Diabolical Plots is bidding a fond farewell to Kel Coleman, who is stepping down from their position on the editorial team to pursue rest, as well as other creative endeavors.
For those who don’t know, our working relationship with Kel started on the story side of things, when we had the opportunity to publish “A Study of Sage” in February 2021 (my first sale! – kel). Not long after, they joined the editorial team, resolving submissions for submission windows, helping to determine final acceptances, and editing stories for publication.
Kel also contributed to discussions about updating submission guidelines and publication policies, as well as reaching out to authors to establish working relationships. And they’ve been a big part of planning something I can’t talk about yet. We’re excited to see it come to fruition and we can’t wait to give them a shout-out when the time comes.
It has been a pleasure working with Kel, and I hope to have the opportunity to work with them again in the future. (the feeling is mutual! – kel)
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.
