remembered. When he closes his eyes I can almost imagine him as the fresh-faced young boy staring with earnest panic at the eyes of the fresh-faced young woman whose beauty first made him want to sing such songs. He sings of pain, a sense of loss, a longing for something denied to him. But there is also wonder, a sense of amazement at all the dreams he’s ever managed to fulfill.

Or maybe that’s just my head, making the song mean what I want it to mean. In either event, the music is slow and heartfelt until some kind of mid-verse epiphany sends its tempo flying. And all of a sudden the drum beats and the hands clap and the darkened room bursts with men and women rising from the shadows to meet on the dance floor in an explosion of flailing hair and whirling bodies. There are children on shoulders and babies on backs and a hundred voices united in the chorus of the moustached man’s song, which seems to fill our veins with fire. Jerry has already slid away, his rant of a few moments before forgotten in the urgency of the moment. I recognize nobody around me but nevertheless see no strangers. As I decide to stay in Enysbourg, to spend the rest of my life with Caralys, to raise a family with her, to keep turning pages in this book I’ve just begun to write, the natives seem to recognize the difference in me. I am handed a baby, which I kiss to the sound of cheers. I hand it back and am handed another. Then another. The music grows louder, more insistent. A wisp of smoke drifts by. Clove, tobacco, hashish, or something else; it is there and then it is gone.

I blink and catch a glimpse of Caralys, cut off by the crowd. She is trying to get to me, her eyes wide, her face shining, her need urgent. She knows I have decided. She can tell. She is as radiant as I have ever seen her, and though jostled by the mob she is determined to make her way to my side. She too has something to say, something that needs to be spoken, through shattered teeth and a mouth filled with blood.

During

8.

There is no sunlight. The skies are too sullied by the smoke of burning buildings to admit the existence of dawn. What arrives instead are gray and sickly shadows, over a moonscape so marked with craters and shattered rubble that in most places it’s hard to tell where the buildings stood in the first place. Every few seconds, the soot above us brightens, becomes as blinding as a parody of the light it’s usurped, and rocks the city with flame and thunder. Debris pelts everything below. A starving dog cowering in a hollow formed by two shattered walls bolts, seeking better haven in a honeycomb of fallen masonry fifty meters of sheer hell away. But even before it can round the first twisted corpse, a solid wall of shrapnel reduces the animal to a scarlet mist falling on torn flesh.

I witness its death from the site of my own. I am already dead. I still happen to be breathing, but that’s a pure accident. Location is all. The little girl who’d been racing along two paces ahead of me, mad with fear, forced her to rip off her flaming clothes to reveal the bubbling black scar the chemical burns have made of her back, is now a corpse. She’s a pair of legs protruding from a mound of fallen brick. Her left foot still bears a shoe. Her right is pale, naked, moon-white perfect, unbloodied. I, who had been racing along right behind her, am not so fortunate. The same concussion wave that put her out of her misery sent me flying. Runaway stones have torn deep furrows in my legs, my belly, my face, my chest. I have one seeping gash across my abdomen and another across one cheek; both painful, but nothing next to the greater damage done by the cornice that landed on my right knee, splintering the bone and crushing my leg as close to flat as a leg can get without bursting free of its cradling flesh. The stone tumbled on as soon as it did its work, settling in a pile of similar rocks; it looks like any other, but I still think I can identify it out from over here, using the marks it left along the filthy ground.

I have landed in a carpet of broken glass a meter or so from what, for a standing person, would be a ragged waist-high remnant of wall. It is good fortune, I suppose; judging from the steady tattoo of shrapnel and rifle fire impacting against the other side, it’s that wall which for the moment spares me the fate of the little girl and the dog. Chance has also favored me by letting me land within sight of a irregular gap in that wall, affording me a view of what used to be the street but which is right now is just a narrow negotiable path between craters and mounds of smoking debris. My field of vision is not large, but it was enough to show me what happened to the dog. If I’m to survive this, it must also allow me to see rescue workers, refugees, even soldiers capable of dragging me to wherever the wounded are brought.

But so far there has no help to be seen. Most of the time even my fragmentary view is obscured by smoke of varying colors: white, which though steaming hot is also as thin and endurable, passing over me without permanent damage; black, which sickens me with its mingled flavors of burning rubber and bubbling flesh; and the caustic yellow, which burns my eyes and leaves me gagging with the need to void a stomach already long empty. I lick my lips, which are dry and cracked and pitted, and recognize both hunger and thirst in the way the world pales before me. It is the last detail. Everything I consumed yesterday, when Enysbourg was paradise, is gone; it, and everything I had for several days before. Suddenly, I’m starving to death.

9.

There is another great burst of sound and light, so close parts of me shake apart. I try to scream, but my throat is dry, my voice a mere wisp, my mouth a sewer sickening from the mingled tastes of blood and ash and things turned rotten inside me. I see a dark shape, a man, Jerry Martel in fact, move fast past the gap in the wall. I hear automatic fire and I hear his brief cry as he hits the dirt in a crunch of flesh and gravel. He is not quite dead at first, and though he does not know I am here, just out of sight, a collaborator in his helplessness, he cries out to me anyway: a bubbling, childish cry, aware that it’s about to be cut off but hoping in this instant that it reaches a listener willing to care. I can’t offer the compassion Jerry craves, because I hate him too much for bringing fresh dangers so close to the place where I already lie broken. I want him gone.

A second later fate obliges me with another burst of automatic weapons fire. Brick chips fill the air like angry bees, digging more miniature craters; one big one strikes my ravaged knee and I spasm, grimacing as my bowels let loose, knowing it won’t matter because I released everything I had inside me long ago. I feel relief. He was my friend, but I’m safer with him gone.

10.

I smell more smoke. I taste mud. I hear taunts in languages I don’t recognize, cries and curses in the tongues spoken in Enysbourg. A wave of heat somewhere near me alerts me that a fire has broken out. I drag myself across ragged stones and broken glass closer to the gap in the wall, entertaining vainglorious ambitions of perhaps crawling through and making it untouched through the carnage to someplace where people can fix me. But the pain is too much, and I collapse, bleeding now from a dozen fresher wounds, having accomplished nothing but to provide myself a better view.

I see the elderly musician with the huge moustache stumble on by, his eyes closed, his face a sheen of blood, his arms dangling blistered and lifeless at his sides,each blackened and swollen to four times its natural size. I see a woman,halfmad, her mouth ajar in an unending silent scream, clutching a tightly wrapped but still ragged bundle in a flannel blanket, unwilling to notice that whatever it held is now just a glistening smear across her chest. I see a tall and robust and athletic man stumble on by, his eyes vacant, his expression insane, his jaw ripped free and dangling from his face by a braided ribbon of flesh. I see all that and I hear more explosions and I watch as some of the fleeing people fall either whole or in pieces and I listen as some are released by death and, more importantly, as others are not.

Something moving at insane speed whistles through the sky above, passing so near that its slipstream tugs at my skin. I almost imagine it pulling me off the ground, lifting me into the air, allowing me a brief moment of flight behind it before it strikes and obliterates its target. For a moment I wish it would; even that end would be better than a deathbed of shattered rock and slivered glass. Then comes the brightest burst of light and most deafening wave of thunder yet, and for a time I become blind and deaf, with everything around me reduced to a field of pure white.

11.

When the world comes back, not at all improved, it is easy to see the four young men in identical uniforms who huddle in a little alcove some twenty meters away. There is not much to them, these young men: they all carry rifles, they all wear heavy packs, they’re all little more than boys, and their baggy uniforms testify to a long time gone without decent food. When one turns my way, facing me and perhaps even seeing me, but not registering me as a living inhabitant of the corpse-strewn landscape, his eyes look sunken, haunted, unimaginably ancient.

He is, I realize, as mad as the most pitiful among the wounded—a reasonable response to his environment, and one I would share if I could divest the damnable sanity that forces me to keep reacting to the horror. He turns back to his comrades and says something; then he looks over them, at something beyond my own limited field of vision, and his smile is enough to make me crave death all over again. His comrades look where he’s looking and smile the same way: all four of them showing their teeth.

The three additional soldiers picking their way through the rubble bear a woman between them. It is Caralys. Two stand to either side of her, holding her arms. A third stands behind her, holding a serrated knife to her throat with one hand and holding a tight grip on her hair with the other. That soldier keeps jabbing his knee into the small of her back to keep her going. He has to; she’s struggling with every ounce of strength available to her, pulling from side to side, digging her feet into the ground, cursing them to a thousand hells every time they jerk her off her feet and force her onward.

She is magnificent, my Caralys. She is stronger, more vibrant, than any one of them. In any fair fight she would be the only one left standing. But she is held by three, and while she could find an opportunity to escape three, the soldiers from the alcove, who now rush to help their comrades, bring the total all the way up to seven. There is no hope with seven. I know this even as I drag myself toward her from the place where I lie broken. I know this even as she struggles to drive her tormentors away with furious kicks. But these boys are too experienced with such things. They take her by the ankles, lift her off the ground, and bear her squirming and struggling form across the ravaged pavement to a clear place in the rubble, where they pin her to the ground, each one taking a limb. They must struggle to keep her motionless. The soldier with the darkest eyes unslings his rifle, weighs it in his arms, and smashes its butt across her jaw. The bottom half of her face crumples like shattered pottery.

There is nothing I can do but continue to crawl toward her, toward them.

Caralys coughs out a bubble of fresh blood. Fragments of teeth, driven from her mouth, cling to what’s left of her chin. She shrieks and convulses and tries to kick. Her legs remain held. The same soldier who just smashed her face now sees that his job is not yet done. He raises his rifle above his head and drives the stock, hard, into her belly. She wheezes and chokes. She tries to curl into a ball of helpless misery, seeking escape within herself. But the soldiers won’t even permit that. Another blow, this one to her forehead, takes what little fight is left. Her eyes turn to blackened smears. Her nose blows pink bubbles which burst and dribble down her cheeks in rivulets. She murmurs an animal noise. The soldier responsible for making her manageable makes a joke in a language I don’t know, which can’t possibly be funny, but still makes the others laugh. They rip off her filthy dress and spread her legs farther apart. The leader steps away, props his rifle against a fragment of wall, and returns, dropping his pants. As he gives his swollen penis a lascivious little waggle, I observe something wrong with it, something I can see from a distance; it looks green, diseased, half-rotted. But he descends, forcing himself into her, cursing her with every thrust, his cruel animal grunts matched by her own bubbling exhalations, less gasps of pain or protests at her violation than the involuntary noises made as her diaphragm is compressed again and again and again. It doesn’t last long, but by the time he pulls out, shakes himself off, and pulls his pants back up, the glimpse I catch of her face is enough to confirm that she’s no longer here.

Caralys is alive, all right. I can see her labored breath. I can feel the outrage almost as much as she does. But she’s not in this place and time. Her mind has abandoned this particular battlefield for another, inside her head, which might not provide any comfort but nevertheless belongs only to her. What’s left in this killing ground doesn’t even seem to notice as one of the other soldiers releases his grip on her right arm, takes his position, and commences a fresh rape.

12.

There are no words sufficient for the hate I feel. I am a human being with a human being’s dimensions, but the hate is bigger than my capacity to contain it. It doesn’t just fill me. It replaces me. It becomes everything I am. I want to claw at them and snap at them and spew hatred at them and rip out their throats with my teeth. I want to leave them blackened corpses and I want to go back to wherever they came from and make rotting flesh of their own wives and mothers. I want to bathe in their blood. I want to die killing them. I want to scar the earth where they were born. I want to salt the farmland so nothing ever grows there again. If hatred alone lent strength, I would rend the world itself. But I cry out without a voice, and I crawl forward without quite managing to move, and I make some pathetic little sound or another, and it carries across the smoky distance between me and them and it accomplishes nothing but advise the enemy that I’m here.

In a single spasm of readiness, they all release Caralys, grab their weapons, scan the rubble-field for the source of the fresh sound. The one using her at the moment needs only an extra second to disengage, but he pulls free in such a panicked spasm that he tumbles backward, slamming his pantless buttocks into a puddle of something too colored by rainbows to qualify as water. The leader sees me. He rolls his eyes, pulls a serrated blade from its sheath at his hip, and covers the distance between us in three seconds.

The determined hatred I felt a heartbeat ago disappears. I know that he’s the end of me and that I can’t fight him and I pray that I can bargain with him instead, that I can barter Caralys for mercy or medical attention or even an easier death. I think all this, betraying her, and it makes me hate myself. That’s the worst, this moment of seeing myself plain, this illustration of the foul bargains I’d be willing to make in exchange for a few added seconds of life. It doesn’t matter that there aren’t any bargains. I shouldn’t have wanted any.

I grope for his knife as it descends but it just opens the palms of my hands and christens my face and chest with blood soon matched by that which flows when he guts me from crotch to ribcage. My colon spills out in thick ropes, steaming in the morning air. I feel cold. The agony tears at me. I can’t even hope for death.

I want more than death. I want more than oblivion. I want erasure. I want a retroactive ending. I want to wipe out my whole life, starting from my conception. Nothing, not even the happy moments, is worth even a few seconds of this. It would be better if I’d never lived.

But I don’t die yet.

13.

I don’t die when he walks away, or when he and his fellow soldiers return to their fun with Caralys. I don’t die when they abandon her and leave in her place a broken thing that spends the next hours choking on its own blood. I don’t even die when the explosions start again, and the dust salts my wounds with little burning embers. I don’t die when the ground against my back shakes like a prehistoric beast about to tear itself apart with rage. I don’t even die when the rats come to me, to enjoy a fresh meal. I want to die, but maybe that release is more than I deserve. So I lie on my back beneath a cloudscape of smoke and ash, and I listen to Caralys choke, and I listen to the gunfire and I curse that sociopathic monster God and I do nothing, nothing, when the flies come to lay their eggs.

After

14.

I wake on a bed of freshly-mowed grass. The air is cool and refreshing, the sky as blue as a dream, the breeze a delicious mixture of scents ranging from sea salt to the sweatier perfume of passing horses. From the light, I know it can’t be too long after dawn, but I can tell I’m not the first one up. I can hear songbirds, the sounds of laughing children, barking dogs, music played at low volumes from little radios.

Unwilling to trust the sensations of peace, I resist getting up long enough to first grab a fistful of grass, luxuriating in the feel of the long thin blades as they bunch up between my fingers. They’re miraculous. They’re alive. I’m alive.

I turn my head and see where I am: one of the city’s many small parks, a place lined with trees and decorated with orchid gardens. The buildings visible past the treeline are uncratered and intact. I’m intact. The other bodies I see, scattered here and there across the lawn, are not corpses, but sleepers, still snoring away after a long lazy evening beneath the stars. There are many couples, even a few families with children, all peaceful, all unworried about predators either animal or human. Even the terror, the trauma, the soul-withering hate, the easy savagery that subsumes all powerless victims, all the emotional scars that had ripped me apart, have faded. And the only nearby smoke comes from a sandpit not far upwind, where a jolly bearded man in colorful suspenders has begun to cook himself an outdoor breakfast.

15.

I rise, unscarred and unbroken, clad in comfortable native clothing: baggy shorts, a vest, a jaunty feathered hat. I even have a wine bottle, three-quarters empty, and a pleasant taste in my mouth to go with it. I drink the rest and smile at the pleasant buzz. The thirst remains, but for something non-alcoholic. I need water. I itch from the stray blades of grass peppering my exposed calves and forearms. I contort my back, feeling the vertebrae pop. It feels good. I stretch to get my circulation going. I luxuriate in the tingle of the morning air. Across the meadow, a little girl points at me and smiles. She is the same little girl I saw crushed by masonry yesterday. It takes me a second to smile back and wave, a second spent wondering if she recognizes me, if she finds me an unpleasant reminder. If so, there is no way to tell from the way she bears herself. She betrays no trauma at all. Rather, she looks as blessed as any other creature of Enysbourg.

The inevitable comparison to Caralys assigns me my first mission for the day. I have to find her, hold her, confirm that she too has emerged unscathed from the madness of the day before. She must have, given the rules here, but the protective instincts of the human male still need to be respected. So I wander from the park, into the streets of a capital city just starting to bustle with life; past the gondolas taking lovers down the canals; past the merchants hawking vegetables swollen with flavor; past a juggler in a coat of carnival color who has put down his flaming batons and begun to toss delighted children instead. I see a hundred faces I know, all of whom nod with the greatest possible warmth upon seeing me, perhaps recognizing in my distracted expression the look of a foreigner who has just experienced his first taste of Enysbourg’s greatest miracle.

Nobody looks haunted. Nobody looks terrorized. Nobody looks like the survivors of madness. They have shaken off the firebombings that reduced them to screaming torches, the bayonets that jabbed through their hearts, the tiny rooms where they were tortured at inhuman length for information they did not have. They have shrugged away the hopelessness and the rampant disease and the mass graves where they were tossed beside their bullet-riddled neighbors while still breathing themselves. They remember it all, as I remember it all, but that was yesterday, not today, and this is Enysbourg, a land where it never happened, a land which will know nothing but joy until the end of everything comes again, ten days from now.

16.

On my way back to the hotel I pass the inn where Caralys and I went dancing the night before the end of everything. The scents that waft through the open door are enough to make me swoon. I almost pass by, determined to find Caralys before worrying about my base animal needs, but then I hear deep braying laughter from inside, laughter I recognize as Jerry Martel’s. I should go inside. He has been in Enysbourg for years and may know the best ways to find loved ones after the end of everything. The hunger is a consideration, too. Stopping to eat now, before finding Caralys, might seem like a selfish act, but I won’t do either one of us any good unless I do something to keep up my strength. Guilt wars with the needs of an empty stomach. My mouth waters. Caralys will understand. I go inside.

The place is dim and nearly empty. The old man with the enormous moustache is on stage, playing something inconsequential. Jerry, who seems to be the only patron, is in a corner table waiting for me. He waves me over, asks me if I’m all right, urges me to sit down, and waits for me to tell him how it was.

My words halting, I tell him it doesn’t feel real anymore.

He claps me on the back. He says he’s proud of me. He says he wasn’t sure about me in the beginning. He says he had me figured for the kind of person who wouldn’t be able to handle it, but look at me now, refreshed, invigorated, ready to handle everything. He says I remind him of himself. He beams and expects me to take that as a compliment. I give him a weak nod. He punches me in the shoulder and says that it’s going to be fun having me around from now on: a new person, he says, to guide around the best of Enysbourg, who doesn’t yet know all the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the joys and adventures. There are parts of Enysbourg, both in and outside the capital, that even most of those who live here don’t know. He says it’s enough to fill lifetimes. He says that the other stuff, the nasty stuff, the stuff we endure as the price of admission, is just a reason to cherish everything else. He says that the whole country is a treasure trove of experience for people willing to take the leap, and he says I look like one of those people.

And of course, he says, punching my arm again, there’s Caralys: sweet, wanton Caralys, whom he has already seen taking her morning swim by the sea. Caralys, who will be so happy to see me again. He says I should remember what Caralys is like when she’s delighted. He says that now that I know I can handle it I would have to be a fool to let her go. He chuckles, then says, tell you what, stay right here, I’ll go find her, I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about. And then he disappears, all before I have said anything at all.

On stage, the man with the enormous moustache starts another song, playing this time not the misshapen guitar-thing from two nights ago, but something else, a U-shaped device with two rows of strings forming a criss-cross between ends and base. Its music is clear and resonant, with a wobbly quality that only adds to its emotional impact. The song is a slow one: a relief to me, since the raucous energy of Enysbourg’s nights might be a bit much for me right now. I nod at the old man. He recognizes me. His grin broadens and his eyes slit with amusement. There’s no telling whether he has some special affection for me as a person,orjustappreciatesthearrivalof anyaudienceatall.Eitherway,hiswarmth is genuine. He is grateful to me for being here. But he does not stop playing just to greet me. The song continues. The lyrics, once again in a language unknown to me, are once again still easy to comprehend. Whatever the particulars, this song is impossible to mistake as anything but a tribute to being alive. When the song ends, I toss him a coin, and he tosses it back, not insulted, just not interested. He is interested in the music for music’s sake alone, in celebration, because celebration is the whole point.

17.

I think hard on the strange cycle of life in Enysbourg, dictated by law, respected as a philosophical principle, and rendered possible by all the technological genius the modern world can provide: this endless cycle which always follows nine days of sheer exuberance with one day of sheer Hell on Earth.

It would be so much easier if exposure to that Tenth Day were not the price of admission.

It would be so much better if we could be permitted to sail in on The Day After and sail out on The Night Before, enjoying those nine days of sweet abandon without any obligation to endure the unmitigated savagery of the tenth. The weekly exodus wouldn’t be a tide of refugees; it would be a simple fact of life. If such a choice were possible, I would make it. Of course, I would also have to make Caralys come with me each time, for even if she was determined to remain behind and support her nation’s principles, I could never feel at peace standing on the deck of some distant ship, watching Enysbourg’s beautiful shoreline erupt in smoke and fire, aware that I was safe but knowing that she was somewhere in that no man’s land being brutalized and killed. And there is no way she would ever come with me to such a weekly safe haven, when her land was a smoking ruin behind her. She would know the destruction temporary the same way I know it temporary, but she would regard her escape from the regular interval of terror an act of unforgivable treason against her home. It is as she said that time I almost lost her by proposing that she come back home with me, a suggestion I made not because home is such a great place, but because home would be easier. She said that leaving would be cowardice. She said that leaving would be betrayal. She said that leaving would be the end of her. And she said that the same went for any other attempt to circumvent the way things were here, including my own, which is why she’d despise me forever if I tried. The Tenth Day, she said, is the whole point of Enysbourg. It’s the main reason the ships come and go only on the Day After. Nobody, not the natives like Caralys, and not the visitors like myself, is allowed their time in paradise unless we also pay the price. The question that faces everybody, on that day after, is the same question that faces me now: whether life in Enysbourg is worth it.

I think of all the countries, my own included, that never know the magic Enysbourg enjoys nine days out of ten, that have become not societies but efficient machines, where life is all about keeping that machine in motion. Those nations know peace, and they know prosperity, but do they know life the way Enysbourg knows life, nine days out of every ten? I come from such a place and I suffocated in such a place—maybe because I was too much a part of the machine to recognize the consolations available to me, maybe because they weren’t available to be found. Either way I know that I’ve never been happy, not before I came here. Here I found my love of being alive—but only nine days out of ten.

And is that Tenth Day really too much to endure, anyway? I think about all the countries that know that Tenth Day, not at safe predictable intervals, but for long stretches lasting months or years or centuries. I think about all the countries that have never known anything else. I think about all the terrorized generations who have lived and died and turned to bones with nothing but that Tenth Day to color their days and nights. For all those people, millions of them, Enysbourg, with that Tenth Day always lurking in recent memory and always building in the near future, is still a paradise beyond comprehension. Bring all those people here and they’d find this choice easy, almost laughable. They’d leap at the chance, knowing that their lives would only be better, most of the time.

It’s only the comfortable, the complacent, the spoiled, who would even find the question an issue for internal debate. The rest would despise me for showing such reluctance to stay, and they’d be right. I’ve seen enough, and experienced enough, to know that they’d be right. But I don’t know if I have what it takes to be right with them. I might prefer to be wrong and afraid and suffering their disdain at a safe distance, in a place untouched by times like Enysbourg’s Tenth Day.

18.

I remember a certain moment, when we had been together for three days. Caralys had led me to a gorge, a few hours from the capital, a place she called a secret, and which actually seemed to be, as there were no legions of camera-toting tourists climbing up and down the few safe routes to the sparkling river below. The way down was not a well-worn path, carved by the weight of human feet. It was a series of compromises with what otherwise would have been a straight vertical drop—places where it became possible to slide down dirt grades, or descend from one rock ledge to another. Much of the way down was overgrown, with plants so thick that only her unerring sense of direction kept us descending on the correct route, and not via a sudden, fatal, bone-shattering plunge from a height. She moved through it all with a grace unlike I had ever seen, and also with an urgency I could not understand, but which was nevertheless intense enough to keep me from complaining through my hoarse breath and aching bones. Every once in a while she turned, to smile and call me her adventurer. And every time she did, the special flavor she gave the word was enough to keep me going, determined to rush anyplace she wanted me to follow.

The grade grew gentler the closer we came to the river at the gorge bottom. It became a mild grade, dim beneath thick forest canopy, surrounded on all sides by the rustling of a thousand leaves and the chittering of a thousand birds. Once the water itself grew audible, there was nothing but a wall of sound all around us. She picked up speed and began to run, tearing off her clothes as she went. I ran after her, gasping, almost breaking my neck a dozen times as I tripped over this root, that half-buried rock. By the time I emerged in daylight at a waterfront of multicolored polished stones, she was well ahead of me. I was hopping on one leg to remove my boots and pants and she was already naked and up to her waist in mid-river, her perfect skin shiny from wet and glowing from the sun.

She had led us directly to a spot just below one of the grandest waterfalls I had ever seen with my own eyes. It was an unbroken wall of rushing silver, descending from a flat rock ledge some fifty meters above us. The grotto at its base was bowl-shaped and just wide enough to collect the upriver rapids in a pool of relative calm. The water was so cold that I emitted an involuntary yelp, but Caralys just laughed at me, enjoying my reaction. I dove in, feeling the temperature shock in every pore, then stood up, dripping, exuberant, wanting nothing in this moment but to be with her.

She caught my wrist before I could touch her. “No.”

I stopped, confused. No? Why no? Wasn’t this what she wanted, in this perfect place she’d found for us?

She released my arm and headed toward the wall of water, splashing through the river as it grew deeper around her, swallowing first her hips and then her breasts and then her shoulders, finally requiring her to swim. Her urgency was almost frightening now. I thought of how easy it might be to drown here, for someone who allowed herself to get caught beneath that raging wall of water, and I said, “Hey,” rushing after her, not enjoying the cold quite as much anymore. I don’t know what fed that river, but it was numbing enough to be glacial runoff. Thoughts of hypothermia struck for the first time, and I felt the first stab of actual fear just as she disappeared beneath the wall.

The moment I passed through, with sheets of freezing water assaulting my head and shoulders, was one of the loudest I’d ever known. It was a roaring, rumbling, bubbling cacophony, so intense that it drowned out all the other sounds that filled this place. The birds, the wind, the softer bubbling of the water downstream, they were wiped out, eliminated by this one all-encompassing noise. I almost turned around. But I kept going, right through the wall.

On the other side I found air and a dark dank place. Caralys had pulled herself onto a mossy ledge just above the waterline, set against a great stone wall. There she sat with her back to the wall, hugging her legs, her knees tucked tight beneath her chin. Her eyes were white circles reflecting the light passing through the water now behind me. I waded toward her, found an empty spot on the ledge beside her, and pulled myself up too. The stone, I found without much surprise, was like ice, not a place I wanted to stay for long. But I joined her in contemplating the daylight as it prismed through a portal of plummeting water. It seemed brilliant out there: a lot like another world, seen through an enchanted gateway.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

She said nothing, so I turned to see if she was all right. She was still staring at the water. She was in shadow, and a trick of the light had shrouded most of her profile in darkness, reducing her outline to a dimly lit crescent. The droplets balancing on the tip of her nose were like little glistening pearls. I saw, too, that she was trembling, though at the time I attributed that to the cold alone. She said, “Listen.”

I listened. And heard only the sound of the waterfall, less deafening now that we’d passed some distance beyond it. And something else: her teeth, chattering.

She said, “The silence.”

It took me a second to realize that this was the miracle she’d brought me here to witness: the way the waterfall, in all its harmless fury, now insulated us from all the sounds we had been hearing all morning. It was as if none of what we’d heard out there, all the time it had taken us to hike to this place she knew so well, now existed at all. None of it was there. None of it could touch us.

It seemed important to her.

At that moment, I could not understand why.

19.

I am in the little restaurant, thinking all this, when a soft voice calls my name. I look up, and of course it’s Caralys: sweet, beautiful Caralys, who has found me in the place where we prefer to think we saw each other last. She is, of course, unmarked and unwounded, all the insults inflicted by the soldiers either healed or wiped away like bad rumors. She looks exactly like she did the night before last, complete with fringed blouse and patchy dress and two curling strands of hair that meet in the center of her forehead. If there is any difference in her, it lies in what I now recognize was there all along: the storm clouds of memory roiling behind her piercing black eyes. She’s not insane, or hard, the way she should be after enduring what she’s endured; Enysbourg always wipes away all scars, physical and psychological both. But it does not wipe away the knowledge. And her smile, always so guileless in its radiance, now seems to hold a dark challenge. I can see that she has always held me and my naïveté in the deepest possible contempt. She couldn’t have felt any other way, in the presence of any man who had never known the Tenth Day. I was an infant by Enysbourg’s standards, a man who could not understand her or the forces that shaped her. I must have seemed bland, dull, and in my own comfortable way, even retarded.

I find to my surprise that I feel contempt as well. Part of me is indignant at her effrontery at looking down at me. After all, she has had other tourists. She has undertaken other Projects with other men, from other places, trying time and time again to make outsiders into natives of her perverse little theme park to savagery. What does she expect from me, in the end? Who am I to her? If I leave, won’t she just find another tourist to play with for ten days? And why should I stay, when I should just see her as the easy vacation tramp, always eager to go with the first man who comes off the boat?

It’s hard not to be repulsed by her.

But that hate pales beside the awareness that in all my days only she has made me feel alive.

And her own contempt, great as it is, seems drowned by her love, shining at me with such intensity that for a moment I almost forget the fresh secrets now filling the space between us. I stand and fall into her arms. We close our eyes and taste each other’s tears. She whispers, “It is all right, Robert. I understand. It is all right. I want you to stay, but won’t hate you if you go.”

She is lying, of course. She will despise me even more if I go. She will know for certain that Enysbourg has taught me nothing. But her love will be just as sincere if I stay.

It’s the entire reason she seeks out tourists. She loathes our naïveté. But it’s also the one thing she can’t provide for herself.

20.

Jerry Martel stands nearby, beaming and self-congratulatory. Dee has joined him, approving, cooing, maternal. Maybe they hope we’ll pay attention to them again. Or maybe we’re just a new flavor for them, a novelty for the expatriates living in Enysbourg.

Either way, I ignore them and pull Caralys close, taking in the scent of her, the sheer absolute ideal of her, laughing and weeping and unable to figure out which is which. She makes sounds that could be either, murmuring words that could be balms for my pain or laments for her own. She tells me again that it’s going to be all right, and I don’t know whether she’s telling the truth. I don’t even know whether she’s all that sure herself. I just know that, if I take that trip home, I will lose everything she gave me, and be left with nothing but the gray dullness of my everyday life. And if I stay, deciding to pay the price of that Tenth Day in exchange for the illusion of Eden, we’ll never be able to acknowledge the Tenth Day on the other days when everything seems to be all right. We won’t mention the times spent suffocating beneath rubble, or spurting blood from severed limbs, or choking out our lungs from poison gas. I will never know how many hells she’s known, and how many times she’s cried out for merciful death. I’ll never be able to ask if what I witnessed yesterday was typical, worse than average, or even an unusually good day, considering. She’ll never ask about any of the horrors that happen to me. These are not things discussed during peacetime in Enysbourg.We won’t even talk about them if I stay, and if we remain in love, and if we marry and have children, and if they grow up bright and beautiful and filled with wonder; and if every ten days we find ourselves obliged to watch them ground beneath tank-treads, or worse. In Enysbourg such things are not the stuff of words. In Enysbourg a certain silence is just the price of being alive.

And a small price it is, in light of how blessed those who live here have always been.

Just about all Caralys can do, as the two of us begin to sway together in a sweet slow dance, is continue to murmur reassurances. Just about all I can do is rest my head against her chest, and close my eyes to the sound of her beating heart. Just about all we can do together is stay in this moment, putting off the next one as long as possible, and try not to remember the dogs, the hateful snarling dogs, caged for now but always thirsty for a fresh taste of blood.

“The mere absence of war is not peace.”

—President John F. Kennedy

For J.H.

RESISTANCE

by Tobias S. Buckell

Tobias S. Buckell is the author of the novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose, and the New York Times bestseller Halo: The Cole Protocol. He is a Writers of the Future winner, and has published more than thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Nature, Lightspeed, Science Fiction Age, and Analog, and in anthologies including Mojo: Conjure Stories, New Voices in Science Fiction, and I, Alien. Much of his short work has been collected in Tides from the New Worlds. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.

In November 2008, American voters elected Barack Obama president of the United States. The race was not as close as it has been in recent elections, but the real excitement of the day was the high voter turn-out. With an estimated 61% of all registered voters choosing to cast votes, the 2008 election stands as the highest voter turnout in more than three decades.

Of course, that means 30% or so of all registered voters didn’t bother to turn up. And who knows how many U.S. citizens never got around to even registering in the first place?

There are thousands of explanations for voter apathy, but in the world Buckell portrays in our next story, none of those excuses really matter; it’s a techno-democracy failed by its own voters. But Buckell knows first-hand about systems that begin with high hopes only to crumble into disaster. He was born during a 1979 coup d’etat in Grenada, where the new government, according to Buck-ell, “fell into the spiral of quashing opposition to the point where it became draconian and people ended up lined up against walls and shot.”

It would appear that a utopian government is only as strong as the voices of its resistance.

Four days after the coup Stanuel was ordered to fake an airlock pass. The next day he waited inside a cramped equipment locker large enough to hold two people while an armed rover the size and shape of a helmet wafted around the room, twisting and counter-rotating pieces of itself as it scanned the room briefly. Stanuel held his breath and willed himself not to move or make a sound. He just floated in place, thankful for the lack of gravity that might have betrayed him had he needed to depend on locked, nervous muscles.

The rover gave up and returned to the corridor, the airlock door closing behind it. Stanuel slipped back out. The rover had missed him because he’d been fully suited up for vacuum. No heat signature.

Behind the rover’s lenses had been the eyes of Pan. And since the coup, anyone knew better than to get noticed by Pan. Even the airlock pass cut it too close. He would disappear when Pan’s distributed networks noticed what he’d done.

By then, Pan would not be a problem.

Stanuel checked his suit over again, then cycled the airlock out. The outer door split in two and pulled apart.

But where was the man Stanuel was supposed to bring in?

He realized there was an inky blackness in the space just outside the ring of the lock. A blotch that grew larger, and then tumbled in. The suit flickered, and turned a dull gray to match the general interior color of the airlock.

The person stood up, and Stanuel repressurized the airlock.

They waited as Stanuel snapped seals and took his own helmet off. He hung the suit up in the locker he’d just been hiding in. “We have to hurry, we only have about ten minutes before the next rover patrol.”

Behind him, Stanuel heard crinkling and crunching. When he turned around the spacesuit had disappeared. He now faced a tall man with dark skin and long dreadlocks past his shoulders, and eyes as gray as the bench behind him. The spacesuit had turned into a long, black trench-coat. “Rovers?” the man asked.

Stanuel held his hand up and glyphed a 3-D picture in the air above his palm. The man looked at the rover spin and twist and shoot. “Originally they were station maintenance bots. Semi-autonomous remote operated vehicles. Now they’re armed.”

“I see.” The man pulled a large backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.

“So… what now?” Stanuel asked.

The gray eyes flicked up from the pack. “You don’t know?”

“I’m part of a cell. But we run distributed tasks, only checking it with people who assign them. It keeps us insulated. I was only told to open this airlock and let you in. You would know what comes next. Is the attack tonight? Should I get armed? Are you helping the attack?”

The man opened the pack all the way to reveal a small arsenal of guns, grenades, explosives, and—oddly—knives. Very large knives. He looked up at Stanuel. “I am the attack. I’ve been asked to shut Pan down.”

“But you’re not a programmer…”

“I can do all things through explosives, who destroy for me.” The man began moving the contents of the pack inside the pockets and straps of the trenchcoat, clipped more to his belt and thigh, as well as to holsters under each arm, and then added pieces to his ankles.

He was now a walking arsenal.

But only half the pack had been emptied. The mysterious mercenary tossed it at Stanuel. “Besides, you’re going to help.”

Stanuel coughed. “Me?”

“According to the resistance message, you’re a maintenance manager, recently promoted. You still know all the sewer lines, access ducts, and holes required to get me to the tower. How long do you guess we have before it notices your unauthorized use of an airlock?”

“An hour,” Stanuel said. The last time he’d accidentally gone somewhere Pan didn’t like, rovers had been in his office within an hour.

“And can we get to the tower within an hour, Stanuel, without being noticed?”

Stanuel nodded.

The large, well-armed man pointed at the airlock door into the corridor. “Well, let’s not dally.”

“Can I ask you something?” Stanuel asked.

“Yes.”

“Your name. You know mine. I don’t know yours.”

“Pepper,” said the mercenary. “Now can we leave?”

A single tiny sound ended the secrecy of their venture: the buzz of wings. Pepper’s head snapped in the direction of the sound, locks spinning out from his head.

He slapped his palm against the side of the wall, crushing a butterfly-like machine perfectly flat.

“A bug,” Stanuel said.

Pepper launched down the corridor, bouncing off the walls until he hit the bulkhead at the far end. He glanced around the corner. “Clear.”

“Pan knows you’re in Haven now.” Stanuel felt fear bloom, an instant explosion of paralysis that left him hanging in the air. “It will mobilize.”

“Then get me into the tower, quick. Let’s go, Stanuel, we’re not engaged in something that rewards the slow.”

But Stanuel remained in place. “They chose me because I had no family,” he said. “I had less to lose. I would help them against Pan. But…”

Pepper folded his arms. “It’s already seen you. You’re already dead.”

That sunk in. Stanuel had handled emergencies. Breaches, where vacuum flooded in, sucking the air out. He’d survived explosions, dumb mistakes, and even being speared by a piece of rebar. All by keeping cool and doing what needed to be done.

He hadn’t expected, when told that he’d need to let in an assassin, that he’d become this involved. But what did he expect? That he could be part of the resistance and not ever risk his life? He’d risked it the moment one of his coworkers had started whispering to him, talking about overthrowing Pan, and he’d only stood there and listened.

Stanuel took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

The space station Haven was a classic wheel, rotating slowly to provide some degree of gravity for its inhabitants so that they did not have to lose bone mass and muscle, the price of living in no gravity.

At Haven’s center lay the hub. Here lay an atrium, the extraordinary no-gravity gardens and play areas for Haven’s citizens. Auditoriums and pools and labs and tourist areas and fields, the heart of the community. Dripping down from the hub, docking ports, airlocks, antennae, and spare mass from the original asteroid Haven had taken its metals. This was where they floated now.

But on the other side of the hub hung a long and spindly structure that had once housed the central command for the station. A bridge, of sorts, with a view of all of Haven, sat at the very tip of the tower. The bridge was duplicated just below in the form of an observation deck and restaurant for visitors and proud citizens and school trips.

All things the tower existed for in that more innocent time before.

Now Pan sat in the bridge, looking out at all of them, both through the large portal-like windows up there, and through the network of rovers and insect cams scattered throughout Haven.

One of which Pepper had just flattened.

Stanuel knew they no longer had an hour now.

Pepper squatted in front of the hatch. “It’s good I’m not claustrophobic.”

“This runs all the way to the restaurant at the tower. It’s the fastest way there.”

“If we don’t choke on fumes and grease first.” Pepper scraped grease off the inside.

Stanuel handed him a mask with filters from the tiny utility closet underneath the pipe. He also found a set of headlamps. “Get in, I’ll follow, we need to hurry.”

Pepper hauled himself into the tube and Stanuel followed, worming his way in. When he closed the hatch after them the darkness seemed infinite until Pepper clicked a tiny penlight on.

Moving down the tube was simple enough. They were in the hub. They were weightless. They could use their fingertips to slowly move their way along.

After several minutes Pepper asked, voice muffled by the filter, “so how did it happen? Haven was one of the most committed to the idea of techno-democracy.”

There were hundreds of little bubbles of life scattered all throughout the asteroid belt, hidden away from the mess of Earth and her orbit by distance and anonymity. Each one a petri dish of politics and culture. Each a pearl formed around a bit of asteroid dirt that birthed it.

“There are problems with a techno-democracy,” muttered Stanuel. “If you’re a purist, like we were, you had to have the citizenry decide on everything.” The sheer amount of things that a society needed decided had almost crushed them.

Every minute everyone had to decide something. Pass a new law. Agree to send delegates to another station. Accept taxes. Divvy out taxes. Pay a bill. The stream of decisions became overwhelming, constantly popping up and requiring an electronic yes or no. And research was needed for each decision.

“The artificial intelligence modelers came up with our solution. They created intelligences that would vote just as you would if you had the time to do nothing but focus on voting.” They weren’t real artificial intelligences. The modelers took your voting record, and paired it to your buying habits, social habits, and all the other aspects of your life that were tracked in modern life to model your habits. After all, if a bank could use a financial profile to figure out if an unusual purchase didn’t reflect the buyer’s habits and freeze an account for safety reasons, why couldn’t the same black box logic be applied to a voter’s patterns?

Pepper snorted. “You turned over your voting to machines.”

Stanuel shook his head, making the headlamp’s light dart from side to side. “Not machines. Us. The profiles were incredible. They modeled what votes were important enough—or that the profilers were uncertain to get right—so that they only passed on the important ones to us. They were like spam filters for voting. They freed us from the incredible flood of meaningless minutiae that the daily running of a government needed.”

“But they failed,” Pepper grunted.

“Yes and no…”

“Quiet.” Pepper pointed his penlight down. “I hear something. Clinking around back the way we came from.”

“Someone chasing us?”

“No. It’s mechanical.”

Stanuel thought about it for a moment. He couldn’t think of anything. “Rover?”

Pepper stopped and Stanuel collided with his boots. “So our time has run out.”

“I don’t know.”

A faint clang echoed around them. “Back up,” Pepper said, pushing him away with a quick shove of the boot to the top of his head.

“What are you doing?”

“We’ve come far enough.” Four extremely loud bangs filled the tube with absurdly bright flashes of light. Pepper moved out through the ragged rip in the pipe.

Another large wall blocked him. “What is this?”

Stanuel, still blinking, looked at it from still inside the pipe. “You’ll want the other side. Nothing but vacuum on the other side.” Had Pepper used more explosive they might have just been blown right out the side of Haven.

“Right.” Pepper twisted further out, and another explosion rocked the pipe.

When Stanuel wriggled out and around the tube he saw trees. They’d blown a hole in the lawn of the gardens. They carefully climbed out, pushing past dirt, and the tubes and support equipment that monitored and maintained the gardens and soaked the roots with water.

“Now what?” Stanuel asked. “We’re going to be seen.”

“Now it gets messy,” Pepper said. He pulled Stanuel along toward the large elevator at the center. “I’m going with a frontal assault. It’ll be messy. But… I do well at messy.”

“There’s no reason for me to be here,then,”Stanuel said. “What use will I be? I failed to get you there through the exhaust pipes. Why not just let me go?”

Pepper laughed. “Not quite ready to die for the cause, Stanuel?”

“No. Yes. I’m not sure, it just feels like suicide, and I’m not sure who that helps.”

“You’re safer with me.” Pepper launched them from branch to branch through the trees. Now that curfews were in effect, no families perched in the great globe of green, no kids screaming and racing through the trees. It was eerily silent.

Pepper slowed them down in the last grove of trees before the elevators at the core of the gardens. As they gently floated towards the lobby at the bottom of the shaft three well-built men, the kind who obviously trained their bodies up on the rim of the wheel, turned the corner.

They carried stun guns. Non-lethal, but still menacing.

Stanuel heard a click. Pepper held out a gun in each hand. Real guns, perfectly lethal.

“I’d turn those off,” Pepper said to the men, “and pass them over, and then no-one would get hurt.”

They hesitated. But then the commanding voice of Pan filled the gardens. “Do as he says. And then escort him to me.”

They looked at each other, unhappy, and tossed the guns over. Pepper threw them off into the trees. “You’re escorting us?”

The three unhappy security men nodded. “Pan says you have an electromagnetic pulse weapon. We’re not to provoke you.”

Stanuel bit his lip. It felt like a trap. These traitors were taking them into the maw of the beast, and Pepper, as far as he could see, looked cheerful about it. “It’s a trap,” he muttered.

“Well of course it is,” Pepper said. “But it’s a good one that avoids us skulking about, getting dirtier, or having to shoot our way through.” The mercenary followed Pan’s lackeys into the elevator. He turned and looked at Stanuel, hovering outside. “And Pan’s right. I do have an E.M.P device. But if I trigger it this deep into the hub, I take out all your power generating capabilities and computer core systems.”

“Really?” Stanuel was intrigued.

Pepper held up a tiny metal tube with a button on the end. “If I get to the tower,” Pepper said. “I can trigger it and take out Pan, while leaving the rest of the station unaffected.”

Stanuel had weathered five days of his beloved Haven under the autocratic rule of Pan, the trickster.

He’d travel with Pepper to see it end, he realized.

He pulled himself into the elevator.

For five days Haven’s populace had a ruler, a single being whose word was law, whose thoughts were made policy. Pan stood in the center of the command console, its face lit by the light of a hundred screens and the reflections off the inner rim of Haven’s great wheel.

Pan wore a simple blue suit, had tan skin, brown eyes, and brown hair. His androgynous face and thin body meant that had he stood in a crowd of Haven’s citizens, he would hardly have been noticed. He could be anybody, or everybody.

He also flickered slightly as he turned.

“My executioner and his companion. I’m delighted,” Pan said. “If I could shake your hand, I would.” He gave a slight bow.

Pepper returned it.

Pan smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you two for quite a while. I apologize for sending the rover up the exhaust pipe.”

Pepper shrugged. “No matter. So what now? I have something that can take you out, you have me surrounded by nasty surprises…”

Pan folded its arms. “I don’t do nasty surprises, Pepper. I’m not a monster, contrary to what Stanuel might say. You have an E.M.P device, and if you were to set it off further down the tower, you would shut all Haven down. True, I have backup capabilities that mitigate that, but your device presents a terrible risk to the well being of the citizenry. With the device and you up here, the only risk is to me.”

An easy enough decision, Stanuel thought. Trigger the damn device! But Pepper glanced around the room, maybe seeing traps that Stanuel couldn’t. “If you don’t do nasty surprises, what stops me from zapping you out, right here, right now?”

“I would like to make you an offer. If you’d listen.”

Pepper’s lips quirked. “I wouldn’t be much of a mercenary if I just accepted the higher bid in the middle of the job. You don’t get repeat work very often that way.”

Pan held its hands up. “I understand. But consider this, I am, indirectly, the one who hired you.”

Stanuel had to object. “The resistance…”

“I run it,” Pan smiled. “I know everything it does, who it hires, and in many cases, I give it the orders.”

Stanuel felt like he’d been thrown into a freezing cold vat of water. He lost his breath. “What do you mean? You infiltrated it?” They had lost, even before they’d started.

Pan turned to the mercenary. “Stanuel is bewildered, as are many, by what they created, Pepper. I’m merely the amalgamated avatar of the converged will of all the simulations made to run this colony. The voter simulations kept taking up energy, so the master processing program came up with a more elegant solution: me. Why run millions of emulators, when it could fuse them all into a single expression of its will that would run the government?”

“A clever solution,” Pepper said.

“A techno-democracy, even more so than the vanilla kind, is messy. Dangerously so. With study committees and votes on everything, things that needed to be done quickly didn’t get done in time.

“So the emulations decided to put forward a bill, buried in the middle of some other obscure administrivia. The vote was that emulations be given command of the government.”

Stanuel stepped forward. “We woke up and found that in a single moment all of Haven had been disenfranchised.”

“By your own desires and predictive voting algorithms,” Pan said. “In a way, yes. In a way, no.”

Stanuel spit at the dictatorial hologram in front him. “Then the emulators decided that a single amalgamation, an avatar, and expression of all their wills, would work better. So then even our own voting patterns turned over their power.”

“Not surprising,” Pepper said. “You didn’t have the maturity to keep your own vote, you turned it over to the copies of yourselves. Why be surprised that the copies would do something similar and turn to a benevolent dictator of their own creation?”

Pan looked pleased. “Dictators aren’t so bad, if they’re the right dictator. And it’s hard coded into my very being to look out for the community. That’s why I look like this,” it waved a hand over its face. “I’m the average of all the faces in Haven. Political poll modeling shows that were I to run for office, if would be almost guaranteed based on physiological responses alone.”

Stanuel looked at Pepper. “Pan may have infiltrated, but you were still paid to destroy it. Do it.”

“No,” Pan said. “You might pull that trigger. But if you do, you destroy what the people of Haven really wanted, what they desired, and what they worked very hard to create, Pepper, even if they didn’t realize they consciously wanted it.”

“I’ve heard you get the government you deserve,” Pepper said. “But this is something else. They created their own tyranny…”

“But Pepper, I’m not a tyrant. If they vote as a whole to oust me, they can do it.”

Pepper moved over to the one of great windows to look out at the inside rim of Haven. Thousands of distant portholes dotted the giant wheel, lit up by the people living inside the rooms across from them.

“Look around you,” Pan implored. “There are plenty who like what I’m doing. I’m rebuilding parts of Haven that have been neglected for years. I’m improving agriculture as we speak. I’ve made the choices that were hard, got things into motion that just sat there while people quibbled over them. I am action. I am progress.”

Stanuel kicked forward and Pepper glanced back at him. “I think Stanuel objects.”

Pan sighed. “Yes, a few will be disaffected. They will always be disaffected. That was why I created outlets for the disaffected, because they are a part of me as well. But my plea to you, Pepper, is not to break this great experiment. I can offer you more money, a place of safety here whenever you would want it, and Haven as a powerful ally to your needs.”

Pepper nodded and sat in the air, his legs folded. “I have a question.”

“Proceed.”

“Why do they call you Pan?”

“They call me Pan because it’s short for panopticon. An old experiment: if you were to create a round jail with a tower in the center, with open cell walls facing it, and the ability to look into every cell, you would have the ultimate surveillance society. The panopticon. In some ways, Haven is just that, with me at its center.”

Pepper chuckled. “I’d half expected some insane military dictator wearing a head of antlers calling himself Pan.”

Pan did not laugh. It leaned closer. “Pepper, understand me.This is not your fight. I’m the naturally elected ruler of Haven. The choice to remove me, that isn’t yours. I did not bring you here to destroy me, but for other reasons.”

“The choice?” The word affected Pepper in some way Stanuel could not figure out. He looked over at Stanuel. “Then if you’re a benevolent ruler, you will escort me off Haven, leave Stanuel alive, and move on to other things. After all, it was your orders that set Stanuel down this path.”

“Of course. It’s that or a sentence in one of Haven’s residential rooms. You’ll be locked in, but comfortable. There do have to be ways to handle such things. Exile, or confinement.”

“Okay, Mr. Pan. Okay. My work here is done.” Pepper moved towards Stanuel with a flick of his feet. “Come on Stanuel, it’s time to leave the tower.”

Stanuel could hardly look Pepper in the eye. “I can’t believe you left there.”

“Pan made a good argument.”

“Pan offered to pay you more. That’s all.”

“There’s that, but I won’t take it.” Pepper scratched his head. “If I destroyed Pan, what would you do?”

Stanuel frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You said the emulations wouldn’t be allowed to hold direct control, earlier. Does that mean you’d allow the emulations to come back and decide votes for you?”

“One assumes. We might have not gotten them right, but if we can fix that error, things can go back to the way they were.”

Pepper unpacked his suit and stepped into it. It crinkled and cracked as he zipped it up. “And then I’ll be back. Because you’ll repeat the same patter all over again.”

“What?”

“For all your assumptions, you’re not quite seeing the pattern. Deep down, somewhere, you all want Pan. You don’t want the responsibility of voting, you want the easy result.”

“That’s not true,” Stanuel objected.

“Oh come on. Think of all the times princes and princesses are adored and feted. Think of all the actors and great people we adore and fawn over.”

“That doesn’t make us slavish followers.”

Pepper cocked his head. “No, but we still can’t escape the instincts we carry from being a small band of hunter-gatherers making their way across a plain, depending on a single leader who knew the ins and outs of their tiny tribe and listened to their feedback. That doesn’t scale, so we have inelegant hacks around it.

“Stanuel, you all created a technological creature, able to view you all and listen to all your feedback, and embody a benevolent single tribal leader. Not only was it born out of your unconscious needs, even your own emulations overwhelmingly voted it into power as sole ruler of Haven.”

Stanuel raised his hand to halt Pepper. “That’s all true, and over the last four days we’ve argued around all this when we found out about the vote. But, Pepper, whether perfect or not, we can’t allow a single person to rule us. It goes against everything we believe in, everything we worked for when we created Haven.”

Pepper nodded. “I know.”

“And you’re going to walk away.”

“I have to. Because this wasn’t some power grab, it was the will of your people. There was a vote. Pan is right, it is the rightful ruler. But,” Pepper pointed at him, “I’m not leaving you empty-handed.”

“What do you mean?”

He handed over the backpack and pressed a small stick with a button into Stanuel’s hand. “The E.M.P device is in the backpack. You won’t get anywhere near the tower to take out just Pan, but if you trigged it in the hub after I leave, it will shut Haven down. Pan will have backups, and his supporters will protect the tower, but if enough people feel like you do, you can storm it with the guns in that pack.”

“You’re asking me to… fight?”

“You know your history. The tree of liberty needs to be watered with some blood every now and then. Thomas Jefferson, I think, said that. Most of your ancestors fought for it. You could have kept it, had you just… taken the time to vote yourself instead of leaving it to something else.”

“I don’t know if I can.” Stanuel was bewildered. He’d never done anything violent in his life.

Pepper smiled. “You might find Pan is more willing to fold than you imagine. Think about it.”

With that, he stepped into the airlock. The door shut with a hiss, and the spacesuit faded into camouflage black as Pepper disappeared inside whatever stealth ship had bought him to Haven.

Stanuel stood there. He pulled the backpack’s straps up over onto his shoulders and made his way toward the gardens, mulling over the mercenary’s last words.

A hologram of Pan waited for him at the entrance to the gardens, but no goons were nearby. Stanuel had expected to be captured, with the threat of a long confinement ahead of him. But it was just the electronic god of Haven and Stanuel.

“You didn’t understand what he meant, did you?” Pan said. It really was the panopticon, listening to everything that happened in Haven.

“No.” Stanuel held the switch to the E.M.P in his hand, waiting for some trick. Was he going to get shot in the head by a sniper? But Pan said it didn’t use violence.

Maybe a tranquilizer dart of some sort?

“I told you,” Pan said, “I also created the resistance.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Stanuel said.

“It does if you stop thinking of me as a person, but as an avatar of your collective emulators. Every ruling system has an opposition; the day after I was voted into power, I had to create a series of checks and balances against myself. That was the resistance.”

“But I was recruited by people.”

“And they were recruited by my people, working for me, who were told they were to create an opposition tame as a honey trap.” Pan flickered as he walked through a tree. An incongruous vision, as Stanuel floated through the no gravity garden.

“Why would you want to die?”

“Because, I may not be what all of you want, just what most of you want. I have to create an opportunity for myself to be stopped, or else, I really am a tyrant and not the best solution. That is why Pepper was hired to bring the

E.M.P device aboard. That was why, ultimately, he left it with you.” “So it’s all in my hands,” Stanuel said. “Yes. Live in a better economy, a safer economy, but one ruled by what you

have created. Or muddle along yourselves.” Pan moved in front of Stanuel, floating with him.

Stanuel held up the metal tube and hovered his thumb over the button. “Men should be free.”

Pan nodded sadly. “But Stanuel, you all will never be able to get things done the way I can. It will be such a mess of compromise, personality, mistakes, wrong choices, emotional choices, mob rule, and imperfect decisions. You could well destroy Haven with your imprecise decisions.”

It was a siren call. But even though Pan was perfect, and right, it was the same song that led smart men to call tyrants leaders and do so happily. The promise of quick action, clean and fast decisions.

Alluring.

“I know it will be messy,” Stanuel said, voice quavering. “And I have no idea how it will work out. But at least it will be ours.”

He pressed the button and watched as the lights throughout Haven dimmed and flickered. Pan disappeared with a sigh, a ghost banished. The darkness marched its glorious way through the cavernous gardens toward Stanuel, who folded up in the air by a tree while he waited for the dark to take him in its freeing embrace.

CIVILIZATION

by Vylar Kaftan

Vylar Kaftan writes speculative fiction of all genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, GigaNotoSaurus, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Cosmos, Escape Pod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Sybil’s Garage, The Way of the Wizard, and in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Paper Cities. She lives with her husband Shannon in northern California.

If you were young in the 1980s, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Getting to pick your own way through the story always seemed so thrilling, until you came to the end and realized no matter what choices you made, it always turned out the same. Sometimes you even found yourself stuck in a loop, repeating the same stupid action over and over.

It was good training for real life, wasn’t it?

Our next story isn’t a cautionary tale of government gone bad or a social principle run amok. It’s quite simply an analysis of civilization, and the chilling recognition that for good or bad, people in groups just can’t seem to get things right. Historians will agree: society after society keeps making the same ridiculous mistakes.

Just like your characters did when you steered them through those Choose Your Own Adventure books.

1. Beginning

You have a civilization! It doesn’t matter which one—let’s say it’s modern Western civilization. It’s got fast food and sporting events, which is all you really need. Western technology gives you great military power—you have fantastic unstoppable tanks, and heat-seeking missiles to keep you safe. It’s a good place to start.

You could also have chosen a remote aboriginal tribe in the center of Australia—one with nuts and berries, and spears and ropes. Or you could have chosen Communist China, or that group of scientists living in Antarctica. But let’s stick to modern Western civilization. Let’s give you people, too. We’ll call them John and Jane. If you have a civilization, then you probably have at least two people in it.

Now, with your civilization comes a political system. Maybe your system is a democracy, and everyone gets a vote except the felons and child molesters. Maybe your system is a republic, and you market it as a democracy because it looks better on the brochures. Maybe your system is totalitarian, and you force everyone to enjoy the sound of that complicated word.  Totalitarian!

But! A major choice awaits you. Are you traditional, bound by the past, certain that the old ways are the best because “we’ve always done it that way, so there”? Or are you radical, lured by the future, always hoping that the new ways will be better than the old because “we’ve never done it that way, so there”? Be warned, the future of your civilization depends on your choice. John and Jane’s lives are at stake.

If you choose tradition, go to section 2.

If you choose radicalism, go to section 5.

2. Tradition

You’re a traditionalist. Or a blind follower. Or just someone who reads everything in order, from start to finish. It doesn’t matter; you end up in the same place anyway.

So, you have a civilization. You have TV dinners and expensive cars. You hold elections. This is the way it’s always been done, and this is the way it must be. Never mind those fruitcakes in wigs who fought against the colonial powers. They were supporting Freedom and Liberty and other words that make great advertising. The corporations live off the people and the people trust the corporations. John and Jane relax, knowing that everything around them has worked for centuries.

Things stagnate. You hold more elections, or pretend to. The people in power have always been in power. The world is the way it’s always been. The police have always arrested people in the streets. The freedom to speak has always been restricted in the name of security. The corporations destroy the people and that’s the way it’s always been, and why would you question that, citizen?

Congratulations!  You’ve got fascism!

Go to section 3.

3. Fascism

How nice for you, that you look so good in jackboots and a uniform! Your secret police are so dangerous that they’re sexy. They kick the enemies of the State in the street, like Rockettes in steel-toed boots. You sleep with national security books on your nightstand and a revolver under your pillow. Or maybe you just have secret meetings of secret societies in secret boardrooms, sealing fates with secret handshakes. The artists fill the gulags, and hey—cheap labor! So what if it’s not fair and equal? Equality is for hippies. John and Jane trust you to keep them safe at all times.

When you’re fascist, you’re always right, because God or Satan or your left boot told you what to do. Divine power is with you! That means that you’re right, and you’d better make sure everyone else knows it too.  Let’s go to war!

Go to section 7.

4. Complacency

You’ve been in power an awfully long time now. Why pay attention any longer? There’s too many good shows on TV (or in the bullring, or in the arenas, or whatever you’ve got). You talk about the great sporting events on television and visit fast-food drivethroughs. You worry about whether your toothpaste is really doing all that a toothpaste should. After a while, you stop paying attention to anything at all. John and Jane are off doing something, but you’re not sure what. This is the way it’s always been, and this is the way it will always be. Is this progress?  You aren’t sure.

Go to section 2.

5. Radicalism

You decide to experiment. Artists love your society. Painters color skyscrapers, and sculptors make art of garbage. Directors shoot movies in black light and show them in darkened theatres. Musicians shred the works of previous centuries.  Corporations hold festivals to mock their own logos.

People are changing things from the way they’ve always been, just to make changes. Broken furniture becomes the new fashion. Everyone lives with six uncles and an aunt. John and Jane change their names to Isthmus and Quagmire. No matter what the new idea is, it must be better than the old. You remember that you haven’t changed governments in a while. Throw out the old! Bring in the new!  It’s time for a revolution!

Go to section 6.

6. Revolution

You hand out pamphlets in the street. Citizens march in protest of everything. The Hero of the People takes over in a bloodless coup. The former powers all commit a penitent suicide: on the same day, in the same prison, under your watchful eye. How convenient! You take note of all the former rules—because if that’s how they did it, now you must do it differently. You charter a new Constitution in a different font from the old one. Oh good, this regime is much better than the last one!

You suppress the counter-revolutionaries. They want to change everything. Any disagreement in society must be squelched. John and Jane must have their freedom.  For the good of the new regime!

Go to section 4.

7. War

Oh boy, it’s war! Your regiments march like clockwork toys. Colonel Mustard is your general, with his dashing moustache and monocle. Your hats are quite classy, with a feather for each soldier (for officers, two!) On the streets, your noble supporters weep with pride as their loved ones march past. The people support the Cause (both sides, if it’s a civil war). Or if they don’t, you silence them, for national security. Jane blows John a kiss as he shoulders his weapon and heads away.  He’ll come back a hero, and they will marry.

Your soldiers fight bravely. They pose for photos every time they save a small child from Tyranny. There’s no blood—at least, not in the photos. The enemy can’t oppose the side of Truth and Justice, which you’re quite certain is you.

Congratulations! You’ve won the war! Now for the next step: What kind of society do you want to build? Is your future an ideal Utopia, or a dark Dystopia?

If you build Utopia, go to section 8.

If you build Dystopia, go to section 9.

8. Utopia

Medicine: Disease has been eliminated, and people live to be 120 in perfect health. As a result, your people have more time to contribute to society and to enjoy their lives.

Agriculture: Food is mass-produced by advanced techniques so that there is plenty for everyone. Special additives in the food guarantee nutrition and health for every citizen.

Employment: Everyone is guaranteed a job that pays a living wage, so that all people have the means to support themselves.

Housing: No one is homeless. Citizens are guaranteed safe, affordable housing.

Education: Citizens may study any available information. The government provides the entirety of human history and current events, and encourages people to read.

Law: All issues are decided by fair courts.  Mistakes are never made.

Government:  The government wants to make sure the citizens are happy.

Wow! What a wonderful world you’ve built for yourself. Now, all that remains is to help everyone else enjoy Utopia!

Go to section 10.

9. Dystopia

Medicine: Disease has been eliminated, and people live to be 120 in perfect health. As a result, your world is overpopulated and resources are scarce.

Agriculture: Food is mass-produced by advanced techniques so that there is plenty for everyone. Special additives in the food guarantee obedience to the government.

Employment: Everyone is guaranteed a job that pays a living wage, so that people are trapped in nightmarish jobs that they can’t leave.

Housing: No one is homeless. People without homes live in institutions, where they are subjected to conditioning and experiments.

Education: Citizens may study any available information. The government provides the information that citizens are authorized to see, and records who is reading it.

Law: All issues are decided by fair courts. Mistakes, of course, are never made. How could they be?

Government: The government wants to make sure the citizens are happy.

Oh dear. What a horrible world you’ve made for yourself. Hey—those people next door, in that other place? They have Utopia, and you don’t. Misery loves company.  It’s time to change some things.

Go to section 10.

10. Zeal

Rows of smiling identical people sing a patriotic anthem in perfect tune. In Utopia/Dystopia, you are never alone.

Your society is happy, or it’s not. Someone else has it better, or they don’t. But you’re sure about one thing: other people are different from you. And that’s dangerous.

Everyone else must share in your happiness or unhappiness. Everyone else must be just like you.  Like Jane.  Like John.

Oh boy, it’s war again!

Go to section 11.

11. War, Again

I hope you’re not surprised. It always comes back to war. The details change, but the patterns remain the same.

The last war was just for fun, but this one is serious. You’re blowing the left arms off babies and burning 10,000-year-old monasteries. You perfect the technique of keeping a soldier alive despite mortal injury; the technique is quite helpful for spies on suicide missions. Your soldiers pray to God in the field, but you don’t have time to answer. You’re busy making military decisions. This war is serious, and hard choices must be made. John marches off again, and someday will return to Jane.  Or he won’t.  That’s war.

The question is, did you win? Will you dominate these not-like-you people and rule them with an iron hand? Or did you lose, and now face the destruction of your society?

If you won, go to section 12.

If you lost, go to section 14.

12. Tyranny

You’re mad at these people, these pathetic creatures you conquered. They started that horrible war!  Now you must teach them a lesson.

You make them build bigger stadiums and better fast food restaurants. Perhaps it’s tyranny, but it’s oppression with a smile—because you love them. That’s why you want them to be like you. Just like you. And once they learn your lesson, they will be like you. You want them to enjoy their world as much as you enjoy yours. Or hate it, the way you hate your own. It’s all for the good of John and Jane, who really should appreciate you more.

Unfortunately, your smiles aren’t enough to convince them of your love. There’s always room for assassination.

Go to section 13.

13. Assassination

Oops! Someone got crabby and killed your leader, in the shower. It’s terribly messy, with brains splattered on the bathroom wall.

Who do you blame? Why, it’s obvious. It’s the vice-president secret police Communists students Boy Scouts Mothers Against Drunk Driving anyone who isn’t you.  People not you are responsible!  People not you must pay!

Retaliation is swift and effective. You kill their leader. And the other leaders. And some people who aren’t leaders. And they kill more of your leaders. And non-leaders.  The streets flow with blood.

Is this war again, again? No, it’s just collapse. Government structures tumble.

Schools are boarded up. Garbage piles up because no one removes it. People burn textbooks for warmth. John and Jane live on scraps from their neighbors. Maybe someone finds an atomic weapon, and maybe they use it. Maybe they don’t need to.

Whichever way it happens, you’ve reached the apocalypse.

Go to section 14.

14. Apocalypse

Oh no! Your civilization is destroyed. No more fast food. No more sporting events.  No more two-for-one buffalo wing specials.

It’s a mushroom cloud, billowing away in the breeze. Or a plague where everyone’s skin explodes with toxic pustules. Or intense radiation that boils the brains of 98% of the population.

All of the nice families with 2.5 children (maybe happy, maybe not) are vaporized like rain in a volcano. Or the corpses pile up like ants that ate poisoned bait. The survivors walk among the living dead—stealing granola bars from their purses but leaving the wallets, because who needs money anymore?

Nuclear winter sets in.  Or a biological disaster.  Or just sheer depression.

But there are a few survivors.  There always are. And they can start over.

Go to section 15.

15. Survival

Groups of ragged survivors struggle across the wasteland, or rubble, or abandoned cities. John and Jane take things one day at a time. Their challenge is to live until the night—then to live through the night, and to live another day.

Food and shelter are scarce. Many people don’t make it. With time, the population balances so that it can support itself on the meager resources. This takes months, or it takes years. But when enough time passes, a small tribe sits in a cave, or at an oasis, or by a river. John (or Jane) says, “Remember how much better things used to be?” The others throw rocks at him or her, and demand not to be reminded.  They want to forget the dead times that can’t be revived.

But Jane (or John) watches, and waits, and remembers.

Once the others have truly forgotten—and the past has become myth—s/he has an idea. S/he says to the others, “I will lead you to happiness and freedom! Everyone follow me!” John (or Jane) unifies the tribes. Jane (or John) thinks that s/he has a new idea, better than anyone’s ever had, something that will work. As always, certain choices must be made. But Jane and John are no different from you, in the end.  They aren’t smarter or wiser.  They’re just someone else.

Go to section 16.

16. Beginning, Again

Did you think the choices were terrible?  They were.

Are you disappointed in where your choices have led you? Don’t be. Other leaders have tried, and failed. The future is full of the same choices as the past. Nobody likes the choices, but civilization keeps moving.

Do you feel that you’re at the beginning, again? You are. It’s a circle. But there’s always hope for change—hope that the circle becomes a spiral staircase.

Look, here, see this. A room, with a table. It’s evening, or night. Look closely at the three people sitting around the table: John, Jane, their child. John smiles. He needs a shave, or perhaps he is bearded. Jane serves lasagna, or chicken casserole, as she tells her family about her day. The child is a girl, or a boy. The child sits in a highchair and gazes adoringly at John and Jane. After they eat, the parents take the child upstairs, singing a lullaby.  It’s been a good day.

Their world is radical, or traditional. They vote like responsible citizens, but they’re more excited by the child learning to walk. The child grows up in revolution, or not, and marries a man, or a woman, or no one at all. S/he raises a family in Utopia/Dystopia or a world that is neither. When the apocalypse comes, s/he stays with the kids, who are grown up themselves and having a child. Despite the destruction, a baby is born.

You have a civilization.

FOR FURTHER READING

compiled by Ross E. Lockhart

What follows is a selected bibliography of noteworthy Dystopian and Utopian fiction. Dystopia and Utopia are often considered to be opposing sides of a coin, but perhaps the two lie closer than one might at first suspect. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance, may have ended badly for Winston Smith, but Inner Party loyalist O’Brien undoubtedly got a promotion for bringing such a dangerous radical as Smith to justice. Titles notable for their high literary value are marked with an asterisk. To learn more about the stories in Brave New Worlds, visit the anthology’s website at johnjosephadams.com/brave-new-worlds

Notable Dystopias:

Amis, Martin

— Einstein’s Monsters

Anderson, M. T.

— Feed

Armstrong, Jon

— Grey (et.seq.)

Asimov, Isaac

— Pebble in the Sky

Atwood, Margaret

— The Handmaid’s Tale *

— Oryx and Crake

— The Year of the Flood

Auster, Paul

— In the Country of Last Things

Bacigalupi, Paolo

— The Windup Girl *

— Ship Breaker

Ballard, J. G.

— Crash

— Hello America

Barry, Max

— Jennifer Government

Bates, Paul L.

— Imprint

— Dreamer

Beaton, Alistair

— A Planet for the President

Beckett, Bernard

— Genesis

Böll, Heinrich

— My Melancholy Face

Boston, Bruce

— The Guardener’s Tale

Boyd, John

— The Last Starship from Earth

Bradbury, Ray

— Fahrenheit 451 *

Brain, Marshall

— Manna

Brooke, Keith

— Genetopia

Brunner, John

— The Jagged Orbit

— The Sheep Look Up *

— The Shockwave Rider

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward

— Vril: The Power of the Coming Race

Burgess, Anthony

— A Clockwork Orange

— The Wanting Seed

Burroughs, William S.

— Blade Runner, a Movie (see also Nourse, Alan E.)

Butler, Octavia

— Parable of the Sower *

Carbonneau, Louis

— Barrier World

Cobb, William

— A Spring of Souls

Cohen, Stuart Archer

— The Army of the Republic

Collins, Suzanne

— The Hunger Games (et.seq.)

Cowdrey, Albert E.

— Crux

Crace, Jim

— The Pesthouse

DeVita, James

— The Silenced

DiChario, Nick

— Valley of Day-Glo

Dick, Philip K.

— Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

— The Man in the High Castle *

Disch, Thomas

— The Genocides

— 334

Doctorow, Cory

— Little Brother

Farmer, Philip José

— Riders of the Purple Wage

— Dayworld

Ferrigno, Robert

— Prayers for the Assassin (et.seq.)

Fischer, Tibor

— The Collector Collector

Fukui, Isamu

— Truancy

Gibson, William

— Mona Lisa Overdrive

— Neuromancer *

Gray, Alasdair

— Lanark: A Life in Four Books *

Grimes, Tom

— City of God

Hairston, Andrea

— Mindscape

Hall, Sarah

— Daughters of the North

Harkaway, Nick

— The Gone-Away World

Harris, Robert

— Fatherland

Harrison, Harry

— Make Room! Make Room! *

Herbert, Frank

— Hellstrom’s Hive

Hubbard, L. Ron

— Final Blackout

Huxley, Aldous

— Ape and Essence

— Brave New World *

Ishiguro, Kazuo

— Never Let Me Go

Johnston, Paul

— The House of Dust

Keogh, Andrew

— Twentytwelve

Keppel-Jones, Arthur M.

— When Smuts Goes

Kerr, Philip

— The Second Angel

King, Stephen (writing as Richard Bachman)

— The Long Walk

— The Running Man

Kuttner, Henry

— The Iron Standard

Lamar, Jake

— The Last Integrationist

Le Guin, Ursula K.

— The Lathe of Heaven

Lem, Stansiław

— Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Lerner, Lisa

— Just Like Beauty

Levin, Ira

— This Perfect Day

Lewis, Sinclair

— It Can’t Happen Here *

London, Jack

— The Iron Heel *

Lowry, Lois

— The Giver

Lundwall, Sam J.

— 2018 A.D. or the King Kong Blues

Mark, Jan

— Useful Idiots

McCarthy, Cormac

— The Road *

McCarthy, Wil

— Bloom

McIntosh, Will

— Soft Apocalypse

McMullen, Sean

— Eyes of the Calculor

Mellick III, Carlton

— The Egg Man

— War Slut

Miéville, China

— Perdido Street Station

Mitchell, David

— Cloud Atlas (“Sonmis Oratio”)

Moore, Alan

— V for Vendetta

Morgan, Richard

— Market Forces

— Thirteen (AKA Black Man)

Morrison, Toni

— Paradise

Nabokov, Vladimir

— Invitation to a Beheading

Neiderman, Andrew

— The Baby Squad

Nolan, William F. and George Clayton Johnson

— Logan’s Run

Norden, Eric

— The Ultimate Solution

Nourse, Alan E.

— The Blade Runner (See also Burroughs, William S.)

O’Brien, Michael D.

— Eclipse of the Sun

Oppegaard, David

— The Suicide Collectors

Orwell, George

— Nineteen Eighty-Four *

Philbrick, Rodman

— The Last Book in the Universe

Pohl, Frederick and C. M. Kornbluth

— The Space Merchants

Pollack, Rachel

— Unquenchable Fire

Powers, Tim

— Dinner at Deviant’s Palace

Rand, Ayn

— Anthem

Reed, Kit

— Enclave

Robinson, Kim Stanley

— The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) *

Rucker, Rudy

— Postsingular Russ, Joanna

— And Chaos Died

Scalzi, John with Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, and Karl Schroeder

— Metatropolis

Sharpe, Matthew

— Jamestown

Shirley, John

— Black Glass

Silva, Ulises

— Solstice

Silverberg, Robert

— The World Inside

Singer, Lee

— Blackjack

Slattery, Brian Francis

— Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America *

Smith, Cordwainer

— The Rediscovery of Man

Smith, L. Neil

— The Probability Broach

Spinrad, Norman

— The Iron Dream

Starhawk

— The Fifth Sacred Thing

Stephenson, Neal

— Snow Crash

Stevens-Arce, James

— Soulsaver

Stewart, George R.

— Earth Abides

Takami, Koushun

— Battle Royale

Tevis, Walter

— Mockingbird

Theroux, Marcel

— Far North

Thomson, Rupert

— Divided Kingdom

Turner, George

— The Sea and Summer

Turtledove, Harry

— The Gladiator

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.

— Player Piano *

Walton, Jo

— Farthing

— Ha’Penny

Waugh, Evelyn

— Love Among the Ruins

Wells, H. G.

— The Time Machine

— When the Sleeper Wakes

Westerfeld, Scott

— Uglies (et.seq.)

Weyn, Suzanne

— The Bar Code Tattoo (et.seq.)

Williams, David J.

— The Mirrored Heavens

Wilson, Robert Anton

— The Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy

Wilson, Robert Charles

— Mysterium

Womack, Jack

— Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Wright, Ronald

— A Scientific Romance

Zamyatin, Yevgeny

— We *

Notable Utopias:

Banks, Iain M.

— Consider Phlebas (Culture series) (et.seq.)

Bellamy, Edward

— Looking Backward *

Borghese, Elizabeth Mann

— My Own Utopia

Callenbach, Ernest

— Ecotopia

Charnas, Suzy McKee

— Motherlines

— Walk to the End of the World

Delany, Samuel R.

— Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia *

Gentle, Mary

— Golden Witchbreed

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

— Herland

Heinlein, Robert A.

— The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Huxley, Aldous

— Island *

Le Guin, Ursula K.

— Always Coming Home

Lessing, Doris

— The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five

More, Thomas

— Utopia *

Morris, William

— News from Nowhere *

Piercy, Marge

— Woman on the Edge of Time

Robinson, Kim Stanley

— Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) *

Russ, Joanna

— The Female Man *

Skinner, B. F.

—  Walden Two

ENJOYED THIS SAMPLER?

Look for the Brave New Worlds trade paperback (ISBN 978-1-59780-221-5) — thirty three of the best tales of dystopian menace by some of today’s most visionary writers — at a better bookstore near you. Or find the e-book (ISBN 978-1-59780-288-8), collecting twenty-eight essential dystopian tales, online.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to the following:

Jeremy Lassen and Jason Williams at Night Shade Books, for letting me edit all these anthologies and for doing such a kick-ass job publishing them. Also, to Ross Lockhart and Michael Lee at Night Shade for all they do behind-the-scenes, nad  to Allan Kausch for his copyediting prowess. Cody Tilson: Thank you for the fantastic cover, comrade. Gordon Van Gelder, who first showed me the horrible dystopia of the slush mines and then helped me climb out of them. My former agent Jenny Rappaport, for helping me launch my anthology career, and my current agent, Joe Monti, for keeping it going. Wendy N. Wagner for her assistance wrangling the header notes. All the clever things in the header notes are all her work. Anything lame you came across is mine. Rebecca McNulty, for her various and valuable interning assistance—reading, scanning, transcribing, proofing, doing most of the work but getting none of the credit as all good interns do. My mom, for ensuring that, as a child, I did not have to grow up in a dystopia. All of the other kindly folks who assisted me in some way during the editorial process: Jean Adamoski, Linda Allen, Kathleen Bellamy, Cristina Concepcion, Ellen Datlow, Jennifer Escott, Lina M. Granada, Sean Fodera,Victoria Fox,Vaughne Lee Hansen, Dave Housley, Alexandra Levenberg, Kristina Moore, Mimi Ross, Lawrence Schmeil, Jason Sizemore, Alicia Torello, to everyone who entered suggestions into my dystopian fiction database, and to everyone else who helped out in some way that I neglected to mention (and to you folks, I apologize!). The NYC Geek Posse—consisting of Robert Bland, Desirina Boskovich, Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, Jordan Hamessley, Andrea Kail, David Barr Kirtley, and Matt London, (plus the NYCGP Auxiliary)—for giving me an excuse to come out of my editorial cave once in a while. The readers and reviewers who loved my other anthologies, making it possible for me to do more. And last, but certainly not least: a big thanks to all of the authors who appear in this anthology.

Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

“Resistance”by Tobias S. Buckell. © 2008 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Seeds of Change. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs” by Adam-Troy Castro. © 2003 by Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in Imaginings. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away” by Cory Doctorow. © 2008 by CorDoc-Co, Ltd UK. Originally published in Tor.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Civilization” by Vylar Kaftan. © 2007 by Vylar Kaftan. Originally published in Glorifying Terrorism. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Just Do It” by Heather Lindsley. © 2006 by Heather Lindsley. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“For Further Reading” by Ross E. Lockhart. © 2011 Ross E. Lockhart. Original to this volume.

“Arties Aren’t Stupid” by Jeremiah Tolbert.© 2008 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Originally published in Seeds of Change. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Is This Your Day to Join the Revolution?” by Genevieve Valentine. © 2009 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Futurismic. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn. © 2010 by Carrie Vaughn. Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.