Michelle smiled, exhausted, as her baby’s cry filled the hospital room. The lights above her were harsh and cold, and the sheets beneath her were tangled and scratchy, soaked in her sweat and stinking of iodine, but none of that mattered against such a beautiful sound. She heard it so rarely—just once a year.
“Congratulations, Mrs Bergeron,” said the midwife. “It’s a girl.”
“Oh, thank you so much! I’m ecstatic!” She looked over at Nathan, cradling baby Danielle face down in his strong arms. A Happiness Moderator stood by them, uniformed with the usual black suit and easy smile; he lined up a large needle at the base of Danielle’s skull and implanted the HappyChip with a swift movement. Danielle’s cries quieted, then turned to a happy giggle.
“You should be very proud,” said the midwife, smiling. “What number is she?”
“My 22nd!”
“Well, congratulations again. I look forward to seeing you next year for number 23.”
Highest Possible Mode
Raj stepped into the kitchen and the welcoming arms of Alejandro. The air was heavy with spice and the sizzle of frying pork, the promise of a celebratory dinner as only Ali could prepare.
“I knew you could do it,” whispered Ali, embracing him. “Team manager!”
This, more than the promotion, was what made Raj happy: that he had made Ali proud. Falling in love with him had made everything click for Raj, and he understood, at last, what it meant to call someone your other half: not just a casual joke, but an honest statement that I am not me without them. Seeing Ali’s pride made him swell. It meant more than anything.
A firm knock sounded at the door, and Raj all but floated down the hallway to open it.
Pain flared in his toes. Raj crumpled, grasping at his right foot. He looked up; a Happiness Moderator stood in the doorway, already filling out his worksheet on a tablet. The Moderator had stamped on Raj’s foot as soon as the door had opened, breaking two, maybe three toes by the feel of it.
“Why?” gasped Raj.
The Moderator didn’t look up from his monitoring tablet. “Your level of happiness had risen to be equal to a large number of other citizens, but was nonetheless lower than the current societal mode. As such, your happiness threatened to establish a lower level as the new mode, undermining government targets.”
“Couldn’t you have given me some flowers or something? Made me even happier and lifted me above the others?”
“Sorry sir,” said the Moderator. “Pain is easier to invoke, and longer lasting. Have a happy day!
Highest Possible Mean
Roger cackled as he switched the traffic lights to red again, having let only three cars through the intersection. He was watching the drivers on an array of video monitors that glowed in the dim control room, displaying an orchestra of impatience rendered in drumming fingers and revving engines.
“Sir,” said a Happiness Moderator, stepping up to the desk. “Please be careful not to cause too much irritation. As soon as their combined frustration outweighs your delight…”
Roger looked up, a manic, almost hysterical grin on his face. He hadn’t had this much fun in years! Lights go green… lights go red! Pedestrians cross now… and again… and again! But not for too long—got to make them run once they’re halfway across! He laughed uproariously.
“Never mind, sir,” said the Moderator, stepping away.
Smallest Possible Standard Deviation
Cecile clicked the plastic lid onto the latte and passed it across the counter with a smile. The businesswoman smiled back with the same easy contentment and stepped away into the chatter of the airport, merging seamlessly into the efficient flow of foot traffic.
A cry went up from the arrivals line: Delphine! Oh Delphine! Two silver-haired women ran towards each other and embraced, clinging to each other with a frantic longing, their shoulders shaking as they sobbed on each other’s shoulder.
Cecile’s eyes welled up. She suddenly missed Nicole desperately, a huge hollow of longing opening up beneath her heart. It had been two months now, and Cecile still had no idea when the Venezuelan dig would be completed and Nicole would be home again, curled up on the sofa with Cecile under blankets and cushions and Henri the cat purring between them, a shared bottle of merlot by candlelight…
Happiness trickled across Cecile’s body like warm water, flowing out from the base of her skull, dampening her sadness and leaving it as an academic awareness of loneliness to be acknowledged with a smile. The two women in arrivals broke apart, arms dropping to their sides and broad grins smoothing down to gentle smiles. The same gentle smile as Cecile. The same gentle smile as everyone. Easily-maintained, easily-controlled, for everyone everywhere, always.
Highest Possible Median
Moderator Laidlow looked up from her monitoring tablet into the crying man’s puffy eyes. He stood in his doorway, dressed in a grey, ratty dressing gown, his hair unkempt and face unshaven. His bottom lip wobbled as he explained.
“Honestly, I’ll be fine again in a couple of hours. It’s just—my cat died overnight, and I might be a little down now, but I’m getting over it, I promise!”
He danced a sad little jig in the sour morning light as if to demonstrate, but he only made it four beats before sagging in defeat.
It wouldn’t have mattered. The tablet had already confirmed his status: he was the saddest person in the local area, with the least chance of improving above the median before the end of the day, judging by his current emotional trajectory.
She nodded at Moderator Rence, who reluctantly drew his HappyTaser. Laidlow had noticed his increasing reticence through their recent duties, though she struggled to understand it. She took great pride and satisfaction in her work; in knowing that she was improving society. Rence’s mood was completely at odds with her own approach to the work.
Without ceremony, he pressed the HappyTaser to the man’s forehead and executed him. He stood for a moment as the body crumpled, jerking slightly with the electric discharge, then slowly lifted the Taser and examined it.
“Do you ever wonder,” he said, “if what we do actually helps? Does it fix anything, or are we just papering over cracks? Does our work merely hide society’s ills behind an artificially inflated number, not only doing nothing to help directly but actively preventing greater self-examination of the true causes of our problems? Does the work not, in fact, burrow under your skin and eat away at you in the cold hours of the night, leaving you filled only with doubts and a raw, jagged uncertainty? Having walked out of the darkness of ignorance and come to find the truth beneath the façade, I do not know as I will ever be truly happy again.”
Laidlow said nothing. She swiped about on her monitoring tablet, looking for the next unhappiest person in the vicinity now that this job had been completed.
Moderator David Rence said the display.
She raised her HappyTaser to his temple and executed him.
Well! she thought, smiling. That was efficient! What an excellent day!
Author’s Note: I can’t recall precisely what triggered the combination of utilitarianism and statistics in my mind—just the general everyday mush that is my brain, one supposes—but I never expected anyone else to find it funny. There’s not much more to be said for it than that, perhaps, except perhaps it shows the absurdity of taking any system to its logical extreme without constraint. I wonder if that will ever occur to the free market adherents selling off all the public infrastructure in Britain. Special thanks must go to Ric Crossman (@SquidFromSpace) for his statistical consultancy, in particular pointing out a far more efficient method for maintaining the optimum median value, an idea that will surely make him a hero come the revolution.
Matt Dovey is very tall, very English, and most likely drinking a cup of tea right now. He once got too happy after finding a packet of Golden Crunch Creams at the back of the cupboard, and has a scar on his arm where the Moderators intervened. He now lives in a quiet market town in rural England with his wife & three children, and despite being a writer he still hasn’t found the right words to fully express the delight he finds in this wonderful arrangement. His surname rhymes with “Dopey” but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. He’s an associate editor at PodCastle, a member of Codex and Villa Diodati, and has fiction out and forthcoming all over the place, including all four Escape Artists podcasts, Flash Fiction Online and Daily SF. You can keep up with it all at mattdovey.com, or follow along on Twitter and Facebook both as @mattdoveywriter.
Charlie Slawson sat alone in the transit station, watching a set of empty train tracks and wondering why the train was late. Truth be told, he hadn’t known until just then that temporal trains even could be late.
He looked around the underground station—its old, brick walls lined with gaudy digital displays, advertising exciting trips to next year, next century, and beyond—before noticing a man stepping onto the platform from a little door beside the tracks. He wore navy blue coveralls and a tall pair of work boots. His close-cropped, grey hair was half hidden beneath a faded baseball cap.
“Excuse me,” Charlie called. “Any idea when the train will arrive? I think it’s running late.”
The man stopped and frowned, then walked over to the bench. “You sure you’re in the right place, son? Which train are you waiting for?”
Charlie nodded and motioned to the marquee above the tracks. “Train to Wednesday. Just like it says.”
“Hmmph,” the old man grunted. “Wednesday’s never been one of our peak destinations. Especially not a Wednesday that’s just a few days away. What’d you want to do a thing like that for?”
Charlie turned the tablet in his hands so the old man could see the picture on the screen. That day, years ago, when Dad took him fishing out west of Cambridge. The first time he’d ever been to the train station.
Dad tried to keep the trip going every year after Charlie left home, but life got busy, then they drifted apart. Charlie had always assumed they’d have time to catch up later, but he would give anything to have that day back, now.
“Your father?” the man asked.
Charlie nodded. “His funeral is this Wednesday.” He thought of the tearful video message he’d received this morning from his mother, his siblings already bickering in the background over funeral venues and seating arrangements.
It was foolish, all of it. It would make no difference to Dad if the memorial dinner served chicken or beef, or if the service was held at the church on High Street or Main. What Dad would have appreciated was more time with his son, but Charlie hadn’t given him that. And no memorial, however perfectly it was planned, could do a thing about it.
More time at home would just mean more time to feel guilty. More awkward conversations with distant relatives, more photographs and memories, more reminders that Dad had always been there for him, but he hadn’t done the same.
“I loved my Dad,” Charlie said. “Even if I wasn’t the best at showing it. I wouldn’t miss his funeral for the world, but I’d just rather skip all the mess in between.”
The man nodded and fished a hand into his coveralls, coming up a moment later with a small, silver pocket watch. Inscribed on its cover was the looping infinity symbol of the Temporal Transportation Administration.
The man opened the watch and tilted it so Charlie could see. Dials and arms littered the watch face, twisting together in an intricate dance that Charlie struggled to make heads or tails of. The man tapped the glass faceplate and made a sound which fell somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh.
“Well would you look at that,” he said. “Seems you’re right. Train should’ve been here at least thirty seconds ago.”
“Is that normal?” Charlie asked.
“Nah. But it ain’t unheard of either.” The old man bit his lip. “These tunnels have been around almost as long as I have. Every once in a while the track is bound to run a little slow.”
Charlie looked down at the screen in his hands and sighed. “Okay. Any idea how much longer it’ll be?”
“Doesn’t work like that.” The old man shook his head. “A little hiccup on the other end might mean just a few extra minutes here, or it could mean a few days, or more. No way to tell without heading down the tracks and finding where the train is stuck.”
“Christ,” Charlie mumbled, staring down into the empty tunnel at the end of the station. “Is that safe?”
The old man shrugged. “Life ain’t safe. But there’s no reason it should be especially dangerous, provided we’re careful.” He turned and started to walk towards the tracks.
“We?” Charlie asked.
“Course.” The old man climbed down onto the railway and motioned for Charlie to follow. “Any extra delays stack up real fast down the line, so once we get her going again, the train won’t stop until the next station. You’ll have to board wherever we find her.”
“You’re joking,” Charlie muttered, glancing down at his dress slacks and new oxford shoes, then at the puddles and mud waiting for him beside the tracks.
Then he thought of his father, and the nightmare the next two days would be without him. He grabbed his briefcase and jacket and hopped over the edge of the platform.
*
Charlie tiptoed along the rail line, as close to the man and his flashlight as he could manage. Above their heads, aging brickwork dripped water and something much darker in thick, black droplets that clung to the floor.
“You sure it’s safe to be in here?” Charlie asked. “These walls don’t look like they’re holding up so well.”
The old man grunted in agreement. “Been around a long time. It’s a wonder they’ve held up as long as they have.”
Somehow, that didn’t comfort Charlie. “Why hasn’t anyone bothered to replace them?”
“Ha!” The old man laughed, then turned back to face him. “When are you from, son?”
“When?” Charlie asked, shielding his eyes from the beam of the flashlight. “Don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“Course you don’t,” the old man replied. “Because you don’t remember when they put these things in.” He patted the brick wall with obvious affection, then turned down the tunnel and started to walk again. “It ain’t just something you can go and replace. Takes a lot of time, and a lot of lives to dig a set of tunnels through spacetime. To pull the two apart so that you can move through one by moving through the other. It also took a lot of problems to make men and women willing to take that risk. Problems that you couldn’t just hop on a train and skip.”
Charlie grimaced. He wasn’t skipping the problem, just the mess. “So how does this work?” he asked, hoping to change the subject. “Aren’t we traveling back in time?”
The man laughed again, like Charlie was a child. “Course not. Trains can only go forward and so can we. Can walk down the tunnel as long as you want, but you’ll never reach a previous station.”
“And what if you managed to get outside the tunnel?”
“Wouldn’t want to do that.” The man pointed his flashlight at a pool of ink-black liquid. “The tunnel’s old enough here that some of the outside’s dripping through. All you’d find out there is a big sea of black.”
“Unless you found another tunnel?” Charlie asked.
The old man shrugged. “Suppose so, but you wouldn’t last that long. Just the tunnels and trains that can survive in the void.”
As they walked down the tracks, the dripping grew more frequent and louder, until the darkness spilled from the walls in neat little rivulets.
“Careful now,” the old man muttered. “Better keep your feet on the tracks and avoid them puddles altogether.”
“Otherwise?” Charlie asked.
The man’s voice was stern for the first time since they’d met. “Otherwise I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”
*
The train was near wrecked when they finally found her. That much was clear the moment the old man’s flashlight beam fell onto her engine’s crumpled exterior.
“Well that doesn’t look good,” Charlie managed to mutter.
The man shook his head and wandered closer to the engine. He pointed his flashlight down onto the ground, stepping carefully around the small, black stream which poured from the brickwork where the train had collided with the wall. The engine was lodged halfway through the wall itself, the only thing plugging a massive hole to the void.
The old man crouched beside the damaged tunnel and ran his hand along the bowing stone. Little waterfalls of thick, black liquid flowed from the brick around the sides of the train, pooling into a narrow brook which ran both ways along the tracks.
“Well?” Charlie asked. “What do you think?”
The old man grimaced. “I think we’ve got a big problem to deal with.”
Charlie looked at the line of train cars behind him. Aside from the engine, the rest of the train was largely undamaged. Passengers milled about inside, uninjured, pressing their faces up against the small, dark windows. A woman in a floral dress and an ancient-looking hat leaned her head out of one of the passenger car doors and began to climb down the emergency ladder. A young, mustachioed man in a charcoal-grey suit followed closely behind.
“The train doesn’t seem so bad to me,” Charlie said. “Just needs a new engine, probably.”
The old man nodded, then noticed the couple exiting the train. He wagged his finger like a grandfather scolding a pair of children. “And what exactly do you think you’re doing?” he called.
A guilty smile crossed the woman’s face. “Just
coming to have a look. Maybe see if we could fix whatever’s the matter.”
The old man sighed and dipped a finger into one
of the pools of black. The liquid crawled quickly up his hand, until he
withdrew it from the puddle. He held his arm in the air a moment before pressing
it against the edge of the train. The blank, dark space where his hand had been
simply passed through the metal as if nothing was there.
He fixed the couple with a glare. “And what exactly are you going to do about that?”
The woman’s smile vanished and she mumbled a
half-hearted reply.
“Exactly,” he replied. “Now you two get back inside and close that door, and let the experts handle this.”
Charlie chuckled. He certainly didn’t feel like an expert.
The old man frowned at him, then pulled a small, silver rag from his coveralls and wiped his hand clean. The black which had coated his palms seemed to simply fade into the fabric. “It ain’t the train that I’m worried about. This wall gives any further and the whole tunnel will be swimming in the black. Station too. Maybe the next station down the line. Nothing to stop it moving forward once it reaches that point.”
“Christ,” Charlie muttered. “What can we do about it? I imagine there’s someone that we’ll have to call?”
The old man glanced at his pocket watch. “No time for that. It’d take ‘em at least as long as it took us to get down here. But we can start by getting this engine out of the way.”
“What?” Charlie asked, feeling the knot in his stomach tighten at the idea. “The engine is the only thing plugging the hole. If we pull the plug, the entire tunnel will flood.”
The old man shook his head. “Don’t work like that, kid. The tunnel isn’t any happier about it being broken than we are. Given the chance, the hole would seal itself right up. As is, the train’s the only thing keeping it open.”
He pointed at the spiderwork cracks running through the tunnel wall. “It’s like a knife in a wound. Might bleed worse for a minute when we pull it out, but the longer it’s in there, the more damage it does.”
The cracks seemed to grow even in the short time the man spoke, new drips and defects popping up around them. “Well that’s easy then,” Charlie replied. “We just put the train in reverse and pull the engine out.”
“Mmhmm,” the man replied. “Provided she’s still working.”
*
Charlie sat in front of the train’s aging control board, horrified that humans had ever trusted their safety to technology so primitive. Although digital networks had replaced the engineers running the rails decades ago, the engines were built in a time long before then and still sported a panel of manual backups, littered with dials, levers, and other relics of the past. Charlie glanced over his shoulder at a small, dim screen that showed a live feed of the passenger cars. Come to think of it, most of the train’s passengers were relics as well.
Out the cabin’s small side window, the old man stared at Charlie and gave him two thumbs up. He’d stayed outside to make sure the hole sealed shut, his hands full of minor patching equipment which Charlie was entirely sure would be insufficient if actually needed.
Initially, he thought he’d gotten the better end of the deal. But now that he was inside the engine room, with only inches of glass separating him from the horrible emptiness which stared back through the front windshield, he wasn’t so certain. The darkness in front of him swirled and writhed like a pile of living shadow, feeling and squirming its way towards the cracks in the tunnel wall. Charlie couldn’t see it, but he felt it. Felt it the same way he felt this might not end well. But what choice did he have?
He could climb back outside the engine and tell the man he’d had enough. Walk straight to the station and wait out the rest of a painful week at Mom’s. That wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be tearful and frustrating, but certainly not deadly.
But it had taken nearly an hour to walk this far down the tunnel, and there were no guarantees the wall would hold long enough for him to get back. Besides, if the man was right, and a spill on this end of the track could creep into the future, who was to say he’d make it to the funeral at all?
At the end of the day, those thoughts didn’t matter. The only one that mattered was of Dad, standing on the train platform all those years ago, bending over to pick up a piece of crumpled paper from beside the trash can.
“Never walk past a mistake, Charlie,” he’d said, his quiet, certain voice rising over the sound of the station’s bustle. “Not when it’s in your power to fix.”
Dad had lived his life by those words, and Charlie would be damned if he couldn’t live up to them, especially today. It was the least he could do.
“Alright, Dad,” he muttered, staring down at the large, red lever on the control panel. He glanced out the window and gave the man a thumbs up in return, then threw the lever into reverse.
Behind him, the engine whirred to life, rumbling and shaking as it struggled to throw the massive weight of the train backwards. Charlie gripped his seat and stared out the window at the man beside the tracks, but the train didn’t move.
The man shouted something that Charlie couldn’t hear, but he knew what it must mean by the waving of the man’s arms. Turn the engine power up. Charlie nodded and spun one of the dials to full.
The knot in his stomach tightened even further as he felt the train start to shift backwards. Its metal walls screeched and scraped against the brickwork as it pulled itself back from the hole. Then, just as soon as it had begun, the train slammed to a halt.
“No, no, no,” Charlie mumbled, spinning dials left and right. Despite his attempts, the train wouldn’t budge. Outside the window, the man motioned madly for him to kill the engine, rushing out of the way of a sudden onslaught of black liquid.
Charlie stared at the river and raced through his odds. A portion of the wall must have broken loose as he reversed, lodging itself behind the rear wheels and holding the train in place. The void was coming in, even if he stopped the engine.
He looked at the growing stream of black with mounting certainty. Even if he stopped now, it would be enough to flood the tunnel. The only chance to stop it was to get the engine out, so the hole could close.
Through the windshield, the void tumbled over itself with anticipation. Nothing but black in its horrible depths. Nothing but black…and was that a streak of silver?
Charlie stood up from his chair and pressed his face to the windshield, struggling for a better look. Somewhere below, in the sea of emptiness, a small line of silver glimmered brightly. Charlie traced its path until it ended in a box, so far below it only looked like a little dot.
But it wasn’t a dot, of that Charlie was certain. In that moment, he knew it was a train station—some other year, some other century, lingering in the darkness below.
It was a train station, and he had a plan.
Charlie sat back in his seat and took a deep breath, then one final peek out the small side window. The black stream had grown into quite a torrent already, pouring both ways down the tunnel. The old man still motioned for Charlie to stop the engine, but he was standing pressed up against the opposite wall to avoid the darkness as best as he could.
Charlie tapped a small red button on the dashboard, feeling a clunk behind him as the engine detached from the rest of the train cars.
“Alright, Dad,” he muttered. “I’ve never been one for walking anyways.” With that, he gripped the engine’s lever and shoved it towards the waiting void.
The engine lurched forward with a tremendous screech, and Charlie turned around in time to see the wall snap closed behind him and the world vanish from view.
*
The engine crashed through the station ceiling some time later. How long, exactly? Charlie wasn’t certain, and he doubted he ever would be. It felt as if he’d spent no time at all in free fall, and yet it felt as if he’d spent his whole life. All he knew was that he was happy when the collision threw him forward against his restraints and he was suddenly staring into someplace bright and living again.
The moment the engine came to a rest on the empty platform, Charlie unclipped his restraint and scrambled to the door. He climbed awkwardly out of the twisted, tilting vehicle, prepared to shout at any bystanders about the need for evacuation. Instead of spotting a stream of black liquid behind him, however, he noticed that the engine had fallen straight through the ceiling, which had, indeed, sealed itself right up behind him.
The few commuters on the platform stared at him with surprise, but not dismay, until a middle-aged man wearing dark blue coveralls shouted at him from a across the platform.
“Hey! Hey you!” he called. “What the hell is going on?”
Charlie stared at the brightly colored baseball cap atop the man’s head and smiled. He ran across the platform and wrapped the man in a tight embrace.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the man grumbled, shoving him away with a confused frown.
“What year is it?” Charlie asked suddenly, catching sight of the posters which lined the station walls. He remembered seeing them years ago.
“Oh Jeez,” the man muttered. “Don’t tell me you got yourself lost somehow.”
Charlie felt the knot return to his stomach as he shook his head and grabbed the man by the shoulders. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I just need to know the date, or at least the day of the week.”
The man stared at him for a moment without answering, but Charlie already knew the answer. On the tracks, a train was waiting, its doors preparing to close. Inside, a young boy and his father were too busy staring at the fishing guidebook they’d brought along to notice the commotion outside.
“Wednesday,” the man muttered, but Charlie was already running towards the train.
Author’s Note: I spend most of my life waiting for moments. Counting down the days to big events like graduation, or the minutes to small ones like the end of a shift. Too often, I’m so busy looking forward that I forget to look around, and I find myself wishing later I could have those moments back. Time-travelling trains might make for fun scifi, but even in fictional worlds time only moves one direction, and in real life you can’t cheat your way around that.
Steve is a resident physician in the Pacific Northwest. When he isn’t too busy cracking open a textbook (or a patient’s thorax), you can find him exploring the Cascades by bike, boat, or boot. His stories have appeared in places like F&SF, Grimdark Magazine, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. You can read more of his work at www.stevenbfischer.com, or find him on twitter @stevenfischersf.
Jakayla crouched in front of her dark closet. She hadn’t turned on the light because that was an awfully rude thing to do when trying to talk to the monster hidden inside.
“You gotta listen to me,” she whispered. “The news is saying really bad things, like rocks are gonna fall out of the sky and a lot of people are gonna die. You can’t stay in my closet. You gotta go to the basement. There’s dark spaces down there for you to hide in. I won’t tell no one you gone there.”
“Jakayla!” She turned to find Grandma leaning into the bedroom. “I got to run to your auntie’s house. The phone network’s down.”
“The phones don’t work?” Jakayla gasped. “Why? I didn’t think anything had fallen yet?”
“Nothing has, yet. Everyone’s trying to talk to everyone on the phone, and the system can’t handle that. Listen, girl.” Grandma waddled forward to cup Jakayla’s face. “We’re going to be just fine, you hear me? Don’t you worry. Just stay here. We’ll have everyone here together in the basement tonight.”
Jakayla nodded, wide-eyed.
“I love you. You be safe.” Grandma took a few deep breaths and planted a quick kiss on her forehead. A moment later, she was gone. The walls shuddered as the front door closed.
Jakayla whirled to face the closet again. “She don’t want me to worry, but I’m not worrying. Grandma wants to save all our family, and I’m trying to save you, too. Just ’cause you’re a monster don’t mean you don’t count.” She paused, head tilted with hope of an answer from her closet. “I can’t wait ’til night for you to talk. Just go to the basement, okay? If you get scared, bring Fluffinator the Stuffed Unicorn from the box right there. She always helps me feel braver.”
Jakayla hurried through the apartment. Grandma’d left on the TV. Jakayla would have gotten yelled at if she did that. A big red “BREAKING NEWS” banner filled the bottom of the screen. One woman talked in front of a big computer-made graphic of Earth with a lot of lines going all over and a whole bunch of colors, words everywhere like “projected impact zone” and “tsunami risk” along with countdown timers.
She knew all about tsunamis because her cousin had this one video game where a tsunami happened. Those scenes had scared her a lot until Grandma told her she shouldn’t worry because they couldn’t even see the water from their apartment.
“Plus, we’ll be in the basement,” Jakayla said to the TV. “Grandma said that’s the safest place to be. It don’t even leak like it used to.”
She rushed onward. Out the sliding door, their tiny backyard held a big pile of black garbage bags. Grandma’d said she’d throw out all Uncle Jerry’s belongings unless he paid what he owed in rent. This was as far as she’d thrown everything. Now weeds grew on some of the bags.
Jakayla nudged a sack with her foot. Further back in the pile, something rattled. “Hey, monster. I know you won’t come out or talk in daylight. You’re worse than the closet creature like that. But you can hear the television from here, right? You know what’s coming?”
She waited for a reply, because it was a polite thing to do. Somewhere nearby, sirens wailed and dogs howled like bad back-up singers.
“Here’s the thing,” she continued. “I know you got a good home in these bags, but you should come to the basement. I’ll be there with a bunch of people and the closet monster, too. There’s room for you.”
An odd clicking sound caused Jakayla to glance indoors. The living room was dark, the room quiet. “Oh. The power went out. No more TV.” Her voice suddenly sounded high-pitched. Scared. But she had to be brave so the monsters stayed calm. She took a few deep breaths, like Grandma did before she left.
“I need to go,” she told the pile of bags. “I want you to be okay. You live in Uncle Jerry’s trashed stuff, so you’re kinda like family.” A pop-pop-pop sound like fireworks carried from way off in the distance.
How soon until the rocks fell near here? She pictured the map from the news. The news lady had said something about her city being in a red zone. Red was Jakayla’s favorite color, but a red zone didn’t sound so good. That meant she needed to be fast, “lickity-split, zoom-zoom!” like the bird in her favorite cartoon. She had to go to the old church down the block to warn the gargoyles, then dash to the park on Howard Street to tell the shadow in the sewer pipe, then get home, all before Grandma got back.
She ran through the house. First of all, she had to visit the closet again. She hoped the monster there wouldn’t mind if she borrowed Fluffinator the Stuffed Unicorn. She needed her favorite unicorn with her as she warned her other friends about the awful things to come.
The basement would be crowded tonight, with lots of family and monsters, but that was okay. Grandma said they’d all be together. They’d make it through. In the end, that’s what mattered.
Author’s Note: I wrote this story as part of a Weekend Warrior flash writing contest on Codex. I don’t recall the exact prompts that inspired this story, but I really wanted to show a child’s compassion in the thick of a terrible crisis.
Nebula-nominated Beth Cato is the author of the Clockwork Dagger duology and the Blood of Earth Trilogy from Harper Voyager. She’s a Hanford, California native transplanted to the Arizona desert, where she lives with her husband, son, and requisite cats. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.
My job? Purity shaming pandas. It’s great. You loom over a living, breathing, talking embodiment of the international fixation on world peace and you shout, “Why won’t you fuck, you lazy motherfucker?” And then you play them some porn.
Okay, it’s not actually like that.
At all.
Really, my job kind of sucks.
*
“You. Purity shame. Pandas?”
The dinner entrées have just arrived. There’s a real wax candle, with fire and everything, on the table. Tinny speakers are playing pretentious string music. Wine which came from some sort of grape a hippie read bedtime stories to every night through the long summer fills our glasses. And my date is judging me. Hard.
“Why would you do that?” she asks.
Her name is Samantha. She’s wearing a red dress which, if we were animals, would mean she wants to get laid. Maybe she did want to get laid, five minutes ago, when all she knew about me was that I ordered the wine made from happy grapes. Now that she knows what I am, I may not make it to dessert. I am in serious trouble. “We have to do something. They’re going extinct.”
She gapes at me. If I made that face, my mother would be all ‘Don’t do that, Jason, you look like a carp. Are you a carp?” I don’t know much about carp. My job is pandas. “Can’t you use artificial insemination or something?”
Because that’s better. The pandas won’t even fuck, but how do you think momma panda is going to feel when a few weeks after she has a weird close encounter with a zookeeper she finds out she’s in the family way. Shit like that is where alien abduction stories come from, but the minute a cuddly furball with good PR is involved, the public is all over it. “Some of us think that wouldn’t be the best for Fen Fen’s mental health.”
Samantha is not following.
“Gestation and the eventual cubs have better outcomes if the mother agreed to the act that led to the pregnancy. We’re pretty sure Fen Fen would get very depressed if we inseminated her. She’s basically said as much. So we’re counting on Lan Lan to work some panda seduction.”
I clearly should have brought worms to my date, because I spent the rest of the main course trying to pry conversation from a carp. And no, dessert did not happen.
*
It was hard enough to get those fuzzy fuckers to breed before they could talk. But some jackass had the bright idea that if we used these new neural implant things that had been developed for stroke patients, we could give panda bears the ability to speak and we could explain the gravity of their lack of gravidity. Also, they were hoping for insights into the deep wisdom of the panda, or something.
What they got was Lan Lan the fat ass complaining about the tenderness of the bamboo we feed him, and Fen Fen the would be career woman with a penchant for writing memoir. Meanwhile I, Jason Constans, the Breeding Encouragement Specialist assigned to the fat ass, am basically a glorified sex therapist turned pimp.
So yes, I spend most of my working hours wanting to punch a panda in the face. That is not unreasonable.
*
“Sorry, man,” Cory, my roommate and best bud from way back in our collegiate days, says when I collapsed on our couch. “Bad date?”
I give the universal primate grunt of utter defeat.
“Was it her, or you?”
“Lan fucking Lan. It’s not enough for that celibate bastard to take down his whole species. He’s wrecking my life, too.”
Cory hands me a beer as he plops down on the couch next to me. We’ve had that couch since our first place, senior year of college. It’s part of the family. “Just don’t tell them what you do. You don’t have to open with the pandas-not-fucking thing.”
“It’ll come out eventually and then I’ll have another Rachel. I can’t do another Rachel, man.” Broke my heart. We were engaged. I was living the dream, ready for the picket fence and 2.5 kids and all of it. But she just had to meet Lan Lan, and what kind of monster has daily access to those cute! adorable! overgrown raccoons and won’t hook his fiancée up with an interview? Ten minutes of conversation with Lan Lan, and I was one sad sack of a dumped Breeding Encouragement Specialist.
Actually, it’s unfair to raccoons to compare pandas to them. Raccoons are ambitious little fuckers, and they can sense light with their hands. That is bad ass. Fen Fen’s incisive memoir aside, pandas are useless.
Cory takes a swig from his beer. “They won’t all turn out to be Rachel.”
“I was with her for two years. I can’t waste two years again. I’m getting old. My biological clock is ticking. If they aren’t going to survive finding out they’re dating a panda pimp, I need to get them out of the way in a hurry and look for the one who will.”
“Michael liked that I live with a panda pimp.”
“Michael was a nutcase, as evidenced by his idiotic life choices, first in dating you, then in not dating you.” I glance at Cory to see how he’s taking the ribbing. It’s only been a couple weeks since he and Mike broke up, and I’m pretty sure we’re to the teasing and ragging on the ex stage, but I haven’t tested it out yet.
Cory rolls his eyes and punches me in the arm. I called it right.
“Maybe we should go out and look for dates. Right now. You’re getting old, too. We are on the road to becoming the dude version of platonic cat lady roommates.”
He grimaces. “There’s nothing wrong with cat ladies, and I’ve got work in the morning.”
I do, too, but I’m not looking forward to it.
*
The problem with pandas, aside from everything, is all that bamboo. They’re bears who eat grass. Bears. Eating woody grass. Think about that for a minute. It’s basically the same as if we decided to subsist entirely on popcorn and stuck to it so hard that after a few generations our gut bacteria went, “Okay, fine, I guess we’ll do something with this, but you’re never going to be happy about it,” and so we were tired, sleepy, useless fucks all the time. But damn if we don’t like popcorn so much that we’re not going to bother looking for anything else. Yum, popcorn.
Do not talk to me about the nobility and enlightenment implied by an essentially carnivorous species going vegan so hard they subsist on glorified grass. I don’t care how eloquently Fen Fen writes about it. That is shit. And I would know; I’ve scooped plenty of her shit in my time.
*
The day after Samantha’s aborted red dress, I do my zombie strut into the panda enclosure at my usual cheery dawn-o-clock in the morning, quadruple mocha caramel caffeine fest clutched in my hands. Everything is soft and quiet like things are when the sun hasn’t even bothered to crawl its ass out of bed yet. Lan Lan, the fuzzy mother fucker, is curled up in his custom designed rock cave built by some Swedish company that specializes in harmonizing Feng Shui principles with Scandinavian minimalism, all while authentically replicating nature. What that means is that the cave is made out of stones that were very precisely cut and fit together like an Ikea jigsaw castle, and somebody apologized to the rock the whole time they shaped it.
I’m still tetchy about the date with Samantha, so I don’t hesitate before firing up the projector and starting the day’s therapy right then and there. The enclosure is immediately transformed from a finely honed replica of perfectly balanced authentic nature, into an immersive theater experience. In this particular case, we’re immersed in a very authentic replica of Antarctic winter. The cave is overlaid with images of a wall of emperor penguins squinting against the wind and huddling together like the paragons of bad ass dedicated fatherhood they are.
Lan Lan opens one eye and harrumphs. “Bad date?”
“She wore red.”
“Then you should be more cheerful.”
“I would, except you ruined it again.”
“You could quit your job,” Lan Lan says. He’s said that before.
“Then I’d be the guy who walked away and let the glorious panda go extinct. That’s not going to win me any blushing brides, either.”
“You’re perverse.” Then he closes his eye and goes back to sleep. I’m tempted to have them install industrial fans so we can blast him with a fraction of the Antarctic winter. Or maybe we could give an emperor penguin the neuro-enhancement hardware we’d installed in Lan Lan and Fen Fen and let a real, dedicated member of a popular and thriving species talk some sense into our pig-headed mascots of peace.
I sip at my liquid confection, waiting for the sugar to hit and make me jittery, as I watch the movie. After twenty minutes we get to my favorite part, when the wind eases up and the sun breaks through. All the dads turn their tuxedo faces up and blink at the light. They look so god damned bewildered, like they’ve gotten into the groove of hellacious winter misery and had forgotten it was going to end. “Oh, right, spring! That’s a thing,” their beady little eyes say.
Then the penguin moms come swimming in from the ocean and waddle across the ice and dad gets his first meal in six months and falls over exhausted and they’ve got their little chick and it’s like the perfect triumph of the nuclear family on the world’s largest desert and the sugar finally hits which is the only reason my eyes got misty even though I’ve seen this movie something like five hundred times.
“Have you ever considered that I’m not the one who needs therapy?” Lan Lan asks, his voice rumbling through his chest because he doesn’t even bother to move his face from where he’s buried it in his paws. Parents would shit diamonds to let their kids see that pose this close. They deserve hemorrhoids.
“Do you see what they go through? And that’s just for one egg. You guys usually get twins out of the deal. Why is this so hard for you to get behind?”
“I’m not the family type. And neither is Fen Fen. There’s not enough penguin footage in the world to change that.”
“As far as we can tell, there isn’t a single member of your species who is the family type.”
“So we go extinct. Big fucking deal.” His butt waggles as he shifts to get more comfortable.
“You are the living, breathing embodiment of the symbol of peace. We can’t let that go extinct. What would that say about us?”
The long silence Lan Lan answers me with might be commentary if I didn’t know he was too lazy to work up the effort necessary to judge us. At long last he grumbles, “Make the penguins your symbol of peace.”
*
The dick thing about Michael and Cory splitting is that Cory wants to settle down and have kids as much as I do. I was honestly getting a bit jealous of him because it looked like Michael was going to be the one. My consolation was that I could be the weird straight uncle, like maybe Cory’s kids could be methadone to my raging paternal instincts or something. Dude has seriously let me down by letting that relationship fall apart.
*
“Bad day at work?” Cory asks when I got home. He’s already offering me a beer. All he needs is a string of pearls and he’d be a queer-guy Mrs. Beaver.
“I got sniffly over the penguins again.”
He sighs, withdraws the offered beer long enough to take the top off for me, then hands it back.
“Thanks,” I say, and take a long swallow. Then, “Is it cool if Kim comes over? We want to have a work confab thing, but keep it casual.” Kim is Fen Fen’s assigned Breeding Encouragement Specialist. Super sweet, with three-year-old twin girls who are constantly doing adorable things that get posted to Kim’s Facebook page. She was married before she got the job and her approach so far consists mostly of being utterly and jealousy-inducingly happy for all the world to see. She doesn’t seem bothered that Fen Fen isn’t getting the hint.
“Panda pimps unite?”
“If you cook for us, we’ll let you have one of the team T-shirts.”
“Deal.”
Cory does mysterious things to food objects in the kitchen while I bust ass cleaning up the apartment to make it presentable for company. Kim shows up with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread.
We uncork the bottle right away and she and I hover near the kitchen island while Cory works. The bottle is nearly defeated, and Cory is serving something gloopy that smells like garlic and obesity when Kim gently steers the conversation toward work. “No, I’m serious. Fen Fen really has something good going on. She’s going to be a star.”
“A stand up panda act?” Cory asks as he grinds black pepper over the bowls. “Don’t they only have one punchline?”
“Exactly!” Kim says. “But she uses it really well. Even Jason will like this one.” She nudges me in the ribs to make sure I’m braced for it. “What does the female panda say when her sex therapist asks why she has low expectations for intercourse?”
I wince and bury my face in my hands.
Cory snickers. “Because he just eats, shoots, and leaves.”
“See. Brilliant!” Kim and Cory chortle.
I give the primal ape groan of abject despair. “You’re encouraging her.”
“Of course I am,” Kim says. “She’ll come around in her own time. And when she does, I want to make sure she’s as happy and fulfilled as she can be. That will lead to the best outcomes.”
“Don’t mind him,” Cory says as he hands Kim a bowl. “He’s bitter because he struck out at dinner last night.”
*
Kim waits until dessert to break the news that she and her husband are trying to get pregnant again. Twenty minutes later I’m on the couch trying not to bawl while Cory sees her out. He brings me an extra slice of Marie Callender’s calories-in-lieu-of-happiness pie, puts the plate on my knee, then sits down at my side. “You’ve got to get a handle on this.”
“I’m sorry. I know. It’s just…I’ve always wanted kids and the whole world has always been telling me I’m not supposed to care and even my job is telling me that but Kim’s just, whatever, guess I’ll have another one. It’s not fair. I feel like I’m running out of time.”
Cory picks up the fork from the plate, opens my hand, then manually closes my fingers around the fork. “Shut up. Shovel pie into your mouth until I’m done talking.”
I raise an eyebrow at him, but take a bite of the pie.
“Michael and I split up – ”
“Because he’s an idiot,” I jump in to say. Cory stabs a threatening finger toward my pie. I shut up and take another bite.
“We split up because he wasn’t ready to settle down and I was tired of waiting for him.”
I…hadn’t known that part of it. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. You didn’t say – ” I stop when he slaps the back of my head. A brotherly slap, not a domestic abuse slap. A hey-dipshit-you’re-supposed-to-be-eating slap.
“I’m sick of waiting around for you, too. Catch up to the 21st century. Let’s have a baby.”
It’s a really good thing I don’t follow instructions well, because otherwise I’d be strangling on a bite of Marie Callender. “I’m not gay.”
“I wasn’t planning to get you pregnant. We’ve been living together forever, we throw a mean dinner party on short notice, and we both want kids. Either you can wake up and face the facts, or you can keep getting weepy about penguins. Your call, but I’m done living with a mopey sex-pusher.”
I take a moment with that.
Cory takes my hand, steers the fork to scoop up a piece of pie, then delivers it to my mouth. Which is hanging open. Apparently I learned carp impersonation from Samantha.
“Our kids don’t get to play football. Concussions are serious bad news.”
“Fair deal,” Cory agrees.
*
So, adopting has a fuck-ton of paperwork and takes forever. At the rate we’re going, we could have gestated a baby elephant. But whatever. We’ve got it. It’s not like we’re balancing an egg on our feet all winter.
I still want to give Lan Lan a black eye more often than not, but I’ve switched him over to some great footage of seahorse dads. It’s kind of peaceful to watch them bouncing along in the water.
Fen Fen’s got a Facebook page now to support her self-published memoir, so she’s getting inundated with the photos of Kim’s twins and her ecstatic baby bump updates. Cory and I are trying to keep pace by posting selfies with stacks of paperwork, but it’s not quite the same. Not going to lie, though; it’s still fucking awesome.
The new strategy for Team Panda Pimp is to conspicuously have so much fun, Fen Fen breaks down and asks for insemination, if nothing else, to get material for her next memoir. It might even work. The international symbol of world peace won’t lift a paw to save itself from extinction, but humanity will bend over backward to perform test tube miracles on their behalf. There’s got to be some inspiring symbolism in there somewhere.
And it really hammers home Cory’s point: fucking is not required to make a family.
Author’s Note:One of my very good friends is extremely frustrated by pandas, to the point where he’ll happily go on at length about what a waste of space they are, and how we ought to let them go extinct. Frankly, he has a point. I was thinking about him while watching a documentary on emperor penguins, one thing led to another, and here we are. This story was more on than I realized though, as demonstrated by a pair of would-be penguin dads in Berlin.
Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, Illinois where she is engaged in a torrid love affair with the city.
She’s the fiction podcast editor for Strange Horizons, where you can hear her read a new short story nearly every week. She’s the president of the Dream Foundry, an organization dedicating to bolstering and nurturing the careers of nascent professionals working with the speculative arts.
Her fiction work has appeared in a variety of venues including Lightspeed, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Pod Castle. Her interactive novel, Gilded Rails, was released by Choice of Games in 2018. She lives online at anaealay.com where you can find a complete biography and her blog. Follow her on Twitter @anaealay.
Since time immemorial, one of the perennial topics of humankind has been to compare music. Whether pop is better than country, whether this band is better than that band, or this song better than that song. Before the invention of writing, one can imagine heated arguments about who was the best drummer.
(ANGELICA, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. For everything. But most of all I’m especially sorry for taking what we had for granted. Don’t worry, the parts that are bold-and-italicized are only visible to you, keyed off of your IP address. I can only hope that even though you’ve changed your number and email address that you might have left this one thing unchanged. I know you would be mortified if this were public, and wouldn’t hear the end of it from Maurice. I wouldn’t do that to you!)
Arguments are powerful things. Relationships have formed and relationships have ended over this subject matter (because some of us become complete assholes on the topic and don’t think about other people), and we believe that many relationships can be saved if we can apply some elements of scientific rigor. The subject matter as it has been historically framed is inherently too subjective and therefore is a breeding ground for disputes and hard feelings. Even scientists, we who pride ourselves on being able to set aside our emotions and think rationally, have been known to make this mistake, though we of all people should know better.
We posit that our mistake has been rushing into the discussion without agreeing upon criteria (and also about using absolute statements in combination with invectives, statements like “Anyone who likes 98 Degrees more than The Four Seasons is a complete @*&@#$ @#*@! have no place in a laboratory”. I was not lying, but I should have considered your feelings. I didn’t know how hard you would take that until you replied to say that One Direction was better than Third Eye Blind. That still stings.), and so have entered the debate in bad faith with the conclusion in mind ahead of the evidence. We considered what criteria might be used for the judging of musical bands. As with the objective comparison of so many other types of subject matter, we have come to the conclusion that the answer lies in mathematics. When we sent Voyager to journey beyond our solar system, we wrote our message to the universe in the languages of music and mathematics. If it’s good enough for aliens, it’s good enough for resolving disputes with our fellow music-loving humans. (I would send you a gold record!)
PROPOSAL
Therefore, I propose The Horowitz Method (I hope you’re not upset that I named it after you. I know it’s traditional for the founder/inventor of a scientific method or discovery to be its namesake, and while you didn’t propose the method nor write this article to propose it to the public, I wanted to acknowledge the role that you played in its instantiation. You are the best research partner that I’ve ever had, so rigorous and well-spoken and hilarious when you want to be, and while yes I have at times been jealous of your success, that success was earned and anyone is lucky to work with you. I also admit that another factor in choosing your name was that I hoped you would hear about the proposed method via mutual colleagues and would be curious enough to visit this page where you could read these messages. If you’re upset about the naming, I promise I am willing to change it), an objective method of rank-ordering musical groups in a metric-based approach that is thus subject to peer review.
But what mathematical measure? If we were talking about comparing one song with another, it might be easier, for the music itself is inherently mathematical–meter, tempo, time, number of notes, pitches. But a single musical group could have any number of songs, and the number could grow every day–what particular songs would one use to judge a group? Their newest? The whole body of their work? And some bands release songs so regularly that any conclusion drawn would have to be re-examined very frequently. And that’s not even to speak about what particular measure to use which, we know from personal experience, becomes a dispute of its own.
No, if we are going to compare musical groups and expect a somewhat stable outcome, we must not compare their songs, we must compare traits of the group themselves. The genre? The style? Again, too subjective, one could argue that a group is one or another or maybe both or something entirely new. We need to focus in on something entirely indisputable.
The band name. (Please hear me out and look at the data. And I look forward to seeing your refutation in a prestigious journal instead of publishing it on your own site)
And, in order to apply mathematical rigor to it, the dataset we will work with will be band names with numbers in them. (yeah, I know, but I figured we had to start somewhere)
“My favorite musical group doesn’t have a number in it,” (Black-Eyed Peas) some of you are declaring at this very moment (Faust, Lionel Richie, Adele). Then take heart in knowing that your favorite band is incomparable, in the mathematical sense. If you want to compare your group with others, I’m afraid you’re out of luck, at least for the time being. You may as well try compare (8/0) to (10/0), or compare a walrus to a the clock speed of Pentium processor, or a raven to a writing desk, the question inherently has no meaning, and if you don’t like the system, propose an alternative. (I dare you. You know you want to!)
By using a mathematical system, we can define and rank and draw some mathematical conclusions about the dataset. This system doesn’t define which band is the “best” because that is an inherently subjective concept, but it does define which is the GREATEST, mathematically speaking. (That’s right, that’s how sorry I am, I am resorting to PUNS . In PUBLIC. May the Flying Spaghetti Monster forgive me. )
CORNER CASES
Even in something so simple as numerical ordering, there were some corner cases that are worth noting, especially when other researchers consider peer review.
Only groups that had a number clearly as part of the name were included in the dataset. Groups that clearly had numerical etymology but did not contain what we would recognize as the word we commonly use for the number were not included. This excluded, for instance, Pentatonix, which was a corner case in itself, but if we included root words then we felt it would have to include any other names that include root words, which might not always be easy to determine in every word that it may not be common knowledge that they are numerically based, such as “quarantine”.
But a number may be part of a larger word and still be included as long as the number itself is clearly visible and appears to clearly refer to the number. So, Sixpence None the Richer was included as the number 6 and Oneohtrix Point Never was included as the number 1, but Bone Thugs and Harmony was not included because “Bone” clearly is not meant to refer to the number “one” even though it contains the letter sequence.
At first, ordinal were included, like Third Eye Blind, as its integer number (in this case, 3). But, after considering the earlier decisions about not allowing words with number etymology in them, this seemed inconsistent with that. In an attempt at greater consistency, these were still included in the dataset, but as fractions whenever the word was correct–so Third Eye Blind was included as 1/3 rather than as 3. We expect that this will be a point of contention in peer review and we welcome the debate. (Note that I didn’t do this just so that One Direction would be greater than Third Eye Blind, and how dare you suggest I would undermine my own scientific integrity)
Roman numerals were included, but only when the numeral clearly referred to a number. So, King’s X was excluded even though the X might be considered a 10, because that doesn’t appear to be how it’s used. But Boyz II Men was included, because it is spoken as the number representation, rather than being pronounced “Boyz Eye Eye Men”.
Musical groups with more than one number in their name, like The 5,6,7,8’s, or Seven Mary Three, were treated as a dataset, included once for each number. This means that Seven Mary Three is both greater than and less than The Four Tops.
STATISTICAL RESULTS
Many of the results of this dataset are illustrative of the problems inherent in trying to summarize a dataset with extreme outliers. At the same time, the usual methods for excluding outliers seemed inappropriate for this particular application, because if we are to determine which band is greater than another, but exclude the greatest bands in the dataset, this would undermine. Note that, among other things, this means that the GREATEST band is also the ONLY band that’s above average.
The Greatest (Maximum): Six Billion Monkeys
The Least (Minimum): Minus Five
Average: 28,846,316.88
Standard Deviation: 416,025,135.8
Median: 5 (see data list below to see the bands with value 5)
Mode: 3
Again, note how the average and standard deviation in particular were skewed very high by the high outliers in the dataset, particularly the number of 6,000,000,000, when the majority of the rest of the numbers were less than 100.
HISTOGRAM
While the dataset as a whole is very spread out to make a displayable histogram, since 90% of the datapoints are between the values of 0 and 100, that a histogram of the data within this range could be interesting.
FURTHER STUDY
If this measure were widely adopted, it is possible that it would have the consequence of encouraging musical groups to be more likely to pick names with numbers in them, or to add numbers to existing names. We see this as a positive result in itself, though it could make future results require more peer reviews as bands try to pick the greatest number to improve their placement, which may bias the data.
Although we explicitly avoided ranking individual songs here, the same method has potential for that as well as albums or movie titles or books (i.e. 1984 is greater than Slaughterhouse Five) or really anything else that has titles that might include numbers in them.
(And the most important under the topic of further study is whether you will see this as the olive branch it is meant to be. My research is lesser without you, and I hope you feel the same way about me. You know how to reach me, and I hope you do contact me. Most of all, and you know that I’m not good at the touchy-feely stuff, is that I miss you as a person. You are an incredible human being.)
THE DATA
Here is a list of the complete set of datapoints used in this study. While this is meant to be as complete a list as possible, it is recognized that this is likely not a comprehensive list, as with the Internet publishing where it is it can be hard to define whether a band is a band or not–i.e. what if there is a musical YouTube channel with a numerical username, or what if someone self-publishes a CD on their own website that no one has heard of. Further studies can propose methods of defining what exact musical groups should be included and which ones should not.
Six Billion Monkeys
10,000 Maniacs
Powerman 5000 (Yeah, I know, but numbers don’t lie)
It’s like this: if the world has a food shortage, you eliminate hunger by leaving the planet, taking all your animals and plants in your genetic ark, and finding a new planet on which to grow and flourish.
It’s also like this: if the world has a distribution of wealth crisis, you eliminate poverty by never having elites in your new society. At least for a little while. At least, that was the plan.
And if the world has a gender crisis, an inability for equality, you eliminate gender.
You eliminate sex. The need for physical reproduction. Genetic disease. Gender politics.
You eliminate.
And then maybe you’d live in Arioth, city under the vast hanging visage of a ringed gas giant, black towers that reach for the stars, portal tubes flicking citizens from building top to street corner to corner office.
*
I’m not one of the elites. They lounge in their penthouses, looking down at their domains, moving the tides of originality. They own the artisans, the writers, the thinkers, the scientists—the hearts, the minds, the souls—all valuable trade commodities. Original thoughts, a groundbreaking currency. The first time you have an original thought, you’re a slave of the elites for life.
I decided long ago to never have an original thought. Which is why I became a tracer, hunting the original thinkers who have the very unoriginal idea of running away from their fates.
On a dingy street corner smelling of rotten garbage, where red marks mottled the concrete from the last clearing of a shack village, I pulled my phone out of my pocket, flipping up the eight-centimeter cylinder to activate the holographic display. It unfolded with a cheery chime and showed me a map of the city district in blue lines to the edge of the biodome, which was about a half kilometer from where I was standing.
It also showed me the path my target had taken, a haphazard red weave through streets and alleyways. Did they think they could lose me? Everyone in Arioth was genetically tagged since before emergence. Every child, traceable in every way since the time cells hit cells and became more cells, replicating in the gestation pods. You couldn’t run, not as a toddler, not as an adult. Tracers didn’t have to have original thoughts, because the most strenuous part about being a tracer was the violence, not the tracing itself.
Except.
I scrolled the holo to follow my target’s trail, but it went to a street corner in a particularly seedy district and stopped. I stared at the red dot on my display. It wasn’t blinking as it should have been. And it wasn’t white like it would have been if they’d died. Just solid red staring back at me, like they’d stopped themself somewhere between life and death. That little dot with the name “Emin 4892” beside it.
I’d been a tracer for six years, and I’d never seen a dot do that.
I slapped my phone against my neatly pressed jeans, hoping to jolt out any malfunction. The tracer department was not a department that had a lot of originality, and therefore not a lot of chance for technical upgrades. This phone was at least ten years old and buggy as hell.
The red dot remained, though.
I sighed, shoving down my growing unease. I’d have to investigate—following procedures, of course. Not with anything like original thought.
*
I had my personal numbers and stats in my vision at all times, eyes opened or closed. Everyone did. We saw our names—mine was “Gin 8381.” We saw our physical attributes—cropped brown hair, mid-brown skin, green eyes. Average height, below average weight. We saw our vitals—fit and healthy. We saw, when we were adults, when it was time to visit a clinic and let them harvest cells for the production of the next generation of creche children. We saw alerts from the elites. We saw traffic routing, job assignments based on genetics and aptitudes, and alerts on where to take our daily meals. Everything pertaining to personal, daily life.
And on the left side of my vision, always in movement, was the red to green bar of original thought.
The theory was that if you had an original thought, you would be elevated. You would have a chance, if the thought was original enough, and if you had enough of them, to become an elite. Or at least work under the elites, a few steps higher than you had been.
Some people strove for original thoughts. Their slavery was swift and usually unknowing. They’d lose themselves into their dream worlds and never know how many trade empires depended on their originality.
Some tried hard not to have original thoughts but had them accidentally. Those slaves went fighting and screaming into their elevated exiles.
But most people, from an early age, learned to manage the level of their originality bars. Keep it above red—where you’d be kicked to the streets as genetic chaff—but below yellow-green. If you could hold a steady yellow-orange, you’d have a nice, ordinary, productive life. No great upheavals. No great risks, no great rewards.
*
My originality bar was steady in its usual yellow-orange as I trekked through the litter-strewn streets. A rain had been scheduled for earlier that day, and my boots made soft splashes in black puddles. I’d known the rain was over when I’d come out, but I’d worn my brown duster with its weather-proof coating anyway, because I liked it.
There were no portal tubes in this district, and auto cabs wouldn’t come here, so I had to walk. People would strip both portals and cabs for the metals and resell the parts. That thought was hardly original.
I went through memorized procedures over and over in my mind, a numb and soothing counterpoint to a rising anxiety. My left hand played with the cool metal of my phone in my pocket, a nervous habit I’d never tried to break. I had a sour feeling in my stomach, something that rarely happened on a trace. Tracing was usually as simple as finding the target and bringing them in. Give or take a few bruises or tase gun singes.
But as I neared the place where my target had stopped and saw the sign above the grimy storefront glass, my unease grew.
It was a cuddle shop. There were hundreds of them around the city. If you didn’t have a domestic partner or two, or if you were desperate enough for human contact, you could find it here.
I’d been to some of the middle-class facilities—called Human Contact Therapy there—I wasn’t a recluse. But everyone who was sane stayed away from shops in districts like this. Places like this, people found ways to piece together originality without ever having a full original idea on their own. How to build illicit tech to simulate nerves and responses that were no longer in the human genetic code. Because humans had apparently not out-evolved the need for sex, despite the lack of equipment for it or the stability of a truly sexless society. Which was ridiculous. Genetics were more stable without the haphazard nature of biological reproduction. People didn’t go into hormonal rages like we learned about in ancient history. And there was far, far less abuse. Who could imagine a society so divided that one half subjugated the other purely based on genetics?
I pushed through the creaking door into the shop and had the thought I sometimes had, that maybe our society wasn’t so different from the old horrors in the history texts. That eliminating biological sex and gender had only transferred the problem to a different arena. Humans would always find a way to dominate others, and maybe that domination was still genetic. The bred thinkers vs. the bred non-thinkers. The elites vs. those in shacks on the streets. All watched, all pre-disposed to their lives, and if someone broke their prescribed mold, it was because they were supposed to. Genetic destiny, because the geneticists did not make mistakes. Everyone in their place.
The originality bar on the side of my vision hardly twitched. This thought I was having was not an original thought. Not for me, not for the millions of people monitored by the system.
“Can I help you?” A squat, older person with wild gray hair came toward me in the shop’s humid, off-white lobby.
I grimaced at the tang of sweat in the air. But I pulled out my phone, flipped open the holo, and showed a picture of my target. “I’m looking for this person. Have you seen them?”
“Oh,” the squat person said. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, they’re here.”
I tilted my head. “Still here? Still alive?” I flicked my phone’s holo back to the map. The red dot was solid, and close.
The person fidgeted, a sort of nervous dance. I focused on them, my tracer’s license giving me the ability to see their vitals, their originality bar. All were dangerously high. In a city that tried its best not to do anything out of the ordinary, fear was an original thought.
“Come with me,” the squat person—Dev 1126, the registered owner of this property—said, and led me into the back.
I passed steamy, translucent cubicles. I did not think about what was happening inside them, my lips tightening against the perversity. Human touch was fine. Benign affection was fine. More than that was dangerous.
The owner led me past all the cubicles to a room in the back, a room that had a sterile edge about it, with medical objects and tech on steel counters and an unoccupied medical table in the center.
“I don’t do anything here,” Dev 1126 said. “I just own the building.”
A standard excuse for one part of an original idea. Someone would own the place. Another would facilitate the tech parts, and a few more daring idiots would brush against fate by having just enough of an idea to spread it around. To build whatever they were building.
The room was empty. I checked my map again, and the red dot was centered just beyond this room. I reached into my right coat pocket for my tase gun.
“Hey,” the owner said, putting their hands up. “Hey, I didn’t do anything. Your target’s in there. Back through there.” They nodded at a back door.
Everything about this felt like a trap.
Fortunately, there were procedures for traps.
I shouted, “Emin 4892, come out peacefully, or I will use excessive force!”
I wasn’t expecting my target to come out so easily, and fully expected to have to turn my tase gun’s settings to demolition, but the door cracked, and a slim hand poked out and waved.
“I’m coming out,” a high-pitched voice said. Abnormally high. High with fear?
My brows knit and I hesitated, my aim wavering. Did I have the right person? There was something…off…about that voice. My originality bar jerked precariously upward, and I set my thoughts into reviewing the case file again. The voice did partially match the voiceprint on genetic file for Emin 4892. Thirty-three years of age. Food tester for a gourmet food chain. Nice job, don’t know why they left it. Don’t know why they wanted to have an original thought, if they wanted to at all.
The whole person came out through the doorway. Below average height and weight, bowl-cut black hair. They both were and were not my target. Cosmetic surgery had been involved, certainly. But had it healed this quickly? I’d only got the alert on my target that morning.
Emin 4892 wore a loose, surgical-type green gown and crossed their arms under…anatomy that should not be there.
We all knew what we came from. We all knew the barbaric forms our ancestors had been forced to live in for thousands of years before they were evolutionarily liberated. We knew the carnal drives that society insisted we were no longer slaves to but places like this insisted still lingered in our minds, like an itch that was never quite scratched.
I had never seen an actual throwback, a female, before. For a fleeting, dangerous moment, I wondered if I would feel something more than I should, if my thoughts would turn too original, but they didn’t. I guess I’d never had that itch.
But Emin 4892 apparently had.
They read my judgment, my horror, and their black eyes turned cold. They held their arms tighter around themself.
“That’s right, look at me,” they said. “This is who I am. You can’t take it from me.”
Emin 4892 and the people of this shop must have found a way to perform surgery—no, some kind of genetic splicing or modification—without scars and with rapid healing factor. That in itself was massive originality and an incredibly valuable commodity.
I stared at Emin 4892, and I couldn’t see their vitals. Their red locator dot still shone on my phone, but it hadn’t moved from the back room. Whatever had been done to them had been done there, and that’s where the dot had stopped. Where “they” had stopped and become “her.”
It was physiological, wasn’t it? Not just a cosmetic change. This person was actually female.
I tightened my grip on my tase gun. “Yes, I can take it away. Emin 4892, congratulations. You have had a highly original thought. You will be taken to originality processing where you will be given new accommodations to match your risen status.”
Emin 4892 flipped me the finger. But she didn’t try to bolt. She wasn’t going to run, was she?
“I’m original,” she said, voice tight and smug. “I’m original. I’m an artist, and this is my art.” She waved down at her body. “I decided to make a study of ancient human anatomy. That is an acceptable branch of study. I made an original breakthrough in the field of this art. Look at me—a living sculpture. You can’t destroy that, or return me to how I was. Destruction of originality is a capital crime, isn’t it?”
My thoughts jittered, following her logic. I tried to keep my thoughts in line, but my originality bar rose dangerously into yellow-green. My heart rate intensified.
“Yes, destruction of originality is a crime,” I gasped. I closed my eyes, still watching my originality bar, and ran backward through my most-used procedural manual.
My thoughts began to flow again. To slow. The originality bar went back to yellow-orange.
I exhaled and opened my eyes. I’d take my target in. They were not my problem—they were for someone much more original than I to deal with. It didn’t matter that my target had a point to make, or a sculpture to display, or whatever perversity they thought they were getting away with. It would all smooth out in the end. And it was not my problem.
Emin 4892 sensed their victory, whatever victory they thought they’d gained, and held out their arms. I slapped cuffs on their wrists and shuffled my target out of the shop. I flagged the shop for immediate lockdown and further investigation. It would be shut down, the valuable tech confiscated and taken to be studied by more original scientists. Those who’d built the tech would be traced and taken in, too. You couldn’t escape the fate of original thoughts.
Society would continue in its stability.
Or would it? I darted a glance at Emin 4892. Were they—I couldn’t use “she” without my originality bar climbing, and maybe it wasn’t even “she,” did I even have a right to determine that?—as deranged as our society dictated? Did they just want attention and infamy or did they seriously think that going back to humanity’s original evolutionary forms was a good thing? And if Emin 4892 had caused this much stir already, how could so much originality, so much chaos in concepts like gender or sex, possibly be good?
Emin 4892 walked beside me with a confidence, a carriage in their step I’d only seen in elites. And their eyes flashed with something beyond the defiance, their mouth tight with intense determination. This meant something to them. Something more than status, maybe even more than a statement.
My originality bar started to climb again, and I shunted my thoughts back to procedures, looking away.
Emin 4892 grinned. A sour, knowing grin.
And I hated myself for feeling the contempt in that grin and knowing that I maybe deserved it. That maybe we all did.
That was also not an original thought.
I escorted my willing target down the city blocks to the nearest portal tube, doing my best not to think of societies and change.
Author’s Note: Being queer and non-binary, one of the things I think about a lot is what a future society might look like where gender and sexuality aren’t an issue, and everyone freely expresses who they are. Usually, that feels like a big, happy world (or worlds!) to me, and I truly hope for that future. But this story was born out of what if that idea went horribly wrong and the concepts of gender and sexuality weren’t normalized but banned—what would that society look like? Turns out, pretty dark.
Novae Caelum is an author, illustrator, and designer with a love of spaceships and a tendency to quote Monty Python. Stars short fiction has appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show, Escape Pod, Clockwork Phoenix 5, and Lambda Award winning Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction. Most days you can find star with digital pen in hand, crafting imaginary worlds. Or writing alien poetry. Or typing furiously away at stars serial genderfluid romance novels, with which star hopes to take over the world. At least, that’s the plan. You can find star online at novaecaelum.com.
The scuttling of a million feet before him, the collective aspirations to get somewhere resounded in the marble hall, while he stared at his stubby chin in the glass. He rubbed a growing five o’clock shadow with a soft hand. “Paging passenger Carl Rogers. Please come to Gate 48B. Paging passenger Karl Rogers. Please come to Gate 48B.” The near-garbled voice issuing forth from the speakers was far from honeyed, but there was something sweet about the announcement and the cadence of the passenger’s name. At that moment, he would do anything to be Karl Rogers, to have such a short three syllabled name, so he could be rushing about like the many others rushing about. Needing to get somewhere and feeling the inadequacy of bipedalism in hauling body and material possessions to reach that end.
7F. His gaze shifted beyond his saggy eyelids and the harried countenance of Vishaljeet Mazandaran in the reflection staring from the glass at him. 7F. Seven effing syllables. He hit the convex button to his right, perfectly crafted to nestle his fingertip. One button for the number seven—for his monstrosity of a name when rendered into syllabic roman letters: Vi-shal-jeet-Ma-zan-da-ran. The other for the F for effing, for the way he felt standing here staring at this vending machine. The smooth buttons and the way they cradled his hand belied the enormity of the situation and the creeping feeling of unease. One push and processed foods appear before him, ready to eat. It was so simple, so elegant, almost a physics equation: one action that precipitates another reaction. A button, a mechanism from behind the machine, the coil winds, the snack falls.
He had been staring at the snack which was so innocently snack-like, and yet, never in his twenty years in the States has he seen a bag of Fresh Mazafati Dates tucked away among the coils like he did now. Its tantalizing green package called for him, like the swaying grass of the verdant prairies and the tall trees of the forests of Nur alongside the crystal blue Caspian Sea of his childhood. And only $1.50. Six quarters to afford him a taste of his old home, of the grocery store near the apartment, where they would have the dates in boxes piled next to candy bars, popcorn and small packages of tissues that owner Alireza hoped you would grab as impulsive buys.
He decided he would do it, had an obligation to— who else would buy these foreign dates that had probably been sitting here for ages now? The dates probably fermenting as he felt like he was in his collared shirt and classic fit trousers, his suit jacket folded in half across his left arm. He fed the machine the replicated bust of George Washington, founder of this proud country, hearing the coins fall as identical clinks into the machine’s abyss—and waited for the deposit to yield a sweet, nectarous outcome wrapped in polyethylene lining.
Instead of dates, he got Hostess Ding Dongs. What a wonderful joke! Similarly brown, yielding a sweet flesh, he guessed it could be a substitute for someone who didn’t know better. His finger must have slipped— did he press the correct button? The bag of dates beckoned to him again, an enticing product of nature held behind the glass as an object of admiration, like a museum artifact, and instead in his hands, he found himself holding a crinkling product of mostly Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Shortening generously doused in High Fructose Corn Syrup. Ding Dongs—he remembered eating them when he first came here to the US.
Most of all he remembered the office jokes, his coworker Stan, or as he liked to call himself, Stan the Man, the proud pusher of dubious investments, who would pitch a pencil at Vishaljeet’s turban, saying the bun, or as Sikhs would call it, joora, looked like a little boy’s ding dong. After the third time in two weeks, Vishaljeet had half a mind to go to HR, but what would they do? A grown man tattling on his colleague. Not an upstanding approach to deal with banal workplace terrorists, he decided.
That was all ten years ago, ancient history, as far as he was concerned. He jammed the fluffy Ding Dong into the waste bin next to the vending machine. The joke’s on me, he thought, now I’m the effin’ terrorist, stuck in this airport, can’t leave the terminal. I should’ve ratted on Stan, got him fired, rained more havoc while I had the chance, he thought. But he knew he would never have done that. It wasn’t in his blood; he was never taught to inflict undue harm on others. (But, it was not undue, it was probably in all fair use of the term “due,” and yet, he could not and knew he never would get someone fired from their job, their income to feed their family for some petty name-calling.) Instead he found a convenient excuse to move his desk to the sixth floor. Avoidance some might call it, but smart evasive tactic is the way he thought of it.
His life was always full of smart evasive tactics in approaching assimilation. He kept his turban for half a decade, keeping faith to the minority that he was whether in his hometown Iran or his newfound dwelling, land of the free, the recipient of “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” America, but eventually conceded to the calls of practicality that noted that the refuse-turned-residents generally didn’t wear turbans. He didn’t have to and he knew he could have kept it, but he was just tired of the explanations, of the looks of inquiry, the snickers. He played with the idea that when this airport fiasco was over, this silly detention in this transport hub keeping him from his home of twenty years in Jersey, he’d put the turban back on, if he could find it buried in his wardrobe somewhere. He’d be out soon, anyway. Back on a plane to the East Coast in no time. Just a hitch, he thought, a misunderstanding. He had a fiancé after all, and a position in i-banking he’s held for at least a good ten years. Wears jeans at home, drinks coke and watches football. How more American can he be?
His stomach whimpered. It was not really sustained enough to be a growl. Not enough for a meal. The officials didn’t even provide him the decency of an airport tray of food. Not even Panda Express or Taco Bell. Just told him that he was denied entry until further notice. His frustration curbed his hunger, however, and all he wanted were those dates, just as odd-fitting as he was, in the array of American snacks, and yet, it was there, belonging to the cache of automated refreshments.
Another fumble of coins and another buck fifty for a Persian fruity confection. A series of whirs and out comes—not his fruity delight as expected—but a yellow package of Starburst. He smacked the glass on the machine, but to no avail. These machines are as sturdy as bulls, made to take hits. It’s not like the dates were dangling on the edge of the coil, anyway, so aggression was of no use. They were perfectly lined up as they were when he first peered through the glass of the vending machine. Instead, another slot that had been activated that released the Starburst. He saw the familiar yellow package now in partition 9B, next to the Cheetos and M&Ms. Not the Fresh Mazafati Dates of 7F.
His will relinquished control to his gut and he unwrapped one chew to mollify his hunger. Twenty calories of corn syrup and palm oil. Unexplainably juicy, the package read. Certainly there were aspects of the sweet that were unexplainable, he thought. He thought of the name Starburst, a kind of galaxy, one that bears high rates of star formation. The Cosmic Exploration podcast taught him that. The kinds of things he would learn on his hour commute in New Jersey, sitting in traffic, playing with the dials. He thought about high star formation, as he chewed his artificial extreme juiciness. Starburst seemed like potential, the greater the generation of stars, the greater the possibility of planets. It was the bringer of life. Starbursts as firehouses of possibility, of creation.
Then his mind turned dark and inwards and he thought of other bursts, of those he’s been accused. He recalled an infamous moment—he was making a purchase for a boss’s birthday at the mall when it happened, in the early morning, right as work was to start. While all the consumers rushed to the Sears TV screens to see what the commotion was, once he heard the words “terrorists” and over and over the date that now has an ominous ring: 9/11, he slinked away, took the day off and stayed home. He hated them, the terrorists for what they did, ignoble acts of abomination, and he hated them more for what they did to his identity. He was no longer a Punjab-son-of-migrants-Iranian-American. He was first and foremost a suspect, to be wary and leered at, for someone not Sunni, not even Muslim, but still a prime candidate for jeers of being a bomb-flinging subversive. He didn’t get it— Sunnis and Sikhs didn’t even look the same. Sunnis don’t even wear turbans, they wear skullcaps. And Iran is mostly Shia (with exceptions of minorities like him). Even though his parents adopted a Persian surname named after Vishaljeet’s northern Iranian birthplace (where his parents migrated to), he was set aside from “normal” Iranians because of his top-knot donning of the turban of the Sikhs of his ancestral land Punjab rather than the spherical wrap the majority Shiite Iranians favored. Now, the same aesthetics that set him apart in Iran as a Punjab minority conversely made him more generally Muslim to an angry American populace, for reasons he could fathom given the ignorance but still could not really believe.
For the next few months, Vishaljeet saw his friends and family drop their turbans like stones into a river, a burden that sunk to the bottom never to be detected again. Their hair cropped short and neat, the iron dagger a mere pendant tucked under the button-down shirt, or in one case, as a subdued tie clip. Nothing flashy or even hinting of inciting aggression, let alone violence. Tucked shirt, shaved, hair trimmed. Just another ant in the American colony of capitalist businessmen.
He spat out the half-masticated Starburst into a tissue, wadded it and into the trash the whole package went. The sweetness was getting so overwhelming that it tasted almost hyperbolic. He pulled out another tissue and wiped his lips of concentrated cherry juice and Red #40. That wad, too, into the chute.
He decided he’d have another go at the vending machine. He was determined. He would get the dates. His resolve was like a gamer at a claw machine at the arcade, committing ceaseless trials fishing for the wayward stuffed animal that cost a sheer fraction of the bills pulled out of the wallet.
7F. He watched carefully as he clicked, matching his fingers to the buttons.
Another failure. This time Kit Kat. Reminding Vishaljeet of when he had bought his first Kit Kat at a newspaper stand near a bus stop. Again almost twenty years ago when he first arrived in this country. While sitting waiting for his stop, among other passengers bouncing in their seats, he took a surreptitious bite, just opened it and bit it whole—and was ridiculed by a boy with braces pointing at him, nudging at his preteen friend laughing. He looked around—perhaps they were pointing at someone sitting beside him—but they were clearly pointing at him. He didn’t understand it—a grown up eating a candy bar, how can this be a source of contemptuous fun for juveniles? Later he learned he was supposed to snap each of the perforated four pieces, one at a time, as he ate them. A social gaffe, an etiquette breach of handling quintessential Americana.
He deposited this junk in the trash bin—out the vending machine flap the Kit Kats came and into another flap it goes like the other previous unwanted conferments. He’d have to try again.
He was sticking in his third quarter of the six into the coin sliver of the vending machine when a young man bumped into him. “Excuse me,” said the man, on his cell phone. Vishaljeet’s quarter clattered to the ground and rolled about a foot and a half before spinning in a graduated lethargy to a stop. The man picked up the quarter and handed it to him, then hung up the call and pushed his thin cell phone into his chest pocket. Below that, clinging to his abdomen, hung a conference tag, “Daniel Chih-hung Chen,” it said. This man, Daniel, glanced at the vending machine, stopped for a second and asked if Vishaljeet was using it.
“Why don’t you go ahead?” offered Vishaljeet, extending a soft hand towards the glass.
Vishaljeet saw Daniel feed a crumpled dollar, watched it come back out and only to be fed again, (like giving peas to a petulant child, he thought), and then a few dimes and nickels. The man pressed 7F. Seven for the syllables in my name, thought Vishaljeet Mazandaran again. Something fell to the abyss below with a plop and the man opened it and pulled out a puffy package.
The man, Daniel, stood there for a moment, bent over at the base of the machine, one hand holding open the flap exposing the dispensing chasm of the vending machine and the other holding up a bag of Doritos.
“Huh, tortilla chips,” said Daniel.
“A problem?” asked Vishaljeet.
“No, not a problem. Just confused. Clearly, I saw peanut brittle.”
“Peanut brittle?” asked Vishaljeet.
“Yes, 7F. You don’t see it? It’s Taiwanese, one of our specialties there. A-li brand, it says, known in South Taiwan. Sweet, crunchy, very tasty. I didn’t know they packaged it for commercial overseas sale,” Daniel answered, muttering a bit to himself.
“I see,” said Vishaljeet. He looked at the vending machine but saw only dates in 7F. “Ali is an Iranian name.”
“Oh yeah? We have a lot of Ah-something’s back in Taiwan,” said the man. “I guess that’s something we have in common.” He was now standing upright, holding up the bag of chips inspecting it against the 7F goodies behind the glass. “It’s strange, I still see it there. The peanut candies. I guess I pressed the wrong number.”
Daniel brought the bag of chips up and held it six inches from Vishaljeet’s face. Vishaljeet could see the orange triangles on fire in the image on the bag, taunting him. For a second, he felt something dreadful, like seeing his hopes of returning to his home in America burn away. “Spicy Nacho,” Vishaljeet read.
“You want this?” asked the man Daniel. He turned his lips up into a frown, and shook the Doritos bag again.
Suddenly, an image passed before Vishaljeet.
*
It was that same Taiwanese-American man before him, the same Daniel Chih-hung Chen walking in Keds on pavement in bright daylight, in a plaid shirt and corduroy pants. He’s much younger now, no hint of a receding hairline. He’s strolling the streets of downtown, cars zooming by every so often. He hears a taunt, a “Hey glasses!”
Daniel turns. He’s in mid-bite of the same triangular crispy Doritos. He’s got a handful in his right, the bag in his left. His mouth moves up and down with specks of some bright orange dust in the midst of chomping, just as the other voice says in a gruff, incredulous manner, “You eating nachos?”
“Yeah,” says Daniel, looking at his bag. “Do-ri-tos,” sounding it out. He turned around and looked at the guy talking to him. The man was short, with spiky blonde hair. He was sitting on some steps at the time but now stood up, still somewhat hidden in the shadows of the apartment complex, and looked Daniel up and down.
“Na-chos? Huh?” The man was now taking a step forward, puffing up his chest, like some pigeon mating ritual. “Look, Nachos!” he says to an imaginary crew or posse, but there was no one with him. He turns to Daniel again, “Glasses, you prefer to be called Nacho?”
Daniel just started to walk away. He turned around, aimed east towards home, towards the fiery sun, ignoring the guy with the crusty voice in the shadows.
“Nacho!” the guy howled behind him. Laughing riotously. “Notchyo country!! Notchyo country at all. Go back to your country, where you belong!”
*
The image faded and Vishaljeet saw before him a much older Daniel, worn-looking, but otherwise well-kempt, his arm pushing his carry-on back and forth in a nervous tic, eager to get to baggage claim, or to his gate, or wherever he was going.
“Hey, did you hear me? I said, did you want this?” repeated Daniel. Daniel was distracted. He was now looking at the scrolling Departures list on the screens next to the vending machine, using a pinky finger to push up his falling glasses, while still holding out the sachet of Doritos to Vishaljeet.
Vishaljeet shook his head. “Not really,” said Vishaljeet. “Not a big Nachos fan.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Daniel said.
Vishaljeet watched Daniel hurry away, the one arm guiding his rolling carry-on, the other still clutching the bag of Nachos, despite his professed dislike of them. Vishaljeet turned back to the green sachet of dates, the seductive contents of 7F, the fruit of his once-home in Iran, never found in vending machines in his now-home America until just today. His now-home America, he thought.
The green plastic of the parcel of dates now looked artificially green. How could he have ever thought it looked like the verdant prairies and lush forests of Nur? he thought. It must be the changing of light in this hall, perhaps the setting of the evening sun, even as fluorescent lights flooded the terminal. The plastic package looked sickly green, lackluster, dull and ineffective, like the meaningless green card frittering away in his back pocket, the one that had his name scrawled: Vishaljeet, in Indo-Aryan parlance: great victory, now victor of none, stuck in limbo between places, not even a victor against a mechanized snack dispenser.
Author’s Note: “Fresh Dates” was inspired by current events in America and my long fascination with vending machines and their conveniences and frustrations. Sometimes it’s the little things that magnify the greater indignations and outrages of life. I suppose I also had a few things to say about migration, assimilation and belonging.
D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Besides DiabolicalPlots, her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge. Shecan be found on her website daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com and on Twitter @spireswriter.
Thank you for expressing your concerns about Rodney’s First Term grade. Please understand that the highest mark of “Chosen One” is exceedingly rare, even among our exceptional student body here at Avalon. Rodney’s grade of “Stalwart” is neither a mistake nor cause for concern, but a performance about which you and he can both be proud.
As I indicated in my written evaluation, Rodney is a bright young man, although he does have room for improvement in the areas of effort and behavior. I’m told by his Warrior, Wizard, and Rogue teachers that he shows equal aptitude in all three classes, so I’m confident that with support and encouragement, his skills will continue to improve.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
Teacher of Intermediate Feats & Virtues
Avalon Preparatory Academy for Adventurers
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I apologize for the misunderstanding. When I said Rodney would improve, I did not mean that he should expect to earn a grade of “Chosen One” next term (or any other term for that matter). “Hero” would really be a more realistic goal, perhaps further down the road, should he improve his efforts, though I’m afraid “Paragon” would be quite out of reach.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
Thank you for the information about Rodney’s early displays of giftedness as a child. I understand how excited you must have been about the promising results of his Early Childhood Augury, but you should know that ECAs have proven notoriously inaccurate. (In fact, the National Questing Board no longer recommends them). In any event, I did not mean to impugn Rodney’s potential, and while I understand that his sense of destiny might be a bit shaken, I hope you’ll agree that many paths to success still lie open to him.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I must respectfully disagree with your definition of success. Most of our graduates go on to successful adventuring careers without being Chosen Ones. It would be insulting to limit any definition of “success” to only those few. In fact, in my seventy-three years here at Avalon, I’ve only ever had two pupils earn that distinction. It is, necessarily, quite rare, especially during a lengthy interbellum period like the one we are currently enjoying. If you ask me, we should consider ourselves lucky to have no present need for Chosen Ones.
On a brighter note, you’ll be happy to know that Rodney did quite well on his recent Courage and Morality quiz.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I cannot violate student privacy by discussing former students with you in any detail. Suffice it to say, I’m sure you’ve heard of the two Chosen Ones I mentioned having taught. They graduated in the same year, and you no doubt heard all about their eventual feud and subsequent downfall. If I may say, they serve as an excellent reminder that being a Chosen One is not all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve known many a Stalwart (or Hero, should Rodney’s effort and behavior continue to improve!) who have gone on to happy and fulfilling quests.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I resent your implication that my instruction was in any way responsible for the Calamity of the Twins. Avalon graduates are responsible for their own choices after leaving us, and the moral track record of the vast majority of our adventurers is quite positive. I assure you that Rodney is in good hands in my class.
Respectfully,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
No, I am not only taking credit for my successes and ignoring my failures. I happen to be well aware of my personal shortcomings (though they are no business of yours), and poor teaching is not one of them.
Speaking of shortcomings, however, I’m sorry to report that Rodney’s recent score on his Courage and Morality quiz appears to have been the result of cheating. I caught him with a Talisman of Balacoth today, which I don’t need to tell you is a serious infraction of the Avalon Code of Conduct. Please expect further communication from the principal regarding this matter.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I’m sorry you have not yet heard from the principal. Please understand that he is only a couple of years from retirement and has slowed down some after several good centuries of service to Avalon.
To answer your accusation, however, I am NOT making a baseless charge. On the day in question, Rodney was the only one to have answered any questions correctly, and I grew suspicious when even his brightest classmates were making silly mistakes. Even I had slipped up once or twice only to have your son correct me. Lo and behold, when I checked under his desk, there it was, a little carving of the Fist of Balacoth, and it had taken hold of all the good fortune in the room. After I dispelled it, I had a hunch, so I let the class retake their Courage and Morality quiz. Suffice to say, your son no longer has the highest score.
We do not permit talismans, amulets, or potions of any kind within the school, for obvious reasons. I do not know where he obtained his contraband, but you may want to have a conversation with your son.
Respectfully,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
To suggest I was suspicious of Rodney merely for giving correct answers is ridiculous. I know he is quite capable of performing well on his own, and I’m sorry he felt the need to resort to cheating in order to prove himself. He remains a student of great potential for whom I still have hope.
And no, unfortunately, Rodney may not have an extension on his term paper. It remains due tomorrow.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I was as surprised as you by the drop in Rodney’s Second Term grade. My previous optimistic statements about his potential were never meant as a guarantee. I’m sorry if you misunderstood.
I’m afraid it was his term paper. Students were to write an essay extolling one of the classic heroic virtues with three specific examples, but Rodney chose to write about “ambition,” which was not on the assigned list of options. (I question whether it is a virtue at all.) Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I’m sorry if you were the ones who gave Rodney the idea to write his term paper on ambition. He alone is responsible for his work. Might I suggest giving him space to complete his assignments more independently in the future? (After all, you won’t be out on his quests with him, will you?)
I do not think it necessary for you to hire Rodney a private mentor. Of course, that is ultimately up to you, but Rodney’s challenges have more to do with personal choices than ability.
At this point, should you have any further concerns, it may be best to arrange a meeting. Is there a day or time that would work well for you?
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
It was completely inappropriate of you to appear via astral projection in my living room last night. I understand you are busy, but if you do not want to meet in person, please continue to direct all correspondence in writing to my school address.
Respectfully,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
Of course I want the best for Rodney, and no, I do not have anything to hide.
Rodney, however, may. I don’t imagine you’ve looked at his note-scroll recently? When I saw it today, it was filled with inappropriate doodles of damnation knives, Shigmala the Defiler, and other symbols of the malign. With your permission, I’d like to refer him for counseling with Sibyl Salens, our school soothsayer.
Concernedly,
Madeleine Whimbley.
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
It is no shame to receive counseling, and I’m shocked you would suggest otherwise.
Furthermore, I’m unable to respond to the letter from Rodney’s private mentor, as school policy prohibits me from discussing a student with anyone other than a parent, guardian, or fairy godparent. You do understand, of course.
I must say, though, that I have serious doubts about either the intelligence or integrity of a private mentor who would judge Rodney’s current work to be of “Chosen One” quality. In fact, I can’t believe we are still on the topic of Chosen Ones at all. Allow me to be frank: Your son is not and never will be a Chosen One. In fact, did you know that most Chosen Ones tend to be orphans? If it makes you feel any better, I doubt we will have any Chosen Ones this year at Avalon. The world is at peace. Get a grip. (And counseling for your son).
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
Per the principal’s request, please accept my formal apology for any implication in my previous letter that you ought to die in order for Rodney to become a Chosen One. That was not my intent.
Yours truly,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
Rodney’s behavior in class really has become quite intolerable. Today he accused me of being an “apologist for obsolete heroism” who is “shackled by her loyalty to the fading Light,” simply because I questioned the necessity of his bragging about the new certified Ancient Birthright Sword you apparently bought him for his birthday. He continued to spend the duration of class doodling pictures of it on the corner of his parchment along with the words, “I AM YOUR SAVIOR,” instead of working on his Hero Portfolio. At this rate, he’ll be lucky to make “Rapscallion” by the end of Third Term.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
As I am the only Intermediate Feats and Virtues teacher at Avalon, and as it is a required class, the school will be unable to meet your request to move Rodney into another section. (Believe me, I checked.) Given the circumstances, I’m sure we can stick out the rest of the year and make the best of what’s left of it.
As far as Rodney’s selection of advanced courses for next year, no single course of study is more or less likely to earn him a “Chosen One.” I know the recent craze has been for Wizarding, and before that it was Warriors, but the actual data support neither. If anything, Rogues tend to be slightly overrepresented in the available data from the last several heroic ages, though the numbers are not statistically significant since Chosen Ones are so rare.
In any event, I would encourage Rodney to continue with whichever course of study he most enjoys. And yes, he will be stuck with me again for Advanced Feats and Virtues.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I’m sorry to hear that Rodney is looking at new schools for next year. For what it’s worth, I strongly urge you to reconsider. As we’re fond of saying around here, “There’s always room for redemption at Avalon!” and your son did show great promise once.
Sincerely,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
No, “great promise” does not mean that Rodney could still be a Chosen One. Holy heavens, no. Just no.
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
Never mind, I’ve had it. Your son tried to open a Dark Portal today while my back was turned to the class. Luckily his classmates, who are better students than he is, banished it before it could do irreparable harm. The principal will be following up separately to impose a suspension for Rodney’s repeated violations of the Avalon Code of Conduct.
On a personal note, I feel the need to express how disappointed I am in your son’s decline this year. I’ve done what I can, but I only see him an hour a day. It’s not like I live with him.
Yours,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood,
I understand that Rodney’s application for transfer to the Pinnacle School for Unappreciated Youngsters has been accepted. I would say “Good Luck,” except that I have rather strong philosophical disagreements with their aims and methods there, and I know that Rodney cannot accurately explain the role of Luck in an adventurer’s success anyway. So instead, I’ll just say farewell. (I’m sure the feeling is mutual).
Regards, and Ever Yours in the Light,
Madeleine Whimbley
*
Dear Fairy Godparent,
I write to you in these darkening days with tidings of great hope from Avalon Preparatory Academy. The First Term performance of your orphan, whom I dare not mention by name lest the spies of evil are watching, has earned the rare and distinguished mark of Chosen One. Rejoice!
Please see the enclosed packet for more information, and sign, enchant, and return the accompanying form within ten business days to grant permission for further assessment and, if necessary, individual heroic mentoring.
Congratulations! On a more personal note, I have reason to believe that, should your orphan in fact be Chosen, the Dark Lord Rodney and his forces will hardly present an insurmountable challenge.
P.G. Galalis would love to have been a member of Oxford’s famous literary group, the Inklings (minus all the tobacco smoke), but since he was born on the wrong continent and many decades too late, he compensates by writing and teaching fantasy, science fiction, and other literature. His fiction is also forthcoming in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, and you can visit him on the web (https://pggalalis.com) or Twitter (@pggalalis). He lives with his family near Boston, MA.
Eye Found It! is a competitive hidden picture card game aimed at children. The version of the game I’m familiar with is the Disney version, though it looks like there are other variations. Each player is dealt a hand of cards with scenes from Disney TV shows or movies, such as Winnie the Pooh or Phineas and Ferb, or Monsters Inc. Another card is then flipped over for everyone to see which has a picture of an object, and the goal is to be the first to find that object. The object might be a teapot, or a hat, or the number 8, or a barrel. Any given object is in many of the pictures (though not necessarily all), so it’s a race to be the first to find it, then you flip your card over to get the new object to find, and the goal is to get rid of all of your cards.
One nice thing about the game is that it doesn’t depend on being able to read, so you can play it with children who are too young to read–you can read the object out loud or they can look at the picture of the object (though if they are too young it might take a little work for them to understand that i.e. a “hat” is not this particular kind of hat, it is any kind of hat). And kids can probably do it about as well as adults as long as they’re attentive enough, so it shouldn’t be a game they feel too discouraged about. I’ve found it useful when there’s a chunk of time that I need to keep one or more kids occupied, we used the game for the first time while waiting for fireworks on the 4th of July.
Audience All ages, though probably aimed mostly at children or adults playing with children. The children don’t need to be old enough to read.
Challenge Most of the challenge of the game is just in attentiveness and trying to very quickly scan pictures. There is some element of chance in that some scenes have a lot more objects than others–if you get a Little Mermaid scene there’s a whole category of items you’re not likely to find, for instance. The game levels out some as faster players lose cards because they have less cards to find images in.
Session Time Each round typically takes less than a minute, you could play as many or few as you want.
Replayability Definitely replayable, as you’ll get different scenes and try to find different objects in them, and especially if you’re playing with kids who enjoy the hidden picture. If you played it enough you could learn where objects are in each image I suppose to get an unfair advantage.
Originality I’ve never seen a competitive hidden picture game, I appreciate the novelty especially because it fills a niche that I otherwise hadn’t seen many games in, as far as being good for kids who are just about ready to read but who might be too old for very basic games like Hi Ho Cherry-O.
Overall I definitely recommend this if you currently have or expect to have kids in the 3-6 age group, because it’s a good challenge level for them, and because it’s all based on something kids can do very well you don’t have to pretend to be bad at for the kids to be competitive. Clever idea well executed.
I’m at the microphone for the first round of the 32nd Annual National Empathy Bee, and I can’t feel a thing.
*
ROUND ONE
Good morning, Alex. A man is sitting in a banker’s office. The banker says: “You have great collateral — I’ll give you credit for that.” Is this a joke? If so, why is it funny?
*
Press photographers in the front row dazzle my eyes with flashbulbs. The hotel ballroom stretches behind them, vast and dim, a fog bank of blurry faces. Mom sits somewhere in the audience, but I’ll never spot her with the naked eye from up here on the stage.
Fortunately, my brain implant has an image processing feature. I scroll through options in my mind, zooming, enhancing, upscaling. There she is, slumped on a straight-backed gilt chair with her “guardian of contestant” credentials drooping around her neck. The seat beside her, Dad’s seat, is empty.
*
ROUND TWO
Here is your next question, Alex. A middle-aged man posts pictures of his neighbor’s new sports car on social media, but he says the pictures are of his own car. Give two different reasons why he might be doing this.
*
The National Spelling Bee is deader than ancient Greek. So are mathletes and chess club. Now that every middle-school kid is running around the playground with a microchip in their head that syncs directly to the internet, traditional tests of academic knowledge are pointless. But those of us who aren’t good at sports still need something to do in the afternoons, so we get Empathy Bee.
The goal of the famous Turing Test is to stump a computer with questions that would be easy for a human. Empathy Bee is sort of like that. But the questions here are tricky for people, too. We’re supposed to be showing off our human potential by solving problems our brain implants can’t. It’s great practice for college essays, I’ve heard.
Some contestants spend a lot of time developing software to hack Empathy Bee and its hundred-thousand dollar grand prize, building databases of questions and using deep learning to predict responses. Veterans like me call them “chip kiddies.” The Bee stays a step ahead of technology, you only get sixty seconds at the mic, and it’s almost always better to go with your gut.
The problem right now is, my gut is missing in action. I’m used to nerves — they give me an edge — but not this dull incoherence.
*
ROUND THREE
Alex, you are late for class. You see two older kids bullying Ben. You know that if you stand up for Ben, he will think you are his friend. You don’t want to be friends with Ben, and you are scared of the older kids. What should you do?
*
I stumble on the third round question, speaking in half sentences, and I see the head judge’s hand hover scarily close to the dreaded buzzer before she decides to accept my answer.
Empathy Bee uses five judges at the national level. They score our responses on a ten point scale and determine if we’ve done well enough to advance. Because Bee questions are highly subjective, the judges take a lot of crap every year from angry parents, but I guess they’re used to it. Some of them used to judge beauty pageants.
Last year, when I got buzzed out in the fourth round on an answer I still think was pretty good, Mom spent two hours outside the judges’ greenroom demanding an explanation. She didn’t get one, and I don’t think I’ll get that kind of support from her this year. She’s spent the last few days wan and distant, refusing to talk about anything except nothing. She won’t discuss what happened the night Dad left.
*
ROUND FOUR
Alex, you are four years old. You have lost sight of your family in a crowded theme park. How do you feel, and why?
*
We get a restroom break before the fourth round. Standing in a line of seventy kids with nervous bladders, I flip my implant out of “do not disturb” mode and check my messages. The Bee jams network communications in the ballroom to block hints from parents or coaches, but here on the upper level of the hotel I’ve got a little bit of service.
When I feel the message coming in from Dad, the little jolt of electricity seems to travel right down my spine into my stomach. I haven’t heard from him in eight days.
Hey son. Good luck up there. His words jab into my mind like pins.
I message him back, keeping my eyes fixed on the tiled floor as neurons flow in and out of the implant. Where are you? Don’t you know the bee is on right now?
Yeah, I’m watching it on TV. You look great.
Is she with you?
Come on, Alex.
No, I want to know, are you with your mistress?
Long pause. Her name’s Cynthia, okay?
I don’t want to know anything about her.
*
ROUND FIVE
Alex, here is an excerpt from a child’s picture book. Please read it to the judges. Watch our body language carefully. Slow down, point to the pictures, or explain the story if it appears that we are losing interest or getting confused.
*
I don’t know how I’m still in the competition. Answers spring out of me without a second thought, like I’m one of the robots the Bee is designed to outwit. Three years of experience and hundreds of hours of preparation are keeping me alive, somehow. For now.
I started preparing seriously for the Bee in fifth grade, sitting at the kitchen table doing practice tests with Mom. When I got frustrated and wanted to give up the whole idea, she would simply put the books away and bring them out again the next day. Around the time I won my first regional playoff, her enthusiasm became mine, and I didn’t need any more encouragement to study.
Dad helped out, too, in the early days. I remember lying with my face in the living room carpet, feeling rather than hearing his deep voice reading me the prompts. I’m not sure when that stopped. This past year, he mostly lay on the couch in the evenings, eyes rolled up in his head, communing with his implant. Keeping up with work stuff, he claimed.
*
ROUND SIX
Hi again, Alex. Let’s pretend you have a young brother, Matt, who has ADHD. Day after day, he invades your personal space and messes up your belongings. How can you help him learn a sense of boundaries?
*
I tried to look up “adultery” in my implant yesterday. I didn’t get very far at first. The chip has parental controls enabled. My parents’ implants, however, do not.
My parents aren’t especially chip-savvy. They leave their implants unsecured on our shared network at home. That means I can pair my implant wirelessly with theirs and use their access credentials to get online, especially if they’re sleeping and unlikely to notice. That’s usually how I download the Q-rated headgames that my friends are playing. I used to be able to get those on my own implant, before Mom read some article about the supposed negative effects of virtual reality inside developing brains.
If Dad could do what he did — which is to say adultery, noun, voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone else who is not his or her spouse — I don’t see what’s the big deal about a stupid game.
*
ROUND SEVEN
Tell me a story about a time when you experienced a feeling of schadenfreüde.
*
The contestants are dropping out fast now. The questions get a lot harder in this round, separating the championship contenders from the chip kiddies. Aliya Dhumal, last year’s champ, fails to explain why a controlling parent would trust alternative medicine over science. She leaves the stage after the buzzer with her head down. It looks like I’m going to make the top twenty, maybe more.
I go to the restroom again during the commercial break halfway through the round. I don’t need to pee — I just want to see if Dad has messaged me again. He hasn’t.
I really wish you were here.
He responds after a minute. Me too, Alex. I’m sorry things worked out like this.
You could still make it. We have your entry badge and everything. I can see your seat from the stage.
Look, you know things with me and your mom are rough right now.
Yeah. I know.
Alex.
What?
I love you, okay? You have every right to be upset about all this. I hope you’ll understand some day that I had to do what was right for me.
Alex?
I reach behind my ear and flip the little switch that comes out of the implant, cutting off all access to the chip. My arms and legs are shaking.
*
ROUND EIGHT
You are a politician at a state dinner. The Italian ambassador starts telling a joke that you know will offend the Japanese prime minister. How do you intervene so that nobody’s feelings are hurt?
*
Mom insists I can’t blame myself for what happened that evening, but how can I not? I was the one who paired Dad’s implant with mine while he was sleeping on the couch after dinner. I only wanted his headgame password. I didn’t mean to look at his messages, and when I saw the pictures of the naked woman I didn’t know what to do. I probably shouldn’t have told Mom.
No, I had to tell somebody. I couldn’t carry that secret.
Maybe I should have kept it to myself until after the finals. I would have felt the embarrassment and the guilt, Dad’s guilt, wrenching my stomach, but at least I would have felt something besides this emptiness.
The kid sitting onstage beside me, Ginnie Worley from Cedar Rapids, mutters to herself each time she thinks the judges are about to buzz somebody. “He’s gone.”
*
ROUND NINE
Alex, Oscar Wilde once wrote that “each man kills the thing he loves.” If you truly love something, why would you let it go?
*
The flashbulbs blast in my face, leaving floaters all around my field of vision. It’s like looking into a Petri dish. My implant is still disabled, and I have no idea how to answer this question. I don’t know why someone kills their love. I don’t even know what love is supposed to be. I’m too young to be here.
The head judge leans into her microphone. She’s an elderly woman with a constantly sympathetic expression. “Thirty seconds, Alex.”
I could turn on the implant and search the database for Oscar Wilde. That’s what a chip kiddie would do, but there’s no time now.
Did I kill Dad’s love for me when I accessed his implant? If I hadn’t done that, if I hadn’t learned who he was, wouldn’t we still be together? Or was he bound to leave anyway, like Mom says, in which case nothing matters and this whole question is stupid?
“Alex. Time’s up. If you love something, why let it go?”
I close my eyes and speak so softly into the microphone that I can barely hear myself. “Because I have to do what’s right for me.”
“Please repeat that toward the judges?”
I turn toward the judges’ table. “I have to do what’s right for me.”
The judges put their heads together, murmuring. Somewhere behind me Ginnie Worley hisses jubilantly. “He’s gone.”
The sound of the buzzer strikes me right in the chest, vibrating all through my body. The head judge sighs, looking as always like she just put down a beloved family pet. “I’m sorry, Alex, that’s not an acceptable answer.”
I look out beyond the microphone, over the judges’ table, past Mom and the sea of people, right into the TV camera on the platform at the back of the ballroom. I look through the lens of the camera into the hotel room where I imagine Dad sits in bed with his arm around his mistress. I speak slowly and with emphasis, the way they teach you. “You’re darn right it isn’t.”
Then I walk off the stage and into that strange holding pen for just-eliminated contestants called the cry room. Mom is there, and I put my head on her shoulder, and all of a sudden I have more feelings than I know what to do with.
Author’s Note: I competed twice in the National Spelling Bee and still follow it from afar. In my opinion, the Bee is fundamentally broken in the digital age — kids keep getting smarter and prep tools get better, but the dictionary stays the same. I started thinking about the evolution of academic competitions, and came up with what I think would be a much more interesting event. (I’d watch it, anyway!)
Forrest Brazeal is a software engineer, writer, and cartoonist based in rural Virginia. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Abyss & Apex, StarShipSofa, and elsewhere. Find him at forrestbrazeal.com or on twitter @forrestbrazeal.
Matt Dovey is very tall, very English, and most likely drinking a cup of tea right now. He once got too happy after finding a packet of Golden Crunch Creams at the back of the cupboard, and has a scar on his arm where the Moderators intervened. He now lives in a quiet market town in rural England with his wife & three children, and despite being a writer he still hasn’t found the right words to fully express the delight he finds in this wonderful arrangement. His surname rhymes with “Dopey” but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. He’s an associate editor at PodCastle, a member of Codex and Villa Diodati, and has fiction out and forthcoming all over the place, including all four Escape Artists podcasts, Flash Fiction Online and Daily SF. You can keep up with it all at mattdovey.com, or follow along on Twitter and Facebook both as @mattdoveywriter.
D.A. 
