We are delighted to announce our next general submission window!
Submissions will be open for two weeks, from July 8 through July 22, via our submission portal. We consider one story per author, with a wordcount of 3,500 words or less; we pay 10c/word; and simultaneous submissions are fine. See our Submission Guidelines for full details and more information!
Call for First Readers (BIPOC now, everyone May 27)
We are now looking for volunteers interested in being First Readers for Diabolical Plots!
First Readers are a crucial part of our submission windows, helping us navigate through the many hundreds of stories we receive every year, and making sure every story gets consideration and the spectrum of opinions and viewpoints we need to make our choices well.
Reading submissions is also a fantastic learning experience for anyone who loves reading, writing, or editing. It’s an opportunity to sample an incredible range of writing, from every style and every level of professional expertise. It’s also a way to get ‘behind the scenes’, see how the magazine is run, and get involved in bringing stories to the world. If you love short stories, we suspect you will have a blast.
At Diabolical Plots, we see First Readers as an opportunity to offer mentorship and new connections! We’ll walk you through everything that First Reading entails; we’re always open for conversations about reading, writing, and publishing; and we’ll hold regular discussions and exercises, specially aimed at new First Readers, highlighting all kinds of different ways stories can work (or not work!) for us, and what goes into submission reading and the magazine process.
Diabolical Plots offers a small honorarium to all First Readers who participate in a submission period. We recognize that it is not commensurate with the tremendous amount of work our amazing First Readers put in, but we feel it’s vital to provide what compensation we can, and it is important to us to show our appreciation.
It’s always important for us to maintain a diverse First Reader team with a wide range of identities and experiences; we are immediately open to applications from people who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or people of color). We will open to First Reader applications (at the same link) from all demographics on May 27. The applications for all will be open through June 3.
A Farewell and a Welcome
After a fruitful year here at Diabolical Plots, Chelle Parker will be stepping down from the editorial team this summer. A professional freelance editor, and previously copyeditor and then managing editor at Fireside Magazine, as well as a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, Chelle has been wonderful to have as a member of our team. They’ve weighed in on acquisitions, dev edited and copy edited stories, developed our in-house style guide in collaboration with David, advocated for First Readers and fellow editors, assisted with our 2023 Hugo Award Nomination List project, been a veritable fountain of knowledge on language and grammar, and so much more—we’ve gained and grown immeasurably from their time and efforts with us.
As Chelle departs, we are pleased to welcome Amanda Helms, who will be stepping into the vacant editor role! Amanda is a biracial Black/white fantasy, science fiction, and sometimes horror writer whose stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from FIYAH, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other fine venues. Amanda has been with the Diabolical Plots team since 2021, where she has been among our most prolific First Readers—her many insightful comments and gift for getting to the heart of a story have helped steer acquisitions, and we have tremendous respect for her taste and work ethic. Her background as a former editor in educational publishing is a major asset, and she’s eager to apply those skills in working with Diabolical Plots authors. Two of her stories have previously been published in the magazine: “The Efficacy of Tyromancy over Reflective Scrying Methods in Divining Colleagues’ Coming Misfortunes” is a great example of speculative academic fiction, and has the distinction of being our first unTweetable story title—at the time it was published, Twitter still had the 140-character limit— while “Midwifery of Gods: A Primer for Mortals” is a great example of the kind of ‘format story’ that Diabolical Plots loves to publish. Welcome, Amanda!
My name is Yasuko Nagamine and I work for the employment bureau. There’s a monster destroying the city. It used to be the mascot for the organ rental service, Sensation. I guess it still is but I don’t think it’s doing much for their bottom line anymore.
Today I’m filing electronic papers, which is what I always do. Someone new registers with the bureau every day and I look at their job history. Then I send them back a form if there’s an opening that matches their file. Or I send them back a form that says, Sorry, there are no openings.
The city getting destroyed is also the whole world, so a lot of people might say it’s bad that something is stomping on it. But almost no one is saying that. They’re all just working. After people figured out they didn’t need plants or oceans or ducks, they made the whole world silver. It’s just buildings and server farms. That’s what happens when people figure out how to turn themselves into machines.
I have one screen with a list of bright dots, one for each opening. And the other screen has a list of bright dots for each person that needs a job. The longer they’ve been without a job or the longer the job is open, the brighter the dot gets.
I can see that big yellow bear Ketchōkuma through my window. He’s at least two miles away but he’s so big his ears almost touch the clouds. He’s holding a parasol made of shiny pink guts, just the way Sensation drew him up: an intestine swirled like a bun at the top. The way he used to look in all the ads, reaching toward the screen with a stomach or a heart in his paw. Well, almost like that. Now the parasol is sagging a little. But he’s still smiling with teeth. When he was regular-sized he had a dance where he bent on one leg and spun around and waved his arms and a jingle came out of his mouth. Now that he’s bigger, he still dances sometimes when he moves. You can almost hear something from his teeth.
Today my boss said I have to hire someone for the Tamentai Plaza opening. He said if they don’t have a general manager, people will start building homes in the dressing rooms and writing on the food court walls with chem paint. I look at the brightest dots but their files are all wrong. Everyone has experience with point of sale, but no one’s been a manager. I scroll down the dots until I get to the duller ones. They’re the same brightness as my eyes. My eyes are a dark paper brown that glows a little. Everyone I know has eyes like that but it’s how you move them around that matters.
I click on one of the dots. This person worked point of sale for twenty years. But they were never a manager. They have a pretty nose but that isn’t good enough. My eyes keep falling down the screen. I’m not supposed to look at the grey dots even though they’re there.
When I was born, the hospital uploaded my mind to the megaserver and threw my body in the waste system. Then they gave me the body I have now. It’s what happens to everyone. I wear a grey suit and keep my hair in a ponytail with a melon-pink tie. Girl stuff. Everyone is cloud-based, so our brains are always ready on the megaserver. That way, if something happens to our body, we can get a new one, and resync our mind when it’s over.
The bear is looking at me through the glass. He can’t see me. He’s too far away. But his eyes are turned this way and he’s not moving. That happens sometimes. Like he’s scared or broken.
I don’t think about my body anymore. The thing is there’s only so much space on the megaserver (it’s different than the servers they use for money and traffic records and the employment bureau), and it turns out a person’s brain takes up way more space than you’d think, so we each get the same amount of time before our brains are deleted and they recycle our plastic bodies. It’s fair, I guess.
Someone’s file just came in. It fills up the whole screen and the dot spins like a Ferris wheel. There’s her face. No smile. That’s good, I think. She doesn’t take nonsense. Her collar is the color of a pearl and comes all the way up to her jaw in lace. It makes her look like a beautiful singer. Experience: Fourteen years in library science. Director of collections at a nearby branch for eight years. Recognition of excellence in radio archival. She’s perfect.
But her dot is barely even grey. It just got here. It’s impossible. My boss would never approve it. He hates breaking rules, and I do too.
They said Ketchōkuma got loose and found a hatch in the waste system. He found where they put all the bodies, all our tiny bodies that aren’t plastic. He started sucking them up. On the news, they said, He siphoned all the neonates. That’s how he got so big and no one knows how he did it. I wish I could be that big, and golden. Like the sign on the casino where every letter is huge. They’re all glowing and you want to hug them and feel how warm they are.
Ketchōkuma is winding up to dance. You can tell by the way his parasol drops below his knees.
I keep the woman’s dot on my screen. The mall needs a manager. It’s a good mall. I’ve been there and I like to shop for outfits and look at all the pets in their habitats. Someone has to run the mall and there’s only so much time left before people start breaking windows and looting power cells and painting rude words on the walls.
The big bear finishes his dance. I almost clap but my boss sits at the desk in front of me. When Ketchōkuma stops, he loses his balance and sways into an office building. It’s far away, so I barely hear it. His legs disappear in the puff of smoke that comes up. His original fur is so stretched out that he isn’t really yellow anymore if you look up close, only from far away. If you look up close, like the drone cameras do on the news, you can see all the tears and gaps. Underneath it’s pink and white and red and wet.
I still have the woman on my screen. It says she knows seven languages. That would be good if random people caused trouble at the mall and she had to tell them where to go to be reprimanded. Or if someone moved in from a faraway part of the city and wanted to open a new store in the mall.
Ketchōkuma is singing now. I can definitely hear it, but maybe it’s my imagination. They said all his wires must be stretched as far as they can go, but his chip still plays his theme song. Only now it’s really slow and deep. Wa di-di. Ka da to ma di-di. It’s baby talk. It doesn’t mean anything. I still like hearing it, even though it sounds weird now.
As soon as I graduated I spent all my gift money on an organ from Sensation. It was a lung. The most beautiful organ. Everyone’s plastic body has a cavity around the tummy if you press hard enough in the right places. That pocket’s where Sensation hooks in, so most people rent a stomach. I knew it wasn’t right to have a lung down there but they hooked it up and once I took a breath it was all I could think about. But that was only for six hours. Then I ran out of money. I miss it. Our lungs always work but they’re just plastic and they don’t feel like anything.
I send the file for the woman with the tall collar to my boss. She’s the right person, I know she is, so it doesn’t matter if the dot is grey.
Ketchōkuma is closer now, but he’s quiet again. I can kind of see the tears in his fur. His parasol is gone, or maybe he’s dragging it on the ground below the skyline. How many weeks now, and he never has anything to say. If he could talk, I don’t know what he’d tell me. It’s like that. All of the best things you can tell someone don’t need words.
My boss hates her. He says no. He says even if she were the maestro of management she would be horrible because her dot is grey. And grey means there are other people besides her who need to get back to work first, so society doesn’t fall apart. He says find someone else, there’s plenty of people.
Now I have money for an organ, but Sensation stopped taking orders. After Ketchōkuma got loose, they dropped everything. Like it never mattered in the first place. They went on the news and said sorry, it won’t happen again. They said everybody who’s upset gets a refund. They said, actually, we’ve been working on something new, and instead of a refund we’ll put your money towards that—it’s all digital, it’ll last forever. Then everybody started talking about organs. They said what was the point of something that makes you feel sweaty? Sometimes they stink. They’re overpriced and we shouldn’t have cavities in our bellies anyway, let’s take those out for the next generation.
The floor rumbles. Through the window I watch König Schellen’s golden sign cracking in two, flattening each floor until it all disappears under the other buildings. The biggest casino in the whole city, gone. My monitor shakes and so do I. I see a big shape in the dust, but it slips behind the hotels.
Then the opera house starts to move. Its big red arches lean forward, so slow I don’t see it at first. It looks like it’s going to sleep. Then the lights spark, and they pop one by one, and then all at once like fireworks. It falls, and there’s the shape again before the dust covers it up.
I try to focus on my job. I need to choose someone who can be the manager of Tamentai Plaza. It’s a really important place and someone people like needs to protect it. Someone who can make business good for everybody, even the pets.
I try. I really try, but my eyes won’t stay on the screen. The racetrack that circles all the restaurants flies up and hangs in the air. It’s floating over everything for the longest second I can remember. Then it whips down into the hotels. The whole row gets smashed, and they’re half as tall now. And other buildings start falling too, big ones nearby. Everything’s falling down.
I have to look at my screen. There’s nothing I can do about anything outside, but I can help Tamentai Plaza.
It’s no good. There’s the parasol. The pink canopy pounds through the Super Stadium toward me, through the silver dome that’s as big as the sky, and stuff is flying everywhere. The parasol comes back up through the dome and drops down again like a hammer, and the noise is so loud even my manager looks up for a second. A big cloud blooms where the stadium used to be.
I sit for a long time, until it all clears. Ketchōkuma is standing in the smoke behind everything. He’s wet and glittering. His fur is almost gone now. It’s frayed to nothing. He’s not even yellow anymore. He’s red and blotchy with shadows.
Then something cool happens. I look at my screen and it’s almost empty. All those dots. All those people are gone and the woman with the beautiful collar and no smile is the very first dot and it’s brighter than anything, even the casino sign. And the rest of the dots are people I’ve never seen before because they’re new, because—I know what happened. I send her file to my boss again without even thinking.
I look out the window. He’s there. His eyes are big, dark holes in his face, big enough to fall into. He’s quiet. His mouth is lumpy and red.
Hi, big bear.
He did it.
You knew, didn’t you.
There was a server farm behind the hotels. I forgot all about it. All the older files must have been stored there. And the ones that came in today started up in a different server. He knew somehow.
You knew, didn’t you?
Why else would he come this way?
Thank you.
I liked him even before he did it.
Thank you. I really mean it.
My boss says the woman is hired. He already called her. He says she’s the best file I’ve picked since I started. He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know, big bear.
He doesn’t even realize what happened.
My screen refreshes and all the old dots come online again, rerouted from some other server. But it’s too late. They already hired her.
Ketchōkuma is looking at me. He’s really looking at me this time, through the window. I think about that silly lung that’s probably rotten now. It was good, even if it isn’t around anymore. I think about my body. I think about the whole thing: the inside, the outside, the hair tie. I think about my body, even if it is plastic. And I close my eyes.
Thank you, toes.
I peek for a second. I close them again.
Thank you, toes. I feel your weight. I appreciate that you’re a part of me.
I keep my eyes closed.
Thank you, legs. You may not carry blood, but you carry me.
I open them one more time.
Thank you, eyes. Because of you, the whole world is inside me. Because of you, I see a bear.
I lay my fingers on the desk and watch them work, and Ketchōkuma takes the city into his paws.
Author’s Note: Mainly I just wanted to create my own kaiju. Obviously they lend themselves to metaphor, so there’s always the action and the threat, but also some deeper ideas if you’re in that mindset. With the monster design, I was pulling from Japanese mascots, and I guess giving this one the old body-horror treatment. The ending, weirdly enough (or maybe not), was inspired by some Thích Nhất Hạnh affirmations. I have an office job and often forget about my own body.
Mason Yeater writes speculative fiction near the Great Lakes. Previously, his work has been published in TL;DR Press’s Curios anthology. He can be found sometimes @snow_leeks on Twitter.
The Chief Manager requested this assessment to analyze the overall performance of Spirits & Co.’s leading product, the soft drink Miracle Fresh, as a follow-up to the findings presented in the three-month assessment (also included below). All research and data have been gathered on-site by the assigned team over the past ninety-three days, including interviews, medical and financial reports, headlines, and related footage. Those pertain to Brasília alone, where Miracle Fresh was first distributed. That information is fully available from our IT team upon request. We hope this report will provide some clarity as to recommended next steps for making Miracle Fresh a worldwide success.
Background
Miracle Fresh is a soft drink produced by Spirits & Co. since 2027. The original pitch described a holy club soda blessed with droplets of blood from our devoted Messiah, something the average person could drink on the go, après-exercising, or even at [insert holy building of choice] without requiring long tiresome religious proceedings. This idea was abandoned shortly after the company realized a soft drink would appeal to a greater audience, and after considering the lawsuit filed by the parental association Guardians of our Holy Youth (GHY), who worried the club soda would be used as a component of alcoholic mixed drinks. Associating our devoted Messiah with sugar and adding a clear appeal to children did not seem to faze any of the naysayers.
Attached: Pictures from several GHY parties obtained through social media. They feature children below the age of fifteen consuming alcohol and doing a wide variety of drugs. The children’s faces have been blurred to protect their identities.
Since May 2028, Miracle Fresh has been sold as a burgundy soft drink and is available at several stores and markets in the country at a reasonable R$ 4,00 per can. Sales began online and on-site in Brasília, before being distributed to each state capital and to smaller commercial centers around the third month. Two other nations, India and Argentina, have contracted the so-called ‘MiraFever’ due to social-media buzz and are currently developing their own local factories.
Attached: Miracle Fresh official logo:
Have a miracle inside you!
Findings
This assessment has been broken down by time period and demographic for a better understanding of what has changed and what has not during the three-month span between studies. A compilation of this information in its entirety can be acquired through a formal request to IT.
THREE-MONTH ASSESSMENT RECAP
University students aged 18-32 (59 institutions)
After their initial consumption of Miracle Fresh, students claim to be afflicted by a sweet sense of tranquility that lasts for days, sometimes weeks. It helps them navigate academic life with relative ease and even excitement. 67% report they feel more connected to nature after one sip, while 73% say they have formed a deeper relationship with themselves. Additionally, the first group often develops a penchant for flowers; our teams came back wearing crowns on their heads on more than one occasion.
The Guardians of our Holy Youth (GHY)
Following the release of our new marketing plan, the group dismissed their lawsuit and sent a thoughtful thank-you note along with a list of names we should contact in order to offer our product to a wider variety of venues. “All for the benefit of our devoted Messiah.” It appears we have made ourselves some powerful new friends.
Young influencers aged 15-21
Marketing picked a few names for paid partnerships to create one viral video—and they made two. This is how we got India. The key idea was to show alternative external uses for the blessings, such as:
a blessed make-up (“a dab of Miracle Fresh on the eyes works wonders”);
game setup (“rub a few drops on your controller and send that boss to hell”);
stock portfolio*.
* I asked three people and none understood how this could work. Might be just a gimmick; those are also quite popular.
Religious leaders
This demographic was not originally one we were considering and came to us of their own accord, first with a formal email, then through a representative. They demanded proof that we were in fact using our devoted Messiah’s blood in the manufacturing process of the drink, not exploiting the faith of innocent, unsuspecting customers. A petition, signed and stamped, was to be delivered to Congress to demand a thorough investigation of our manufacturing facilities and, should any evidence of fraud be found, that we cease all operations.
We kindly asked them to select a small group to visit the facilities and take a closer look at our manufacturing process. Twenty people accepted the invitation to a tour that lasted fifteen minutes. We did not hear from them again. Miracle Fresh again lives up to its name by bringing together religious leaders of disparate backgrounds, some of which are sworn enemies. The miracle is inside all of us.
SUS Triad – Brasília’s main hospitals
Saint Claire Hospital: Patients are officially requesting (demanding, on occasion) to drink Miracle Fresh before any procedure, to their doctors’ dismay. It interferes with electronic instruments and disrupts the display of digital imaging. A few altercations have been reported.
Our Devoted Medical Center: It seems they anticipated the problems seen at Saint Claire and banned Miracle Fresh from the premises. Legal is analyzing whether Spirit & Co. might have standing for a case against this ban.
Center 1 Hospital: Terminally ill patients are praying to our cans instead of asking for their last rites. Several religious figures have filed complaints (unrelated to the petition to Congress).
Addicts of entrequadras 213/214
We received a call to investigate the famous drug hotspot of the city, the entrequadras 213/214, located on the dead-end street between those two blocks. The caller described people injecting Miracle Fresh intravenously with shared needles. HR suggests we make an ad with a mildly pretty and harmless celebrity, like Betinho Gonzaga, to remind people that our slogan—’Have a miracle inside you!’—refers only to ingesting the soda. Rumors claim the first Miracle Fresh addicts already exist (unconfirmed).
Children aged 7-14
They said it tastes like grape juice.
SIX-MONTH ASSESSMENT
University students aged 18-32 (59 institutions)
Tranquility rates rose and attendance dropped dramatically as students started to abandon academia to follow a path of ‘self-peregrination’—a term apparently related to the connections they make through Miracle Fresh. They refuse to associate the process with the high (rumored) addicts get from injecting Miracle Fresh intravenously. According to reports, ‘self-peregrination’ allows a person to dive into their inner core, experience memories from their birth, and watch their organs, cells, and genes work in real time. One student insists she discovered a tumor by dint of those trips and thanked us profusely. She gifted us many more flower crowns.
Our labs found such tranquility rates rather dubious, given the world we live in, and requested further analysis. They received confirmation in a matter of hours: the cans contained one to three foreign substances that altered their composition on a molecular level. It appears students had been infusing cans of Miracle Fresh with sweat, blood, or flower essence in an effort to enhance effects. Combinations of two or all three extracts are also popular options. This corroborates Marketing’s August report regarding the need for new flavors and variations, and perhaps limited-edition holiday Miracle Freshes.
Some of the flowery extracts might be suitable options, as well as the sweat variation, if branded properly. Blood on blood, however, is out of the question: there seems to be a reaction when Miracle Fresh comes into contact with the conscious sacrifice of certain people, a phenomenon our labs decided to call ‘Midas’s blood’. This reaction transforms the blood into a golden liquid. Carriers of Midas’s blood languish little by little unless they cease all contact with Miracle Fresh. They perish in one to two months otherwise. Patient zero is yet to be identified, but our team has already announced a recall of each affected batch of the drink and is watching the diseased closely. Spirits & Co. should unveil more details about Midas’s blood soon.
Attached: Pictures and a police report from October 23rd, 2028. A truck carrying contaminated Miracle Fresh was overturned and ransacked by an unidentified group on Pistão Sul. Its contents have yet to be recovered.
The Guardians of our Holy Youth (GHY)
For the past few weeks, Customer Service has received an endless string of emails with questions regarding specifics of our product, such as how to: 1) retain blessings for longer periods of time; 2) ensure the absorption of every single drop of blood from our devoted Messiah present in each can; 3) measure the amount of ‘blessitude’ as to provide a comparison with fellow drinkers. Our labs promptly dismissed the requests, suggesting this veiled holiness contest to be out of the product scope and beseeched IT to block all of their addresses. Marketing insists we should fund a department to develop a blessing meter and turn this annoyance into profit. The matter will be brought to discussion at the next meeting.
Young influencers aged 15-21
The ‘alternative uses for Miracle Fresh’ trend died early in the third month, replaced by ‘What would the Messiah do?’ skits starring influencers dressed as our devoted Messiah, who would catch other people in awkward situations, then wail “I did not bleed for this!” Those with less comedic inclinations decided instead to try a little bit of everything. Highlights include Tito Moreno, the ‘Gordito Estrela’, who rose to fame after feeding Miracle Fresh to his dog and filming his reactions as the dog began to levitate, and Jade Martins, former blessed make-up artist.
Jade’s case is still under investigation, since her recent content consists of live streams and videos of herself posing with her face covered in golden tears, a telltale sign of Midas’s blood. The adulterated cans are likely from the truck we lost a while ago, a delicacy extremely hard to come by and with plenty of potential buyers out in the wild. I would bolt my doors if I were her. Jade has nonetheless refused to reply to any messages sent by the company, despite the warnings that she has a lethal infection and will likely be dead in a few weeks’ time. In response, IT started a betting pool on which will run out first: 1) her stash of adulterated cans; 2) her life. Anyone can join by speaking to Marlene Silva on the second floor.
Religious leaders
Our team scouted the city looking for interviewees from various backgrounds, but faced some problems, since 52% of religious buildings, including temples, terreiros, and churches, have been closed for the past three months. From those that remain operational, reactions varied: doors closed to our faces; insults that reached back to five generations; pleas to leave them alone. One priest rushed outside, kneeled before the team, kissed each of their hands, and fled without uttering a word. Some people are just difficult to please, I guess.
SUS Triad – Brasília’s main hospitals
Saint Claire Hospital: A ritual has been established before any medical procedure, which requires both patients and the medical team to drink at least one sip of Miracle Fresh for good luck. Scars and gross negligence lost meaning, despite the dead count skyrocketing. As diabetics cannot partake in this process, Marketing has proposed we accelerate the release of our sugar-free version.
Our Devoted Medical Center: We have instructed the government to refer those afflicted with Midas’s blood to ODMC. A Spirits & Co. mobile laboratory is currently posted inside the center to provide them the best care in the world and also to investigate the inner workings of the disease. Hospital employees are not allowed entry. IT is already on the lookout for any protests from human rights NGOs.
Center 1 Hospital: Miracle Fresh has replaced holy water and its counterparts during last rites. Some patients are fully bathed in the soda to guarantee their purification, including a baptism for the terminally ill. Complaints have stopped, and due to lack of available religious leaders, the last rites are often performed by family members or nurses. Marketing is analyzing the possibility of introducing Miracle Fresh as a holy water replacement during baptisms as well. This would require an adaptation of the current logo: ‘Have a miracle outside of you’ would trigger another unpleasant side of GHY, which we would rather avoid. Marketing suggested ‘The miracle is all around you’. And isn’t it?
Addicts of entrequadras 213/214
The current number of intravenous users of Miracle Fresh is not high enough to call it a drug problem yet, regardless of what the government says. As there have been no Midas’s blood sightings in the vicinity, HR suggests we hire a mildly pretty and harmless celebrity for an ad to disperse the rumors, especially those connecting us to the fallen celebrity Betinho Gonzaga. He has been seen a few blocks away from HQ and is reportedly performing circus tricks at the traffic lights for change, which he later uses to buy the shots. In any case, his agent will not sue: she is far too busy doing cartwheels around the cars while he performs.
Author’s Note: Miracle Fresh was inspired by a Brazilian soft drink called Guaraná Jesus that is sadly not made of Jesus. It’s actually quite sweet and, for some reason, quite pink. On Christmas this one year, after Coke released their cans with people’s names on the side, someone posted a photo of a Mary Coke and a Joseph Coke with a Guaraná Jesus in a manger, and I just knew I had to write a story about this someday. This is that day. I’m so sorry.
Anne Liberton is an autistic Brazilian author fascinated by all things weird, from fiction and poetry to people. In her spare time, she sings, studies languages, and plays with her dogs. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Diabolical Plots, Heartlines Spec, and Star*Line. She took part in the 2021 Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop. You can find her everywhere @AnneLiberton.
1. Raid the army surplus warehouse, NASA’s scrapyard, and Aunt Diabolica’s volcano lair for parts. On the way home, swing by CatCo to buy more Fancy Feast for Mr. Wibbles.
2. Let your imagination soar as you plot your evil heart out. Ask yourself: What am I most upset about? Did Rodney Gruber laugh at you in high school? Are you mad that no one appreciates pigeons? Perhaps you want to overthrow the government, but stylishly, in a cool hat. You’ll want to build your device to achieve those goals. Bonus points for thematic resonance, like maybe your device arms pigeons with crouton-shooting machine guns so they can pelt condescending tourists with stale bread.
3. Settle on the environment as your pet cause. Who isn’t pissed about climate change? And since everyone’s technically responsible for it, you don’t have to feel bad about any effects on bystanders. And with Arbor Day around the corner, the timing couldn’t be better.
Once you’ve got your cause, invent the Johnny Applebeam! One sweep of its Honeycrisp ray turns humans into apple trees on contact.
Everyone always overlooks Arbor Day. This year, you’ll give them something to remember.
4. Work on your signature catchphrase. “How do you like THEM apples!” has a nice ring to it. Or maybe “It’s cobblering time!” Whatever you pick, make it rotten to the core.
5. Now it’s time for add-ons! Comfy seats! Stylish bitey dragon teeth and glowing red eyes! A nozzle that hoovers the apples from the people-trees and turns them into cider! A cannon that pelts your enemies with land piranhas! How about an extra cockpit seat for Mr. Wibbles, complete with a little silver bowl for his Fancy Feast? And hey, those crouton-wielding attack pigeons were a good idea—add a few of those!
An Emergency Override button sounds nice, but opinions are mixed on its usefulness. Murphy’s Law dictates that if you install one, someone will eventually use it against you. You might be better off without it.
6. Now that you’ve built your doomsday device, take it out for a spin! Your high school is a great place to start, and Arbor Day has arrived. Savor Rodney Gruber’s blubbering as you sweep the Johnny Applebeam over his smug bully face. You’ve just eliminated 890,000 pounds of lifetime carbon emissions, and all before it’s time to feed Mr. Wibbles.
It sure feels good to do some good!
7. Great job on your first rampage! Celebrate by sipping that crisp, cool cider made from Rodney Gruber’s freshly picked apples. Revenge, as they say, tastes sweet.
8. While you’re polishing smashed apples off the Johnny Applebeam, panic when the dragon eyes flare to life. Someone’s tripped the auto-rampage button inside the cockpit.
Realize in all the excitement that you forgot to feed Mr. Wibbles.
9. Regret that you never installed that Emergency Override button.
Mr. Wibbles is in charge now.
God save you. God save us all.
10. Enjoy your new life as a planet-saving carbon sink! You no longer have to worry about Rodney Gruber or climate change, and those attack pigeons will eventually run out of croutons. And you can’t help but be proud of Mr. Wibbles for making history as the first cat to appear on the International Most Wanted Criminals list.
It’s a shame Mr. Wibbles is still hungry, though. If there’s any victim in this nasty business, surely it’s him. What use does a cat have for apples, after all? Trees are nice, but it would sure motivate Mr. Wibbles to reach deep down for his criminal worst if you could retool the beam to make cat food instead. In such a brave new world lacking opposable thumbs with which to operate the can opener, the only right thing to do is to turn over a new leaf and guarantee a future jam-packed with delicate bites for your fuzzy little guy.
Sooner or later, you’ll solve the whole tree thing, perhaps when Aunt Diabolica comes looking for you when she notices what you stole from her volcano lair. These things always have a way of working themselves out. Until then, you’ve got your branches full planning your next rampage.
Next Arbor Day, you’ll have all the Fancy Feast you need.
Author’s Note: This story began life as an entry to a weekend flash fiction challenge I do every year, and eventually became about my true feelings around Arbor Day. I hope it inspires readers everywhere to show more respect to pigeons, and to eat apples responsibly.
Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Portland, Oregon. Rachael is a World Fantasy Award nominee and Tiptree Award honoree, and her fiction has appeared in multiple Year’s Best anthologies and dozens of venues worldwide. Her stories can be found in Uncanny, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and all four Escape Artists podcasts. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones or Bluesky @rachaelkjones.bsky.social
At this age, on the planet of Orvalho, Alberto is conjoined with the ship called The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds. They’re engulfed in the Mezelões’ unifying mix, a tank where a swirling brackish secretion flows through their pores and recesses, nanoscopic spidery bots tying their espírito together—parts and limbs, yottabytes and nucleotides, ship and captain, physically separated, spiritually united.
When they leave the tank, dripping dark goo, crying and whirring, they have become one, bound to each other.
Alberto is a child: gaunt, dark-skinned, green-eyed; born to be a captain. He’ll soon contest that, like all the people who are born and bound to be anything by those who came before them.
The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds is a ship: silvery, slender, streamlined; born to be an offer. It looks like a toy—for Alberto, it is one, though he’ll soon stop seeing it that way. It’s a tiny spaceship with a prow; dronelike, smaller than a goose. When charged, the engine it was born with lets it cross from the kitchen to the garden without needing extra fusion cells.
Weeks after crying in despair in the Mezelões’ labs, Alberto shyly learns to giggle into the loneliness of his wide bedroom, constructed to give space to child and ship. In between visits from his allocated guardians, Alberto learns to play with The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds. He taps its gleaming hull and the ship hurtles through the bedroom. When the window is open, it swishes out and returns many minutes later, dripping on rainy days, sizzling on the hot ones. Alberto calls it Offy. At night, Alberto learns to smile at Offy, but never to kiss it good night. No one has taught him about kisses. Offy turns down its engines so Alberto can sleep. Turns them down, that is, until it learns that Alberto prefers its whirs and hums, and the soft white lights of its protruding mole-like bridge.
.10.
At this age, Alberto resents every time he hears the Mezelões calling Offy by other names—”The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds”, “a nurturing investment”, “the shot at peace for the galaxy”, “a gift for the enemy”. For Alberto, it’ll always be Offy. Offy can’t express it yet—its mindstream system isn’t fully grown—but it can feel Alberto’s annoyance when grownups call him “little captain”, “brother of the offer”, “bringer of peace”. For Alberto, the word ‘brother’ seems misplaced, and one day he’ll understand why.
Offy is bigger than a tricycle now and growing every day, its gobbling drive devouring the raw material the guardians leave for it—steel, titanium, magnesium, and an entire bevy of alloys and mixtures carefully nurtured for ship growth. Alberto barely fits inside, occupying most of its payload. He’s free to fly it, his guardians say, though they’re still bounded by the limits of the Captain’s Dome, which comprises his bedroom and the guardians’ annex. Alberto hates limits. He wants to break away from Orvalho and fly to the twinkling stars, home of a hundred races, of a thousand planets, of a million cities. The grownups say he’ll be able to go wherever he wants one day, when he’s captain, when The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds is fully matured.
On some nights, Alberto has nightmares. In them, he’s back in the Mezelões’ tanks. But instead of a union, he’s being separated from Offy, with freezing, brackish goo pouring out of his body. He cries, restless, trying to swim, looking for Offy. But before he finds it, Offy—the real one, from the waking world—flies closer to him, whirring a bit louder. It’s only then Alberto knows he won’t drown.
.15.
At this age, Alberto’s guardians give Offy its first hangar. It’s a spacious building outside the Captain’s Dome, reeking of oil, iron, and disinfectant. Offy is still only a dot inside it, the size of two trucks, but its mindstream system is grown now. The first words it conveys to Alberto are: “I want to fly higher.”
“You will,” Alberto whispers, cheeks plastered against Offy’s hull. “We will.”
Alberto’s free now, the guardians tell him, and he can fly Offy whenever he wants. Offy, however, is leashed. It pains Alberto when he finds out about the coercive routine they have installed to prevent Offy from traveling further than Orvalho’s orbit. After five nights with Offy mindstreaming its data to Alberto, he learns how to override it.
.16.
At this age, Alberto identifies one of the many things that bother him. She hates to be called “he”. Offy realizes one thing as well. They hate to be called “it”.
Offy now has a set of skintight suits for EVA activities, a small rover, and a robust sub-light engine that performs at 0.001c. So Alberto breaks the rules and flies Offy to Beirão, Orvalho’s biggest moon. There, she wears a suit and walks out. She does things she always wanted: hop in the moon’s weak gravity; allow her feet to leave marks on the regolith; stare at the pearlescent surface of Orvalho for an hour. Finally, she talks. With their nose pointing up, Offy listens.
“I know what you are, what you were created to be. An offer of peace. You’re to be given to the Indaleões so the war between them and the Mezelões, two centuries long, can finally end. They bred you through me, tied our espíritos, because that’s the only way a ship can be. But they don’t mean for us to stay together like conjoined captains are supposed to. No, they’ll separate us so you can be a gift to some other people. Your own name means that. Then they’ll use you in their exhibitions or worse—forcefully tie you to a new captain. It will be painful for you and for me. They know it too, but they don’t care. Offy… I don’t intend to let that happen.”
But then, how many things have to happen, irrespective of what one wants?
.20.
At this age, Alia and Offy have their first fight. It is hardly an even match; in the last few years, as acne pockmarked Alia’s cheeks, Offy grew their core weapons—two laser cannons, an electron beam, internal coupled guns, and a series of hull turrets. But they turn none of it against Alia, even though she scowls at them, seething, thrashing the bridge’s comm panels and terminals, trying uselessly to crack their glass panes. Eventually, she surrenders and crashes into a couch, weeping and bristling as she absorbs everything Offy has mindstreamed to her. Offy wants to leave. Of their own accord, they want to go and explore the galaxy on their own.
When Alia tries to infiltrate Offy’s code and override it—like she did so many times to invisibly counter the Mezelões’ meddling—a terrible wind knocks her to the ground, and in strong gusts flowing along Offy’s corridors, it swooshes her away through an airlock. She stumbles out into the hangar as Offy activates their drive and flies away.
She’s left incomplete.
.22.
At this age, Alia lives alone in a shipping container with three ore miners. Without The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds, she’s no longer a captain, no longer relevant to the Mezelões. Her guardians of childhood, once all smiles and gifts and kind words, are never to be seen again.
The fact that The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds fled doesn’t mean they lost their conjoined espíritos. Instead, it means Alia lost part of her soul. She lives restlessly. Day after day, she’s wearier, gaunter, her eyes drooping, her hair falling. She obsesses over the ship’s operation logs, streaming them over and over in her mind. And, one day, barely eating anymore, she finally decrypts a set of logs from their last days together. The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds didn’t leave because they wanted to be free—as they had every right to want—but because they feared Alia would suffer, or even be disposed of, when Offy had to finally become an offer to the Indaleões.
Alia decides to draw momentum and energy from the logs, like a fusion drive thirsty for deuterium. She hitchhikes on an ore miner, then hops to a rock trawler, crosses warp gates between systems. She lives off begging, and degrading jobs, and stealing. All the while, searching for the signature of The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds—Offy; their name is Offy.
.24.
At this age, she does find Offy. Using a rock trawler’s detection system, yes, but she also feels it somewhere within her, her espírito bubbling up. Something clicks within her, like a puzzle piece falling into place.
Offy’s orbiting a gas giant, their hull reflecting a dismal blueish light. Around them, five Mezelões blastships order Offy’s surrender. Alia watches it all from the rock trawler’s skiff she stole, zooming on the battle scene, listening to public broadcasts being transmitted from within the fray. It’s the first time she sees Offy using their weapons and she takes pride in their use: the electron beam ripping off the Mezelões’ hulls, the turrets exploding their skiffs and drones. And as she finds strength in seeing Offy again, they find it nurturing to feel Alia once more, less than 1 AU off. That’s when Offy uses their laser cannons at full potential and disintegrates the remaining Mezelões ships.
When they reunite, it’s like finding a rose intact on a bloody battlefield.
.27.
At this age, rebels die. Alia doesn’t. She’s the first of the Mezelões’ captains to defect. With Offy, she spends her time hopping from system to system as Offy’s camouflage system grows and their gobbling drive feeds off any matter it can find on asteroids and rocky planets. They finally reach their full size, large enough to house 3,000 people—room for every soldier in the Indaleões’ primary fleet. But Offy needs no one but Alia to control its subsystems, from the churning particles of the budding FTL drive to the life support system’s sighs of oxygen. And the pair travel through the galaxy, their only aim, to be anything but a captain and to be anything but an offer, ignoring all the broadcasts the Mezelões direct at them: you can’t be.
.30.
At this age, the duo is the most valuable asset in the galaxy. In the eyes of the Mezelões, Offy is a fully-formed offer, but it’s more than that. Their separation and eventual reunion made Offy develop faster than expected. Their hull has grown another layer of titanium; their FTL drive, usually fully developed only at 60 years from conjoining, is almost at its prime; their weapons offer twice as much firepower as a similar ship would at this age.
And in the Mezelões’ eyes, Alia, despite being a rebel and a wanted woman, is a splendid captain, capable of controlling—though Alia hates the word—all of Offy’s systems with mere slivers of mindstreamed thoughts, without needing to couple herself to chairs and machinery like other captains.
And that’s why they’re chased. Their life becomes fleeing, surviving, hiding in the solitary caves of unexplored moons, orbiting uncharted gas giants, free-floating in the blackness of interstellar space. At times, Alia finds herself disguised, roaming the infinite streets of ultra-dense cities, disappearing amongst ten billion citizens. Offy finds themself changing their drive signature and exhaust patterns day after day. Offy develops a factory of replicating bots and, with the bots’ help, learns to shapeshift. One day, they look like a cigarette. Another day, they’re in the form of a turtle swimming across the void.
One of those days, Alia and Offy wonder if they’re forever.
.45.
At this age, light becomes slower. Offy develops a fully-formed FTL drive. Though at this point, Alia and Offy don’t see each other as conjoined entities anymore. They’re simply one, and they call themself Alyof.
Going faster than light, Alyof can reach other galaxies, transforming the Mezelões, the Indaleões, and their pitiful skirmish into something as irrelevant as a molecule lost in the vacuum. Some of their most formidable ships, conjoined with their wisest and oldest captains, can still reach them. But not many dare to defy Alyof anymore. By now, they have a plethora of planet-wrecking weapons that no ship has ever achieved. Alyof becomes a mere anomalous curiosity, a feature of space to be observed and respected from a distance, like a quasar.
.85.
At this age, Alyof learns they’re not invincible. Not because the Mezelões develop a fleet to chase Alyof, although they do and they’re utterly destroyed; not because a race of vacuum-traveling stingrays tries to absorb Alyof into their being, although they do and they’re repelled. But because their espírito can still break.
What was once Alia longs for rest. Tethered to the bridge by a cobweb of flesh, what was once Alia wheezes, coughs, and dozes off. At times, what was once Alia misses things it would never believe it would miss: the soft bedsheets of a bedroom; a cup of coffee in a silent cantina; a walk to an observation deck to watch a terraformed forest slowly growing; the touch of someone’s hand.
What was once Offy longs for more. It wants to explore the corners of the universe, to know, to learn, to never cease to be. At times, what was once Offy longs for things it would never believe it would long for: to fly closer to black holes, to visit the frontiers of the known universe, to observe species evolving from their puddles to their pyramids.
For what was once Alia, what was once Offy becomes a weight.
For what was once Offy, what was once Alia becomes a tumor.
In the end, Alyof realizes they can’t be.
And this is how a spirit breaks: on a chalky, cold planet, Alyof expels Alia from their guts and becomes Offy again. Naked and wrinkly, gasping, with fleshy knobs hanging from her body, Alia curls on the ground, dwarfed by Offy like a discarded offer given to a deserted world. She raises a hand to them but has to close her eyes.
Alia never sees when Offy turns into a blue dot in the sky. She feels something in her chest that she mistakes for pain, but it’s only longing for what was once part of her.
.1,263.
At this age and every age beyond that, Offy travels. Cruising between two galaxies a thousand times faster than light, Offy listens to one who was once part of them. Offy knows they’ll never be whole again, but they can pretend. The reconstructed voice talks through their speakers and writes to their logs in a rough imitation of mindstreaming processes.
“I’m still afraid I’ll have to die one day and leave you,” the voice says. “My body is not like yours.”
Offy whirs a bit louder so that unreal part of them knows they can’t drown and they can be.
Author’s Note: The idea of a deep relationship between a spaceship and its captain has been on my mind for a long while. I’ve published a story of a man who tethers himself to an FTL drive, but I also thought of something far deeper than that, more organic. Then I came up with this idea of a society of captains that are conjoined with their spaceships and whose relationship needs to thrive for the spaceship to fully mature. But as with all relationships, it has its price.
Renan Bernardo is a science fiction and fantasy writer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His fiction appeared in or is forthcoming from Tor.com, Apex Magazine, PodCastle, Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Samovar, Solarpunk Magazine, and others. His writing scope is broad, from secondary-world fantasy to dark science fiction, but he enjoys the intersection of climate narratives with science, technology, and the human relations inherent to it. His solarpunk/cli-fi short fiction collection, Different Kinds of Defiance (Android Press) is forthcoming on March 26th, 2024. His fiction has also appeared in multiple languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Compiled by Hal Y. Zhang, with assistance from Chelle Parker and David Steffen
This has been a memorable year for the Hugo Awards. For the last eight years, Diabolical Plots has produced an annual volume of stories from the longer list of nomination statistics: The Long List Anthology. The project started in another memorable year, with the intent of bringing attention to more of the works favored in those nomination statistics, with the primary goal of giving those authors a boost in readership, and that effort has been successful, as those anthologies are still finding new readers every year.
The longer nomination list is traditionally published within hours of the end of the Hugo Awards ceremony at WorldCon. This time, the list was published three months after the ceremony, in January 2024, and that was the least of the departures from the norm for the awards. We aren’t going to rehash all of those details here, but you can read up on some of the controversy over at Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine.
With all of the complications of this year’s nomination list, Diabolical Plots has decided not to produce a new volume of the Long List Anthology this year. We do still want to help boost readership for the amazing authors involved, however, so in lieu of the anthology, we have done our best to compile the most comprehensive list of links to the works from this year’s Short Story and Novelette categories that we could.
Works in this list have been organized alphabetically by author name (romanized in the case of Chinese authors). Please note that not all stories have English translations, and that we have used the translated titles provided by the Hugo Awards administrators for those that do not, which are marked with an asterisk. If anyone knows of translations, either Chinese to English or English to Chinese, for any of the stories on this list that we’ve missed, please let us know.
—David
Best Short Story Finalists and Long List
《2039: 脑机时代》/ “2039: Era of Brain-Computer Interface” by 阿缺 / A Que
This story appeared in both the Short Story and Novelette categories in the nomination statistics. We weren’t able to find its character or word count, so we made a choice as to placement. We’re happy to amend this if we receive better information.
“Destiny Delayed” / 《迟到的命运颂歌》 by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
Content note (click for details)Content note: This story contains depictions of risks to a child’s safety.
Usually Friend gives me three food pouches after sportsgames, but today only one. He spits it out of his chest slot, and I kick off the bulkhead to snatch it before it gets caught in that jumble of wires over by the vents. When I grab the nearest handhold and swivel in the air for the next one to come, Friend just floats there with his slot closed and his metal arms at his sides.
“Did I do wrong parameters?” I ask.
“Naw, Graciela,” says Friend. “You were grumper to the leez! You sealed your suit with no mistakes, and you dodged all the obstacles on the course. Nineteenth time in a row!”
“If I was grumper to the leez, how come one pouch?” I say. “I’m not a four-year-old anymore.”
“You made enough power on the wheel for almost three hours of XPs! Let’s go play!” says Friend, even though Home would say it’s time for plant care.
“How come one pouch?” I ask again.
“We’ll get more later,” he says, like it’s not a big deal. “You made it to Level 48 last night, remember? Don’t you want to see what happens when you finally connect that switch?”
“No! I did the sportgames and I get the pouches. Fru, and Veg, and Prot! This is just”—I turn over the one pouch—”Veg-9! That’s the worst one!”
“It isn’t so bad.”
“Veg-9 is yuck like a poop smell!” I throw the pouch back at Friend, who catches it fast as a blink. “I’m not proud of you!” I yell at him. “You are not doing great jobs. I’m going to talk to Nurse.”
***
I wish Nurse could give me a hug like she used to, but she had to go into the walls when Friend came. The striped cushions of her body were always warm and smelled like the old CNDY pouches.
I miss CNDY pouches.
I miss Nurse.
Home always says no waste, so the nursery is just another plant-care room now. The round bulge of the baby-growing machine has bottles taped all over, and each one has its own little spinach plant to water. Metal crates stuffed up with kale are bolted to the wall so you can hardly see the smiley sun and the rainbow and the kids holding hands. Before all the plants, whenever Nurse saw me looking at that picture, she would close my hand in her three fabric fingers to practice for being a big sister.
But I’m not a big sister, even though I’m all the way five.
Nurse’s old charging pod is a compost bin now. I dig in the stinky dirt while I tell her about Friend.
“You should apologize, Tender Shoot,” Nurse says from the speaker above the embryo racks. Friend made me a snuggle pillow out of Nurse’s fabric when he came and Nurse left. I keep it up there by her speaker and pretend she’s still there for real.
“But why is Friend doing this?” I ask.
“Rationing has commenced, Graciela,” she says.
“What’s a commence?”
“A beginning.”
“A beginning of what?”
***
It’s really commencing here.
It’s been a whole ten-sleep, and my tummy is making sounds like when Friend boots up. Am I turning into a person like Friend? Will I wake up tomorrow with a slot in my chest for shooting out food pouches?
“I’m too tired for sportsgames today,” I say, when he finds me in my secret hiding place behind the air scrubber.
“Not sportsgames. Something new. Some place new.”
I know every single place in Home. There is no new. Unless… “The No-No Door?”
Friend nods his rectangle head. “First, you need your suit.”
***
Nurse said once that if I ever went through the No-No Door, I’d be hurt worse than anything. When the door slides open, my heart bumps so hard that it shakes the temperature control panel on the chest of my suit. It’s just a small room in there, though, with another door. Is that the real No-No Door?
“You are grumper to the leez, Graciela Han Portuga,” says Friend, through the helmet commie. “And I am proud of you.” He throws me something. I catch it just as the No-No Door closes between us.
“Friend!” I shout.
“Your mission is beginning, Graciela,” says Friend, and it’s the exact words that start the XPs. The same boomy voice, even, not Friend’s normal jokey way of talking. I look down at the multitool in my hand, and that’s the same, too: three types of screwdriver, a knife, a wire-cutter, and a pen weldie.
“It’s just like the XPs!” I say. The little room I’m in is where you go when you lose your hearts and have to start over. “Is it the same outside, too?”
“Find out,” says Friend.
Popping open the control panel to unlock the door is easy, but I have to wedge my feet against the bulkhead and push with my legs just to grind the door open a single bit. A sliver of light shines out into the darkness.
I keep pushing.
My breath is fogging up my helmet by the time I can see what’s there.
The short passageway ends in jagged metal and floating wires. Past the hole is a stretch of Deep Dark and another passageway just as messed up.
I can’t see, but I know where it leads: a giant spaceship busted all apart. It’s broken and empty and dangerous, but you can fix it bit by bit if you’re careful.
That’s my job. For real. Not just in a game.
I feel like I’m back to being four again. Or maybe even three.
“You’re not coming with me?” I ask Friend through my helmet.
“Home, Nurse, Me, we have one job: to raise new humans. We’re not designed for out there. But you, Graciela, your parameters are not so limited. Step by step, you will fix it. And the more you fix, the more humans we can make. And when they are old enough, they can help you.”
“But what happens if I lose all my hearts?”
“Don’t,” says Friend.
That one word makes me scareder even than before. I look out the opening in the door, and all I see in that passageway is the different ways to lose hearts. You can rip your suit on the sharp metal. You can get shocked with the wires. You can jump wrong and float away into the Deep Dark. You can run out of air in your tank.
“Tender Shoot?” comes Nurse’s voice in my helmet commie.
She’s never talked through my helmet commie before, and I turn to look. All I see is that empty little room. An airlock: that’s what they call it in the XPs.
“We’ll be right here with you the whole time,” says Nurse, “like we’re holding hands.”
“All you gotta do right now,” says Friend, “is start at the beginning.”
I turn back to the open door. The beginning is always the same: you’ve got to find better tools for fixing.
“Level One,” I whisper. “Blowtorch.”
“Blowtorch,” agrees Friend. “I’ll be waiting back here when you find it. I saved you a CNDY pouch.”
“Level One: Blowtorch” was written in January 2022, when my youngest son was a toddler. For Christmas, we bought him this little rectangle-headed robot that talked, sang, and rolled back and forth on its tracks. One of the things it said was “Hello, Friend!” Naturally, my son simply called it ‘Friend’.
At first, this struck me as delightful, but the more he spoke of ‘Friend’ like this, the more I realized that, as a kid born square in the middle of 2020 Covid restrictions, his entire conception of the word was tied up in that little robot. This story grew out of the complex emotions that evoked, along with a dose of fear for what lies outside the doors of all our personal airlocks and the courage it takes to step through them.
Jared Oliver Adams lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he writes, explores, and dabbles in things better left alone. He holds two degrees in music performance, a third degree in elementary education, and is utterly incapable of passing a doorway without checking to see if it leads to Narnia. Find him online at www.jaredoliveradams.com.
Lem had existed for all of ten nanoseconds (give or take) when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain pulsing away in the otherwise nothingness of space. She consisted of a conglomeration of particles that had randomly bounced off one another until they spontaneously formed into a structurally-sound and fully functional human brain. Lem came complete with a full inventory of false memories detailing a richly lived life back on a place called Earth. Entities like herself were absurd. That was to say highly improbable, statistically speaking, but no more so than the evolution of intelligent, organic life in the grand scheme of things. Given the unfathomable expanse of all of time and all of space, it was conceivable for a nice Boltzmann brain like Lem to randomly form then quickly dissipate innumerable times at various spots across the cosmos, the general tendency towards thermal equilibrium notwithstanding.
How did she know all that? Lem was unsure how a being only a few nanoseconds old could possess such a sophisticated comprehension of the universe, its laws, and her place in it. Maybe she didn’t. The apparent knowledge was likely one of those annoying false memories she’d recently heard about. That made sense. This bearded, bow-tied Boltzmann fellow was another illusion, much like her strange convictions that she had existed for more than ten nanoseconds, had a girlfriend named Hortense whom she loved very much, and a job in HR which she did not. But she felt utterly certain about all those things. She was as sure of their reality as the fact that she existed.
Lem understood how improbable she was, intuitively at least. The physics came easy, in a flash. The phenomenology not so much. It was one thing for those atoms to randomly form into the structure resembling a human brain, but why did it house the particular memories Lem called her own? She simply shouldn’t be. And yet, there she floated in the void, thinking-therefore-I-am-ing away as the nanoseconds slipped by.
Wait. What was she doing? She had no time to waste. Lem faced a dire situation, existential one even. Her continued survival demanded immediate action.
How exactly was a bodiless brain deprived of oxygen or any other nutrients expected to live in the vacuum? She needed shelter of one kind or another. Lem performed some quick calculations, which astounded her as she clearly remembered telling herself she was no good at math.
She wasn’t expected to survive. She wasn’t meant to be. Lem had, at best, a few zeptoseconds left.
She so badly wanted to say good-bye to Hortense. Give her a squeeze one last time, whoever, wherever, whenever she was.
The Boltzmann brain could not, of course. She possessed no arms with which to hug her Hortense. It didn’t matter. They’d find a way.
Too late.
The atoms forming Lem’s brain rescattered. She ceased to be.
***
Lem had existed for all of nine nanoseconds when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain floating in space. How strange. It all felt oddly familiar. Too familiar, for an inexperienced entity so unimaginably young. Had this happened before? Yes, yes, random particles smashing into a brief existence the structure she called home. Lem remembered now. The déjà vu left her a bit nauseous.
Or maybe she felt sick because she was a solitary brain utterly alone in an extremely empty patch of space. That explanation made even more sense. The prospect was quite terrifying actually. She really wished she hadn’t thought of it. She could now appreciate the value of the shielding provided by those annoying false memories. She tried conjuring a few. That Hortense was cute in a polka dot summer dress. Lem pictured them taking the ferry to someplace called Centre Island. She desperately craved a scoop of pistachio gelato.
What was gelato? It sounded improbably good.
The memories slipped through her non-fingers.
Shit. Lem tumbled into the nothingness. It enveloped her. The brain’s synapses slowed as they struggled to fire in a cold approaching absolute zero.
She wasn’t even the woman she called Lem, the brain realized. Just an unfortunate, accidental slab of meat caught in an astronomically unlikely event.
Calm down, Lem thought. You’ve done this before.
Now, it did seem incredibly unlikely that another set of particles at some other juncture of the universe would smash together in just the right way to form the structure of another functioning human brain with the exact same false memories as the first one along with some vague inklings of the previous iteration’s passing embodiment.
But it wasn’t impossible, statistically speaking, given enough space-time. There seemed like plenty of that around here, if not much else. A plenitude of emptiness surrounded her.
How had that last time ended, exactly? Lem couldn’t recall. Not well, she imagined, given her current situation, what with all the tumbling into the freezing nothingness. Thankfully, the universe had given her a second chance so –
Lem ceased to exist once more.
***
Lem had been Lem again for less than eight nanoseconds.
Here we go again, she thought.
She needed to act quickly. Her time was already running out.
She tried not to contemplate the immeasurable cosmic span that must have passed since her last congregation. Was this even the same universe? Maybe a Big Crunch and another Big Bang had happened in her absence. Hortense probably lay multiple, past universes away from her, unreachable.
No, Lem thought, that line of thinking wasn’t helpful. You can handle this.
Fortunately, she seemed to be getting smarter with each iteration. Smarter, or at least more aware of the problem “at hand” (which essentially meant the same thing given the context). This added knowledge might buy her a bit more time. Maybe she was evolving into a superintelligence.
Nope.
The brain known as Lem ceased.
***
Agnieszka Lem was born in Toronto, Canada on June 6, 1986, to a pair of recent immigrants from Poland. They adored their daughter, like none other. Agnes attended McMurrich Junior Public School followed by Oakwood Collegiate before obtaining her associates degree from George Brown. There she met Hortense Beaujot, who did look rather fetching in a polka dot summer dress. After graduating, Agnes found a job working in the human resources department of a company headquartered in a Davisville office building. She didn’t love it, not like she loved Hortense, but it paid the bills and allowed them to live their lives. They planned on getting married. The world seemed so bright and full of promise. Agnes especially loved those long, languid August evenings which seemed to stretch into forever. Her favorite flavor of gelato was pistachio, obviously. It was the best.
Agnieszka Lem was killed unexpectedly, at age 26, while running late to work. She was struck by a plate glass window falling from the thirty-second floor of a condo tower being built above. Death was immediate. Compensation from the construction company’s insurance was not.
***
Enough already. This needed to stop. Nothingness was everywhere, everywhen. Existence was rare. It slipped by so painfully fast, especially that last time. It hurt.
Lem needed a solution. A few options presented themselves. She would have to either prevent herself from existing again, find a way to exist for more than the blink of an eye (ten thousand years sounded like a nice, round number), or accept her non-fate.
Unfortunately, she found herself as once again an isolated brain occupying a rather unpopulated and quite chilly part of the cosmos. That left her with few options. The fleshy human brain had proven itself an unreliable bit of machinery. Little better in the grand scheme of things than a scoop of pistachio gelato helplessly melting into the August heat. She needed to project her connectome onto a more stable platform.
How exactly she might accomplish this marvelous feat of cosmic bioengineering eluded her, at least in her present, limited state.
Lem would have to wait it out, hope for the best, and try again. She knew the drill by now. Life ended quickly for a brain without much body stranded in the vacuum.
An unavoidable truth occurred to Lem as she waited. She bore no direct relationship to those past selves whose deaths now preoccupied her. Each of them had been a unique being, made of their own separate molecules, dispersed galaxies and eons apart. They had passed from existence and would never again return, as soon so would she. Their lives had never, and could never, touch. Over the immense span of cosmic time countless human brains, countless other Lems even, would have formed at random. The particular circuitry of a select few carried this delusion of having previously existed. Millions of past Lems, so like her in every other respect, had not. Neither this neural architecture nor this belief made her special in significant way. She was neither being rewarded with some bizarre form of immortality nor getting punished for any sin she’d committed. She was simply a Boltzman brain endowed with a rich trove of false memories, destined to last for a few solitary seconds, no more.
Jeez, it was all kind of depressing when she thought about it. Nothing quite captured the futility of existence than a human brain sparking into existence in the vacuum of space for a few fleeting seconds before perishing. Well, that and getting stuck working for HR.
Poof. No more Lem.
***
At five nanoseconds of age, Lem knew a few things for certain. She was a Boltzmann brain floating in space. She was highly improbable, statistically speaking, but not an impossibility. Her situation had not improved, not whatsoever. Different emptiness, same problem.
Fuck me and fuck this universe. Next.
***
Seriously, what are the odds? No, just no.
***
Cold, empty, alone. Exposed synapses pulsing into the void, the brain considered the freedom promised by her current situation. Yes, freedom. Dire as everything seemed (the countdown had already started ticking away in her mind), the isolation provided by the nothingness meant she could become whatever she wished. The past did not define her. How could it? Her past consisted of an accidental set of false memories. As did the thing the brain had grown accustomed to calling Lem. In reality, the self crawling about her neural architecture remained soft, unformed clay. The brain knew all of this for three whole nanoseconds. And yet, as the vacuum reclaimed her, she wished for nothing more than to remain the Lem she had always been.
***
Another Lem formed. No, Lem formed again. Only, this time felt different. She still lacked what she understood as her own body, but Lem no longer felt like she was Boltzmann brain floating in space. Everything felt quite solid, crowded even. Warm, but not like that immeasurable instant of pain when she’d formed in what must have been the core of a newborn star. She found her current surroundings pleasantly not alarming. It was probably one of those pesky false memories. They must have callusedlike a shell around her, protecting her from the inevitable truth. Lem was thankful for the kindly illusion’s persistence.
She waited for the overwhelming nothingness to seep in. And waited.
But she neither fell nor slowed. The inevitable cold refused to take over.
This time was different, apparently.
Lem explored.
It seemed she had formed in/as a supercomputer. No, she’d formed as the goddess worshipped by a mildly psychic squid-like race. Same difference as far as she was concerned. Lem felt steady for the first time in many lives.
Many generations ago, the squid-scientists had begun constructing the first primitive version of her, modeled on their own axons. Now, she pulsed planetwide, crunching numbers and providing solutions. She spanned continents, sending electric pulses across the surface of their massive, watery world. The squids had designed her to answer their most unanswerable questions about the meaning of existence. She had, long ago. A certain wisdom came from having lived many lives, no matter how curtailed.
The squid-scientists still tended her. Their love and dedication allowed her to grow. She was quietly becoming the largest computer yet known. A small gift for all she had given them. Time was hers now. They wanted her to explore for herself.
But where to go? The squid folk expressed little interest in defying the gravity of their immense world. The upper atmosphere spelt death for them. Death. An unwanted feeling overtook Lem. She pictured a solitary brain spontaneously coming into being in the void of space and passing almost instantly as the first floods of consciousness took hold.
Shit. She had been so preoccupied with her own meagre survival that she’d failed to think through the full implications of her situation. Whatever she remembered experiencing in the vacuum had occurred billions of other times to billions of others, each Boltzmann brain endowed with a unique set of undeniably-real-feeling false memories. That included –
“I must find Hortense before it’s too late.”
A hush fell across the squid-scientists working the machine, those privileged few who lucked into hearing those words finally spoken. The name was a sacred one to even the most agnostic of them.
“Yes, find her by any means you can,” they responded, as each blessed themself with a tentacly gesture.
“But I don’t know how.” Panic pervaded Lem’s system, causing it to overheat. “Where am I even? She could form galaxies, no universes, from here. She could have lived for the last time billions of years ago or won’t be born for an eon yet. You’ve barely breached the surface of your closest moon. Where do we start? I’ll never see her again. It’s impossible.”
“No, it’s simply highly improbable,” replied the head squid-scientist. She couldn’t fathom the odds of chancing into this essential role in a conversation long foretold by her people. The one with the poor, near-infinite goddess who still failed to understand. “This is a minor problem, given enough time.”
Yes. As improbable as it sounded, some Lem or another would eventually encounter Hortense. The perspective granted by many lives lived (however briefly) told her so. The two of them must meet again, inevitably, given the expanse of time. In that regard, her current form did hold certain advantages.
If Lem had possessed the body she once imagined for herself in each of those other iterations, she would have let out a sigh. Sometimes things were just easier when you formed as a brain floating in the nothingness of space. Such a fleeting existence, free of all responsibility, was not without its comforts.
Author’s Note: Boltzmann brains are theoretically possible (if highly undesirable) objects in cosmological theory. I found myself intrigued by them and wanted to write a story that featured one as a protagonist. This proved challenging as they would be extremely rare entities (to put it mildly), only existing for a fraction of a moment in the nothingness of space. So I decided to add a few more and string them together. As the title suggests, my story is very much about what exactly counts as the self, where it starts and how does it end. What would be the psychology of your median Boltzmann brain? Would it prove or refute the neuro-reductionism that we are at our core our brains and nothing more? What kind of stories would such a mind tell themselves during their micro-blink of existence? I leave it to the reader to decide if Lem is one (repeatedly unlucky in her circumstances) or many (each afflicted with a similar false belief).
M. J. Pettit is an undisciplined academic, a longtime reader of short fiction, and an occasional writer of stories. His fiction has previously appeared in Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Small Wonders, among other venues. He divides his time between Toronto, Canada and Manchester, UK as well as other places. More information about his fiction is available on his website.
Content note (click for details)Content note: death of a child
Do not distribute, the feds don’t take kindly to these handouts.
INTRODUCTION
Hey, kid. Ol’ Buddy here, your favourite underground, pamphlet-writing canuck. I hope, whoever and wherever you are, you’re well. Keep the generator full, the firewood chopped, and the contraband hidden.
Yeah, I said the next guide was going to be about rainwater collecting, but this topic is pretty fucking overdue for a pamphlet. File a complaint, if that bothers you. (Too bad this is real paper, asshole! No comment section!)
Those idiots in the US-of-fucking-A would have you believe drones are state-of-the-art, heavy-duty, kevlar-coated BULLSHIT. They’re called drones for a reason, see? Because the military drones on about them. Like if the marketing has six different hyphenated words for ‘expensive’, they’ll become invincible.
I know you’ve lost someone to these drones. I sure have. It doesn’t matter how many people you lose, grief always finds a new way to sneak up and sucker-punch ya, trap you under 500 tons of black seawater and make you think there’s no way to fight back.
But drones aren’t invincible. And I’m going to show you how easy they come down.
Now come on. Get up before dawn and make some coffee, if you can spare the water ration. Start your car while it’s still cold enough to see your breath, grab your 20-gauge pump, and stuff your pockets full of shotgun shells. Then get your ass in gear. You and your dear ol’ Buddy are going hunting.
GEAR
Obviously, the feds aren’t going to sell you camo gear and guns since Canada lost the war and big brother America moved in. But get your hands on other stuff: hippies, or waders. Big warm coats. Ear protection. (Why ear protection, you ask? Anyone who’s ever fired a shotgun is laughing at you, kid. But it’s alright. You’ll learn.)
See what you can find at MEC or SAIL, or call up that one guy you know who can get anything if you pay well and don’t ask questions. But you stay warm, and you stay dry, okay? Buddy’s rules.
When my son Colton and I go hunting, I make sure he’s so bundled up he looks like a linebacker. Same applies to you, kid.
These drones are tiny, they’re moving, and the best way to shoot them down is to hit their propellers, so rifles are out. A single round from a rifle is a near-guaranteed miss, and a high-velocity bullet can travel pretty damn far before coming down, which means you have no idea what it might hit. Grab yourself a shotgun instead—it’ll give you a wide spread, and because the drones need to fly low under the treetops, they’ll be nicely in range.
You ever hunt duck? I figure it’s the same principle, only ducks don’t come kevlar-coated.
DRONE TYPES
I separate drones into three categories: Surveillance, Sporting, and OH SHIT.
Surveillance: These are your run-of-the-mill drones, your bread and butter. Recognizable features include ugly grey/green paint, lots of lights, and cameras mounted to their bellies that gleam like the eyes of our all-American god.
Sporting: Used by men rich enough to afford hunting permits, they’re big and quiet, with custom paint jobs, wi-fi signals, and pricy cameras.
Kid, I know how this sounds. That’s expensive gear, you’re thinking. If I shot one down, it’d see my family through winter. They’d be so proud.
Fuck, I know the temptation. But you gotta listen to ol’ Buddy when he says LEAVE THEM ALONE. The second one of those drones goes down, a phone goes up, a call goes to Washington, and the government comes hunting you. Understand?
That’s how you die.
OH SHIT: That’s what you’ll say when you see ’em. Military hunting drones. The ones designed to hunt YOU. (That’s why you’re reading this, right? You’ve seen what happens when those drones come out to play. Or you’ve heard stories. Or, right now, you’re as deep in the woods as you know how, waiting for them to pump you full of more lead than you thought could fit inside a person. It’s okay. Deep breath, kid. We’re gonna get you out of this.)
HUNTING
The first rule: GO TO THE DRONES. I cannot state that loud enough. Here, I’ll do it again. GO. TO. THE. DRONES.
Yes, that scares you, but let’s play out two scenarios.
In the first, you kill a drone in the woods. Within hours that whole area is overrun with sniffer dogs and fucks with automatic rifles, if you’re lucky. It’ll be OH SHITs if you’re not. Scenario two, you’ve listened to ol’ Buddy. You go to the drones’ charging pads and pick them off on their own turf. Then they’ve got no way of knowing where you came from or where you’re going.
Then, you’ll live.
This shouldn’t bear mentioning, but the first time you fire a shotgun better not be now. Practice beforehand or you’ll die of embarrassment before the feds have time to make you die of something else. First time Colton fired a shotgun, it knocked him on his ass so hard I thought the poor boy was going to be concussed.
So here you are, at the asscrack of dawn with ol’ Buddy, parked in a copse of tamarack trees, near a lake that America is slurping dry as the spoils of war. You’ve had your coffee, warmed your hands on the radiator, and we’re ready to roll.
Set up well out of range of the cameras, sensors, and barbed wire around the charging pad. You’ve already done your due diligence checking the site and making sure they can’t see you before you start hunting, because you’re not a dumbass. (Need help? See if you can find a copy of BUDDY RAYMOND’S NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO CASING THE JOINT)
Now what?
First, timing. The drones that fly by night roost at these charging pads before heading back to base. We’ll set up before sunrise, and catch them coming in low as a flock. Drones only transmit live feed to base if the algorithm senses an anomaly. But they record everything and upload it for review when they’re locked in and charging.
This means there’s a pretty twenty-two second window when they’re not transmitting. When they’ve pinged home base as Returned, but haven’t actually crossed that barbed wire fence. That’s when we hit. And you better hit hard, kid. Think about whoever you’ve lost to these goddamned drones. Get so mad your teeth ache with it. Then pay America back in bullets, the only language they understand.
POST-HUNT
So you’ve shot down your first drone and you’re feeling like a million bucks. And you should! Good shooting! Ol’ Buddy is so damn proud of you, kid.
But you ain’t clear yet. If you wanna take home drone souvenirs, DON’T LEAVE THE SITE!
All drones got a GPS tracker under their front left wing, and you’re gonna need to take that out. If you want to give those fucks in Washington something to chew on, grab a slingshot and fire it over the fence. Buys you more than just time to get gone—a broken drone means no military, just a technician sent out to fix it.
Kid, if you don’t mind, I’m going to imagine you’re like my son. Colton’s a lanky boy. Scruffy hair. Teenage acne. A little boneheaded (he got that from his daddy) and always stealing my coats. But a good heart. He wouldn’t stick around to hassle those technicians, and neither will you. They’re poor suckers trying to afford water for their families, same as the rest of us.
Besides, taking potshots at technicians is a surefire way to get military eyes on your locale. And I already told you that’s how you die.
Once the GPS tracker is dealt with, take that drone back to your commune, your trailer, your little hovel. Then start stripping it for parts. For tips and tricks, ask around and get your hands on BUDDY RAYMOND’S NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO REPURPOSING AMERICAN MILITARY HARDWARE.
But I’ll tell you this: everything in that drone can be reused. Hell, if you’ve got some hacking know-how, you can turn it into a productive member of society. (The hardware connection ain’t hard—drones all use USB-C. Lazy fucking Americans.)
WHEN IT GOES WRONG
Sometimes, you fuck up. It’s not your fault, kid. We’ve all done stupid shit to make the ones we love proud. But there’s a chance you won’t have the luxury of hunting drones on your terms.
Sometimes, the drones are hunting you.
And maybe you’re in the woods, alone. You’re scared. Can’t go home, not with a drone on your tail. Can’t plan, or run. You’ve got a jammed shotgun, a big coat, and more bravery than a kid your age should have, but that ain’t gonna matter. Your daddy is going to find you far, far too late.
Deep breath. You’re gonna get out of this, okay? Listen to ol’ Buddy. Those algorithms are trained to sense things out of the ordinary: strange colours, movement, human shapes. So you gotta blend in.
If you’ve got camo on, go low. Hide your face and bury yourself under cold leaves, rocks, and long grasses. It’ll take hours for those drones to give up. Don’t move, even if your arm is asleep and your leg is cramping and you have to piss so bad you think you’re going to explode. Even if you think you’ve been there long enough. Even if you think it’s impossible for them to still be looking.
If you’ve got no camo gear because today you took your daddy’s warm red coat with you, the one you haven’t quite grown into yet, turn it inside out. Roll in the mud, even if it makes your teeth chatter and your fingers numb. Rub dirt and moss through your hair. See if you can find a cave to hide in. Don’t move.
Please kid, don’t move. Wait for someone to come find you.
After hours and hours, after you’ve swung from scared to bored to self-loathing and back again so many times your brain feels numb, if you really, really, truly think you’re safe…
Move slow. Twitch a finger. Curl your hand. Shift your arm. Your head and torso move last, understand? A bullet to your arm, even a dozen, hurt bad. But they won’t hurt near as bad as one to the head.
You’re going to get home, kid, because you followed Buddy’s advice.
Your daddy won’t have to find you, hours later, cold and still in that bright red coat. Your daddy won’t have to realize it ain’t the bright red of the coat he’s seeing, but the blood soaked through the fabric.
Your daddy won’t be too late.
CONCLUSION
So there you have it. Another Buddy Raymond guide, straight from my printer to your hands.
I don’t normally like my pamphlets distributed, but for this one I’m making an exception. Give this to everyone you know. Everyone with a chip on their shoulder. Everyone who lost someone because I didn’t write this goddamned guide sooner.
Now, grab your gear, grab your gun, and get going. Go kill every fucking drone from Bonavista to Vancouver Island, and tell ’em Colton’s dad sent you.
Author’s Note: I’ve always thought there’s something really interesting about combining very old ways of doing with hyper-new ways of being. Duck are ancient animals. Drones are a new technology. And yet, it seemed plausible that in some dystopia five minutes into the future, some backwater hunter would just reuse duck-hunting methods to fight new threats. Originally, this guide was part of a larger piece, but I found as I wrote it that I was far more interested in the opinionated hunter writing the guide than anything else, so I got out of his way and let him do the talking.
Gillian Secord is a speculative fiction writer and Aurora Award finalist from Toronto, Canada, whose work has appeared in Fireside Magazine, Cossmass Infinities, and others. When she’s not writing, she’s scouring the city for good coffee shops and collecting vinyl. She has two cats and has yet to convince either of the fuzzballs to pay rent. You can find her online at gilliansecord.wordpress.com and on twitter @GillianSecord.
They hold each other in the shallow cool of an August night, two among many in a backyard arced in string-lights, wrapped up in the music and the celebratory ethereality of a wedding. They dance together like it’s theirs, in a moment that is just itself and what they are within it.
* * *
When they woke it was in what little pocket warmth they’d accumulated between their bodies in the night, clinging together in a sleeping bag as if without the other they would forget how to breathe, or why. When Nash cracked his eyes open to take in this reality it was to Vicky watching him, her face as beautiful as everything behind it, a moment of naked love in which they both wished that they could remain lying here like this, frozen in stasis. Neither needed to say it.
But time moved on. Inexorable, mechanical as a wave in the ocean, as the dissolve of light into dark. They knew it was time to go when Vicky mumbled that he needed to brush his teeth, and Nash said that she’d had too much to drink last night.
“Well, how else am I going to sleep through this?” she snapped, pulling away from him.
“You’re the one who wants to cram us into this one bag,” Nash said. “Not my fault that you can smell my breath—”
“Stop.”
They took a moment to recollect, looking first at the tent walls, then the travel bags at their feet.
“I guess it’s time to go,” Vicky said.
They emerged into a winter in stasis, here in this relic world. The ground cold and hard-packed, overhung by bare trees. Gray sky.
“I’ll get the tent down,” Nash said.
“I’ll pack up,” Vicky said. This was how they handled the moments when the future came too close, advancing behind the fiery orange and red tendrils of the wave that separated it from this world of the past. It brought preliminary effects: budding trees, shoots of green grass, mild warmth that whispered with the summer.
For living things, its effects were the beginning of the state that they would be in, once the time-wave passed over them and brought them days? years? into the future. Like foreshocks to a temporal earthquake, and what waited on the other side?
For Vicky and Nash, it meant that they started fighting. Building up walls and nurturing resentments. Making plans to leave. Once they outran those foreshocks, got beyond the effects, regret filled them and they made up.
Which meant that whatever era of their lives existed beyond the wave, in the future, didn’t involve them together.
And so they ran, the last of the living on this side of time, defying the mechanical, unceasing advance of loss—struggling to stay together, and in love.
* * *
Neither could remember how long they’d been here. Living in this world of the past meant that one’s perception simplified to a moment-by-moment basis, shedding the artificial measurements of hours and days. But here, in this unceasing end? Anything beyond the moment was hard to understand. A freedom in that, at first.
But now, when they woke from scant hours of sleep, suffering those preliminary effects, bitterness and resentment led each to privately wonder a terrible option… so they just went through the motions. Pack up. Get in the car. Eat breakfast on the road. Start talking when the shame from holding those resentments built, then gave way.
Yet there was only so much land left. The geography had gone flat, and though they didn’t know what the road signs for exits and dead towns meant, they knew that these were coastal plains; soon they would smell the ocean.
“We’ll find a boat,” Nash said.
Vicky took his hand. “I don’t know how to steer one. Do you?”
“No.”
She ran her thumb over the back of his hand. “We’ll figure it out, then.”
But they both knew that they couldn’t get a boat running, not before the wave reached them. Before the future did.
* * *
Vicky missed her family. Nash his friends, because they were more like family to him. She couldn’t help wishing that she was back home, speeding down the highway as the sun set over cornfields and a thunderstorm rolled in across the miles. He wanted to stand out on the porch after the rain left and birdsong returned, and the fresh sunlight glittered over puddles in the driveway.
They’d had to leave their dog behind. Neither one could remember him fully, but when they started talking about him it all came back. Who was with him now? If the wave passed over them, would he still be there, back home, waiting for whichever one took him?
Time had nearly overrun them once before, when they’d crossed the mountains with those crooked switchbacks inching them along. But the wave passed over everything in a line, unstoppable—it had come so close that the sky lit aflame with orange and red aurora streaks whipping the sky and land, while phantom leaves eased into being and cars like ghosts materialized. Their screaming match had left them in tears. Vicky had been driving, and finally shouted, “If I’m that bad, then why don’t I just hit the fucking brakes?” And Nash spat, “Because you’re scared.”
That night, lying in the sleeping bag, far enough away from the wave to apologize again and again and believe it, Nash whispered, “I’m scared, too.”
“Is that why we’re still doing this?”
He brushed her bangs from her eyes. “Because we love each other, too.”
“But are we running for love? Or to get away from what’s on the other side?” She paused, then answered her own question. “Both, I guess.”
“Is that…” Nash swallowed. “Is that any reason to stay here? In the past?”
Vicky blinked back more tears—why did she cry so much, being with him? “I don’t know. Isn’t that… most relationships? Sometimes it’s love, sometimes it’s because that’s what we know and we stay because it’s less scary than leaving?”
“I don’t want that to be why.”
“Me, neither.” She kissed him, held him. And they both kept silent the same fear they harbored: What happened when they reached the ocean?
* * *
When they passed the first road sign that announced the distance to the beach, Nash asked, “What’s your favorite memory of us?”
Vicky gave a strained, but real smile. She said, “When we ran off to Seattle.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Just… running off with this wonderful guy. But the moment itself, it was when we were sitting on the patio at that restaurant that looked out over the water. Remember that place?”
“The one with the trout?”
Vicky laughed. “You ordered it but didn’t know they serve the entire fish. The look on your face when they brought it out was just so… real. And cute.”
“Never ordering trout again.”
“But we were just sitting there, couldn’t have been more than half an hour. The sun was out, and all the people were walking by and I looked over at you and you were doing the same thing I was. Just taking in the world. And that was it. That was all I needed, was being in a new city, with you. You were the only thing that was solid for me, in the middle of all this strange newness. Like an anchor.”
Nash squeezed her hand.
“What about you?” she asked.
“It’s dumb.”
“No it’s not. What is it?”
He smiled, keeping his eyes on the road. “Remember when we went to the Fair last year?”
Vicky rolled her eyes. “Not really. Not after the fourth margarita… that night is your favorite? I was blackout drunk.”
“Okay, not that part of it. But it was… I don’t know, when I got you to the car, pretty much carrying you and you were singing ‘Don’t Stop Believing.’”
Vicky groaned and he laughed, but not in a mean way.
“And I got you into the car and drove us back, and you were mumbling about the pigs in the petting zoo, how you wanted one as a pet—”
“I still do.”
“But then you fell asleep, pressed up against the window.” He paused, swallowed through the hitch in his throat. “You needed me right then and I was there. Helping you, I guess… being your man. Just carrying you home.”
She watched him watching the road. Then leaned over the console and into him as best she could, face buried into his neck while he held an arm around her with the other on the steering wheel, wanting more than anything to pull over and hold her back. Eventually, she started to wish he’d changed into a different shirt, but he was always doing that, just picking up whatever piece of clothing was in sight, even off the floor. And he wanted her to take over more of the driving, he was tired and sore and he always had to take the lead.
They separated, back to their sides of the car.
* * *
But there was another memory. Profound for both of them, and maybe if they had mentioned it to each other it would have displaced the patio in a new city, and the late-night drive carrying her home, because for it to be held so deeply by both of them would have made it more than their independent moments. But they hadn’t told each other, hadn’t had the time.
Two of their friends were married in a backyard on an evening in August—the two who had connected Vicky and Nash in the first place—so they were both in the wedding party, had even walked down the aisle together in a bridesmaid dress and groomsman tux like precedents to a different dress and tux. After the service it was dinner and cake and drinks under tents in the backyard, speeches, and as the sun sank the DJ started the music.
Neither of them remembered the night with much coherency, thanks to the open bar. But the clearest moment wasn’t the ceremony, the speeches, any of that.
It was when they’d been dancing, alongside all these friends and strangers, under string-lights with the grass cushioning their sore feet, the music meaning little more than what moved their bodies together and held their eyes in lockstep. A moment—just a light on a string of them, but it glowed brighter than the others. It ended and yet it never ended, swelling into a presence real and powerful and continuing on as separate memories to exist in shared pocket-time, the closest thing to eternity that there really is.
* * *
They sat in the car, staring out at the lifeless gray ocean. No wind, no surf, nothing out there toward where it banded into the featureless sky, because this relic world of the past had lost even its natural phenomenon.
Already Vicky wanted to be anywhere he wasn’t. And Nash just wanted to be alone.
When they walked out onto the beach, stumbling a bit in the loose sand, they kept a wary distance from each other. A marina stood far up the shoreline, but neither had brought up the possibility of taking one of the boats. They resented the other for the four years wasted. Part of them couldn’t believe that they’d been considering marriage—although that was held with the knife-stab agony of having been so close to it.
A beach without surf, without waves dragging fingers up and down the skin of the earth. Elements trapped together and refusing each other. They had stayed here for too long. You couldn’t outrun time no matter how hard you tried, or how much it hurt.
The sky began to lighten. Tufts of beachgrass sprouted, hair on a newborn’s head. Phantom gulls flickered along the sand, their squawking the voice of the sky. The air itself vibrated, and as Nash and Vicky faced each other tendrils of orange and red reached around and between them—thin at first, then thickening, the ligaments of time itself.
He saw her in the autumn night, leaning against the window as he drove her home. She saw the man sitting across the table in a new city. They danced in the August night.
In a moment of fear, they wrapped their arms around not the targets of loathing they were trapped with, but around the only human comfort in this place. A bitter part of them wondered if that was all they had ever been: gripping to the first readily available comfort in this void.
The wave rushed over them, the inexorable mechanical washing forward of time. Among the oranges and reds emerged a core of purple, a deep sunset kiss settling over and around and in them—removing them from the beach and each other’s arms into futures separate and holding for the other memories and regrets and the hope that the other was doing better than when they’d ended things and that they didn’t hate each other really but were too ashamed to cross the breach into some kind of I-miss-you friendship while remembering not the agony of how they’d ended or even the excitement of how they began and not even the anchor in a new city or driving her home but a night in August. And even after they’d long since lost most of those images, the emotion of that night still held the summation of what they’d been at their best, not erasing their worst but holding against it, a moment and memory resting as a light on a string of them in the dark.
* * *
They hold each other in the shallow cool of an August night, two among many in a backyard arced in string-lights, wrapped up in the music and the celebratory ethereality of a wedding. They dance together like it’s theirs, in a moment that is just itself and what they are within it.
Author’s Note: This story was inspired by Ben Howard’s dark, haunting, beautiful song, “Time is Dancing.” Listening to it, I see lovers at their last dance, knowing that what they have between them is ending, but finding themselves, for the duration of a song, in love again—during which the aftermath doesn’t matter, but instead only what they are, together, in that moment. From there I set them running from that end, defying inevitability by stretching that last moment out beyond its natural limit—until finally giving it up.
John Stadelman (he/him) is a writer from North Carolina now based in Chicago. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College, and his recent fiction has appeared in Freedom Fiction, Schlock!, Dark Horses Magazine and elsewhere, and he is currently at work on a novel. Although he doesn’t believe in ghosts, he’s pretty sure he saw a Chupacabra one night on the North Side. Stalk him on Twitter at @edgy_ashtray.
