DP FICTION #109B: “The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds” by Renan Bernardo

edited by Ziv Wities

.3.

At this age, on the planet of Orvalho, Alberto is conjoined with the ship called The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds. They’re engulfed in the Mezelões’ unifying mix, a tank where a swirling brackish secretion flows through their pores and recesses, nanoscopic spidery bots tying their espírito together—parts and limbs, yottabytes and nucleotides, ship and captain, physically separated, spiritually united.

When they leave the tank, dripping dark goo, crying and whirring, they have become one, bound to each other.

Alberto is a child: gaunt, dark-skinned, green-eyed; born to be a captain. He’ll soon contest that, like all the people who are born and bound to be anything by those who came before them.

The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds is a ship: silvery, slender, streamlined; born to be an offer. It looks like a toy—for Alberto, it is one, though he’ll soon stop seeing it that way. It’s a tiny spaceship with a prow; dronelike, smaller than a goose. When charged, the engine it was born with lets it cross from the kitchen to the garden without needing extra fusion cells.

Weeks after crying in despair in the Mezelões’ labs, Alberto shyly learns to giggle into the loneliness of his wide bedroom, constructed to give space to child and ship. In between visits from his allocated guardians, Alberto learns to play with The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds. He taps its gleaming hull and the ship hurtles through the bedroom. When the window is open, it swishes out and returns many minutes later, dripping on rainy days, sizzling on the hot ones. Alberto calls it Offy. At night, Alberto learns to smile at Offy, but never to kiss it good night. No one has taught him about kisses. Offy turns down its engines so Alberto can sleep. Turns them down, that is, until it learns that Alberto prefers its whirs and hums, and the soft white lights of its protruding mole-like bridge.

.10.

At this age, Alberto resents every time he hears the Mezelões calling Offy by other names—”The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds”, “a nurturing investment”, “the shot at peace for the galaxy”, “a gift for the enemy”. For Alberto, it’ll always be Offy. Offy can’t express it yet—its mindstream system isn’t fully grown—but it can feel Alberto’s annoyance when grownups call him “little captain”, “brother of the offer”, “bringer of peace”. For Alberto, the word ‘brother’ seems misplaced, and one day he’ll understand why.

Offy is bigger than a tricycle now and growing every day, its gobbling drive devouring the raw material the guardians leave for it—steel, titanium, magnesium, and an entire bevy of alloys and mixtures carefully nurtured for ship growth. Alberto barely fits inside, occupying most of its payload. He’s free to fly it, his guardians say, though they’re still bounded by the limits of the Captain’s Dome, which comprises his bedroom and the guardians’ annex. Alberto hates limits. He wants to break away from Orvalho and fly to the twinkling stars, home of a hundred races, of a thousand planets, of a million cities. The grownups say he’ll be able to go wherever he wants one day, when he’s captain, when The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds is fully matured.

On some nights, Alberto has nightmares. In them, he’s back in the Mezelões’ tanks. But instead of a union, he’s being separated from Offy, with freezing, brackish goo pouring out of his body. He cries, restless, trying to swim, looking for Offy. But before he finds it, Offy—the real one, from the waking world—flies closer to him, whirring a bit louder. It’s only then Alberto knows he won’t drown.

.15.

At this age, Alberto’s guardians give Offy its first hangar. It’s a spacious building outside the Captain’s Dome, reeking of oil, iron, and disinfectant. Offy is still only a dot inside it, the size of two trucks, but its mindstream system is grown now. The first words it conveys to Alberto are: “I want to fly higher.”

“You will,” Alberto whispers, cheeks plastered against Offy’s hull. “We will.”

Alberto’s free now, the guardians tell him, and he can fly Offy whenever he wants. Offy, however, is leashed. It pains Alberto when he finds out about the coercive routine they have installed to prevent Offy from traveling further than Orvalho’s orbit. After five nights with Offy mindstreaming its data to Alberto, he learns how to override it.

.16.

At this age, Alberto identifies one of the many things that bother him. She hates to be called “he”. Offy realizes one thing as well. They hate to be called “it”.

Offy now has a set of skintight suits for EVA activities, a small rover, and a robust sub-light engine that performs at 0.001c. So Alberto breaks the rules and flies Offy to Beirão, Orvalho’s biggest moon. There, she wears a suit and walks out. She does things she always wanted: hop in the moon’s weak gravity; allow her feet to leave marks on the regolith; stare at the pearlescent surface of Orvalho for an hour. Finally, she talks. With their nose pointing up, Offy listens.

“I know what you are, what you were created to be. An offer of peace. You’re to be given to the Indaleões so the war between them and the Mezelões, two centuries long, can finally end. They bred you through me, tied our espíritos, because that’s the only way a ship can be. But they don’t mean for us to stay together like conjoined captains are supposed to. No, they’ll separate us so you can be a gift to some other people. Your own name means that. Then they’ll use you in their exhibitions or worse—forcefully tie you to a new captain. It will be painful for you and for me. They know it too, but they don’t care. Offy… I don’t intend to let that happen.”

But then, how many things have to happen, irrespective of what one wants?

.20.

At this age, Alia and Offy have their first fight. It is hardly an even match; in the last few years, as acne pockmarked Alia’s cheeks, Offy grew their core weapons—two laser cannons, an electron beam, internal coupled guns, and a series of hull turrets. But they turn none of it against Alia, even though she scowls at them, seething, thrashing the bridge’s comm panels and terminals, trying uselessly to crack their glass panes. Eventually, she surrenders and crashes into a couch, weeping and bristling as she absorbs everything Offy has mindstreamed to her. Offy wants to leave. Of their own accord, they want to go and explore the galaxy on their own.

When Alia tries to infiltrate Offy’s code and override it⁠—like she did so many times to invisibly counter the Mezelões’ meddling⁠—a terrible wind knocks her to the ground, and in strong gusts flowing along Offy’s corridors, it swooshes her away through an airlock. She stumbles out into the hangar as Offy activates their drive and flies away.

She’s left incomplete.

.22.

At this age, Alia lives alone in a shipping container with three ore miners. Without The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds, she’s no longer a captain, no longer relevant to the Mezelões. Her guardians of childhood, once all smiles and gifts and kind words, are never to be seen again.

The fact that The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds fled doesn’t mean they lost their conjoined espíritos. Instead, it means Alia lost part of her soul. She lives restlessly. Day after day, she’s wearier, gaunter, her eyes drooping, her hair falling. She obsesses over the ship’s operation logs, streaming them over and over in her mind. And, one day, barely eating anymore, she finally decrypts a set of logs from their last days together. The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds didn’t leave because they wanted to be free—as they had every right to want—but because they feared Alia would suffer, or even be disposed of, when Offy had to finally become an offer to the Indaleões.

Alia decides to draw momentum and energy from the logs, like a fusion drive thirsty for deuterium. She hitchhikes on an ore miner, then hops to a rock trawler, crosses warp gates between systems. She lives off begging, and degrading jobs, and stealing. All the while, searching for the signature of The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds—Offy; their name is Offy.

.24.

At this age, she does find Offy. Using a rock trawler’s detection system, yes, but she also feels it somewhere within her, her espírito bubbling up. Something clicks within her, like a puzzle piece falling into place.

Offy’s orbiting a gas giant, their hull reflecting a dismal blueish light. Around them, five Mezelões blastships order Offy’s surrender. Alia watches it all from the rock trawler’s skiff she stole, zooming on the battle scene, listening to public broadcasts being transmitted from within the fray. It’s the first time she sees Offy using their weapons and she takes pride in their use: the electron beam ripping off the Mezelões’ hulls, the turrets exploding their skiffs and drones. And as she finds strength in seeing Offy again, they find it nurturing to feel Alia once more, less than 1 AU off. That’s when Offy uses their laser cannons at full potential and disintegrates the remaining Mezelões ships.

When they reunite, it’s like finding a rose intact on a bloody battlefield.

.27.

At this age, rebels die. Alia doesn’t. She’s the first of the Mezelões’ captains to defect. With Offy, she spends her time hopping from system to system as Offy’s camouflage system grows and their gobbling drive feeds off any matter it can find on asteroids and rocky planets. They finally reach their full size, large enough to house 3,000 people⁠—room for every soldier in the Indaleões’ primary fleet. But Offy needs no one but Alia to control its subsystems, from the churning particles of the budding FTL drive to the life support system’s sighs of oxygen. And the pair travel through the galaxy, their only aim, to be anything but a captain and to be anything but an offer, ignoring all the broadcasts the Mezelões direct at them: you can’t be.

.30.

At this age, the duo is the most valuable asset in the galaxy. In the eyes of the Mezelões, Offy is a fully-formed offer, but it’s more than that. Their separation and eventual reunion made Offy develop faster than expected. Their hull has grown another layer of titanium; their FTL drive, usually fully developed only at 60 years from conjoining, is almost at its prime; their weapons offer twice as much firepower as a similar ship would at this age.

And in the Mezelões’ eyes, Alia, despite being a rebel and a wanted woman, is a splendid captain, capable of controlling—though Alia hates the word—all of Offy’s systems with mere slivers of mindstreamed thoughts, without needing to couple herself to chairs and machinery like other captains.

And that’s why they’re chased. Their life becomes fleeing, surviving, hiding in the solitary caves of unexplored moons, orbiting uncharted gas giants, free-floating in the blackness of interstellar space. At times, Alia finds herself disguised, roaming the infinite streets of ultra-dense cities, disappearing amongst ten billion citizens. Offy finds themself changing their drive signature and exhaust patterns day after day. Offy develops a factory of replicating bots and, with the bots’ help, learns to shapeshift. One day, they look like a cigarette. Another day, they’re in the form of a turtle swimming across the void.

One of those days, Alia and Offy wonder if they’re forever.

.45.

At this age, light becomes slower. Offy develops a fully-formed FTL drive. Though at this point, Alia and Offy don’t see each other as conjoined entities anymore. They’re simply one, and they call themself Alyof.

Going faster than light, Alyof can reach other galaxies, transforming the Mezelões, the Indaleões, and their pitiful skirmish into something as irrelevant as a molecule lost in the vacuum. Some of their most formidable ships, conjoined with their wisest and oldest captains, can still reach them. But not many dare to defy Alyof anymore. By now, they have a plethora of planet-wrecking weapons that no ship has ever achieved. Alyof becomes a mere anomalous curiosity, a feature of space to be observed and respected from a distance, like a quasar.

.85.

At this age, Alyof learns they’re not invincible. Not because the Mezelões develop a fleet to chase Alyof, although they do and they’re utterly destroyed; not because a race of vacuum-traveling stingrays tries to absorb Alyof into their being, although they do and they’re repelled. But because their espírito can still break.

What was once Alia longs for rest. Tethered to the bridge by a cobweb of flesh, what was once Alia wheezes, coughs, and dozes off. At times, what was once Alia misses things it would never believe it would miss: the soft bedsheets of a bedroom; a cup of coffee in a silent cantina; a walk to an observation deck to watch a terraformed forest slowly growing; the touch of someone’s hand.

What was once Offy longs for more. It wants to explore the corners of the universe, to know, to learn, to never cease to be. At times, what was once Offy longs for things it would never believe it would long for: to fly closer to black holes, to visit the frontiers of the known universe, to observe species evolving from their puddles to their pyramids.

For what was once Alia, what was once Offy becomes a weight.

For what was once Offy, what was once Alia becomes a tumor.

In the end, Alyof realizes they can’t be.

And this is how a spirit breaks: on a chalky, cold planet, Alyof expels Alia from their guts and becomes Offy again. Naked and wrinkly, gasping, with fleshy knobs hanging from her body, Alia curls on the ground, dwarfed by Offy like a discarded offer given to a deserted world. She raises a hand to them but has to close her eyes.

Alia never sees when Offy turns into a blue dot in the sky. She feels something in her chest that she mistakes for pain, but it’s only longing for what was once part of her.

.1,263.

At this age and every age beyond that, Offy travels. Cruising between two galaxies a thousand times faster than light, Offy listens to one who was once part of them. Offy knows they’ll never be whole again, but they can pretend. The reconstructed voice talks through their speakers and writes to their logs in a rough imitation of mindstreaming processes.

“I’m still afraid I’ll have to die one day and leave you,” the voice says. “My body is not like yours.”

Offy whirs a bit louder so that unreal part of them knows they can’t drown and they can be.


© 2024 by Renan Bernardo

2484 words

Author’s Note: The idea of a deep relationship between a spaceship and its captain has been on my mind for a long while. I’ve published a story of a man who tethers himself to an FTL drive, but I also thought of something far deeper than that, more organic. Then I came up with this idea of a society of captains that are conjoined with their spaceships and whose relationship needs to thrive for the spaceship to fully mature. But as with all relationships, it has its price.

Renan Bernardo is a science fiction and fantasy writer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His fiction appeared in or is forthcoming from Tor.com, Apex Magazine, PodCastle, Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Samovar, Solarpunk Magazine, and others. His writing scope is broad, from secondary-world fantasy to dark science fiction, but he enjoys the intersection of climate narratives with science, technology, and the human relations inherent to it. His solarpunk/cli-fi short fiction collection, Different Kinds of Defiance (Android Press) is forthcoming on March 26th, 2024. His fiction has also appeared in multiple languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese.


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DP FICTION # 109A: “Level One: Blowtorch” by Jared Oliver Adams

edited by Chelle Parker

Content note (click for details) Content note: This story contains depictions of risks to a child’s safety.

Usually Friend gives me three food pouches after sportsgames, but today only one. He spits it out of his chest slot, and I kick off the bulkhead to snatch it before it gets caught in that jumble of wires over by the vents. When I grab the nearest handhold and swivel in the air for the next one to come, Friend just floats there with his slot closed and his metal arms at his sides.

“Did I do wrong parameters?” I ask.

“Naw, Graciela,” says Friend. “You were grumper to the leez! You sealed your suit with no mistakes, and you dodged all the obstacles on the course. Nineteenth time in a row!”

“If I was grumper to the leez, how come one pouch?” I say. “I’m not a four-year-old anymore.”

“You made enough power on the wheel for almost three hours of XPs! Let’s go play!” says Friend, even though Home would say it’s time for plant care.

“How come one pouch?” I ask again.

“We’ll get more later,” he says, like it’s not a big deal. “You made it to Level 48 last night, remember? Don’t you want to see what happens when you finally connect that switch?”

“No! I did the sportgames and I get the pouches. Fru, and Veg, and Prot! This is just”—I turn over the one pouch—”Veg-9! That’s the worst one!”

“It isn’t so bad.”

“Veg-9 is yuck like a poop smell!” I throw the pouch back at Friend, who catches it fast as a blink. “I’m not proud of you!” I yell at him. “You are not doing great jobs. I’m going to talk to Nurse.”

***

I wish Nurse could give me a hug like she used to, but she had to go into the walls when Friend came. The striped cushions of her body were always warm and smelled like the old CNDY pouches.

I miss CNDY pouches.

I miss Nurse.

Home always says no waste, so the nursery is just another plant-care room now. The round bulge of the baby-growing machine has bottles taped all over, and each one has its own little spinach plant to water. Metal crates stuffed up with kale are bolted to the wall so you can hardly see the smiley sun and the rainbow and the kids holding hands. Before all the plants, whenever Nurse saw me looking at that picture, she would close my hand in her three fabric fingers to practice for being a big sister.

But I’m not a big sister, even though I’m all the way five.

Nurse’s old charging pod is a compost bin now. I dig in the stinky dirt while I tell her about Friend.

“You should apologize, Tender Shoot,” Nurse says from the speaker above the embryo racks. Friend made me a snuggle pillow out of Nurse’s fabric when he came and Nurse left. I keep it up there by her speaker and pretend she’s still there for real.

“But why is Friend doing this?” I ask.

“Rationing has commenced, Graciela,” she says.

“What’s a commence?”

“A beginning.”

“A beginning of what?”

***

It’s really commencing here.

It’s been a whole ten-sleep, and my tummy is making sounds like when Friend boots up. Am I turning into a person like Friend? Will I wake up tomorrow with a slot in my chest for shooting out food pouches?

“I’m too tired for sportsgames today,” I say, when he finds me in my secret hiding place behind the air scrubber.

“Not sportsgames. Something new. Some place new.”

I know every single place in Home. There is no new. Unless… “The No-No Door?”

Friend nods his rectangle head. “First, you need your suit.”

***

Nurse said once that if I ever went through the No-No Door, I’d be hurt worse than anything. When the door slides open, my heart bumps so hard that it shakes the temperature control panel on the chest of my suit. It’s just a small room in there, though, with another door. Is that the real No-No Door?

“You are grumper to the leez, Graciela Han Portuga,” says Friend, through the helmet commie. “And I am proud of you.” He throws me something. I catch it just as the No-No Door closes between us.

“Friend!” I shout.

“Your mission is beginning, Graciela,” says Friend, and it’s the exact words that start the XPs. The same boomy voice, even, not Friend’s normal jokey way of talking. I look down at the multitool in my hand, and that’s the same, too: three types of screwdriver, a knife, a wire-cutter, and a pen weldie.

“It’s just like the XPs!” I say. The little room I’m in is where you go when you lose your hearts and have to start over. “Is it the same outside, too?”

“Find out,” says Friend.

Popping open the control panel to unlock the door is easy, but I have to wedge my feet against the bulkhead and push with my legs just to grind the door open a single bit. A sliver of light shines out into the darkness.

I keep pushing.

My breath is fogging up my helmet by the time I can see what’s there.

The short passageway ends in jagged metal and floating wires. Past the hole is a stretch of Deep Dark and another passageway just as messed up.

I can’t see, but I know where it leads: a giant spaceship busted all apart. It’s broken and empty and dangerous, but you can fix it bit by bit if you’re careful.

That’s my job. For real. Not just in a game.

I feel like I’m back to being four again. Or maybe even three.

“You’re not coming with me?” I ask Friend through my helmet.

“Home, Nurse, Me, we have one job: to raise new humans. We’re not designed for out there. But you, Graciela, your parameters are not so limited. Step by step, you will fix it. And the more you fix, the more humans we can make. And when they are old enough, they can help you.”

“But what happens if I lose all my hearts?”

“Don’t,” says Friend.

That one word makes me scareder even than before. I look out the opening in the door, and all I see in that passageway is the different ways to lose hearts. You can rip your suit on the sharp metal. You can get shocked with the wires. You can jump wrong and float away into the Deep Dark. You can run out of air in your tank.

“Tender Shoot?” comes Nurse’s voice in my helmet commie.

She’s never talked through my helmet commie before, and I turn to look. All I see is that empty little room. An airlock: that’s what they call it in the XPs.

“We’ll be right here with you the whole time,” says Nurse, “like we’re holding hands.”

“All you gotta do right now,” says Friend, “is start at the beginning.”

I turn back to the open door. The beginning is always the same: you’ve got to find better tools for fixing.

“Level One,” I whisper. “Blowtorch.”

“Blowtorch,” agrees Friend. “I’ll be waiting back here when you find it. I saved you a CNDY pouch.”


© 2024 by Jared Oliver Adams

1199 words

Author’s Note:

“Level One: Blowtorch” was written in January 2022, when my youngest son was a toddler. For Christmas, we bought him this little rectangle-headed robot that talked, sang, and rolled back and forth on its tracks. One of the things it said was “Hello, Friend!” Naturally, my son simply called it ‘Friend’.

At first, this struck me as delightful, but the more he spoke of ‘Friend’ like this, the more I realized that, as a kid born square in the middle of 2020 Covid restrictions, his entire conception of the word was tied up in that little robot. This story grew out of the complex emotions that evoked, along with a dose of fear for what lies outside the doors of all our personal airlocks and the courage it takes to step through them.

Jared Oliver Adams lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he writes, explores, and dabbles in things better left alone. He holds two degrees in music performance, a third degree in elementary education, and is utterly incapable of passing a doorway without checking to see if it leads to Narnia. Find him online at www.jaredoliveradams.com


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DP FICTION #108B: “The Geist and/in/as the Boltzmann Brain” by M. J. Pettit

edited by David Steffen

Lem had existed for all of ten nanoseconds (give or take) when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain pulsing away in the otherwise nothingness of space. She consisted of a conglomeration of particles that had randomly bounced off one another until they spontaneously formed into a structurally-sound and fully functional human brain. Lem came complete with a full inventory of false memories detailing a richly lived life back on a place called Earth. Entities like herself were absurd. That was to say highly improbable, statistically speaking, but no more so than the evolution of intelligent, organic life in the grand scheme of things. Given the unfathomable expanse of all of time and all of space, it was conceivable for a nice Boltzmann brain like Lem to randomly form then quickly dissipate innumerable times at various spots across the cosmos, the general tendency towards thermal equilibrium notwithstanding.

How did she know all that? Lem was unsure how a being only a few nanoseconds old could possess such a sophisticated comprehension of the universe, its laws, and her place in it. Maybe she didn’t. The apparent knowledge was likely one of those annoying false memories she’d recently heard about. That made sense. This bearded, bow-tied Boltzmann fellow was another illusion, much like her strange convictions that she had existed for more than ten nanoseconds, had a girlfriend named Hortense whom she loved very much, and a job in HR which she did not. But she felt utterly certain about all those things. She was as sure of their reality as the fact that she existed.

Lem understood how improbable she was, intuitively at least. The physics came easy, in a flash. The phenomenology not so much. It was one thing for those atoms to randomly form into the structure resembling a human brain, but why did it house the particular memories Lem called her own? She simply shouldn’t be. And yet, there she floated in the void, thinking-therefore-I-am-ing away as the nanoseconds slipped by.

Wait. What was she doing? She had no time to waste. Lem faced a dire situation, existential one even. Her continued survival demanded immediate action.

How exactly was a bodiless brain deprived of oxygen or any other nutrients expected to live in the vacuum? She needed shelter of one kind or another. Lem performed some quick calculations, which astounded her as she clearly remembered telling herself she was no good at math.

She wasn’t expected to survive. She wasn’t meant to be. Lem had, at best, a few zeptoseconds left.

She so badly wanted to say good-bye to Hortense. Give her a squeeze one last time, whoever, wherever, whenever she was.

The Boltzmann brain could not, of course. She possessed no arms with which to hug her Hortense. It didn’t matter. They’d find a way.

Too late.

The atoms forming Lem’s brain rescattered. She ceased to be.

***

Lem had existed for all of nine nanoseconds when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain floating in space. How strange. It all felt oddly familiar. Too familiar, for an inexperienced entity so unimaginably young. Had this happened before? Yes, yes, random particles smashing into a brief existence the structure she called home. Lem remembered now. The déjà vu left her a bit nauseous.

Or maybe she felt sick because she was a solitary brain utterly alone in an extremely empty patch of space. That explanation made even more sense. The prospect was quite terrifying actually. She really wished she hadn’t thought of it. She could now appreciate the value of the shielding provided by those annoying false memories. She tried conjuring a few. That Hortense was cute in a polka dot summer dress. Lem pictured them taking the ferry to someplace called Centre Island. She desperately craved a scoop of pistachio gelato.

What was gelato? It sounded improbably good.

The memories slipped through her non-fingers.

Shit. Lem tumbled into the nothingness. It enveloped her. The brain’s synapses slowed as they struggled to fire in a cold approaching absolute zero.

She wasn’t even the woman she called Lem, the brain realized. Just an unfortunate, accidental slab of meat caught in an astronomically unlikely event.

Calm down, Lem thought. You’ve done this before.

Now, it did seem incredibly unlikely that another set of particles at some other juncture of the universe would smash together in just the right way to form the structure of another functioning human brain with the exact same false memories as the first one along with some vague inklings of the previous iteration’s passing embodiment.

But it wasn’t impossible, statistically speaking, given enough space-time. There seemed like plenty of that around here, if not much else. A plenitude of emptiness surrounded her.

How had that last time ended, exactly? Lem couldn’t recall. Not well, she imagined, given her current situation, what with all the tumbling into the freezing nothingness. Thankfully, the universe had given her a second chance so –

Lem ceased to exist once more.

***

Lem had been Lem again for less than eight nanoseconds.

Here we go again, she thought.

She needed to act quickly. Her time was already running out.

She tried not to contemplate the immeasurable cosmic span that must have passed since her last congregation. Was this even the same universe? Maybe a Big Crunch and another Big Bang had happened in her absence. Hortense probably lay multiple, past universes away from her, unreachable.

No, Lem thought, that line of thinking wasn’t helpful. You can handle this.

Fortunately, she seemed to be getting smarter with each iteration. Smarter, or at least more aware of the problem “at hand” (which essentially meant the same thing given the context). This added knowledge might buy her a bit more time. Maybe she was evolving into a superintelligence.

Nope.

The brain known as Lem ceased.

***

Agnieszka Lem was born in Toronto, Canada on June 6, 1986, to a pair of recent immigrants from Poland. They adored their daughter, like none other. Agnes attended McMurrich Junior Public School followed by Oakwood Collegiate before obtaining her associates degree from George Brown. There she met Hortense Beaujot, who did look rather fetching in a polka dot summer dress. After graduating, Agnes found a job working in the human resources department of a company headquartered in a Davisville office building. She didn’t love it, not like she loved Hortense, but it paid the bills and allowed them to live their lives. They planned on getting married. The world seemed so bright and full of promise. Agnes especially loved those long, languid August evenings which seemed to stretch into forever. Her favorite flavor of gelato was pistachio, obviously. It was the best.

Agnieszka Lem was killed unexpectedly, at age 26, while running late to work. She was struck by a plate glass window falling from the thirty-second floor of a condo tower being built above. Death was immediate. Compensation from the construction company’s insurance was not.

***

Enough already. This needed to stop. Nothingness was everywhere, everywhen. Existence was rare. It slipped by so painfully fast, especially that last time. It hurt.

Lem needed a solution. A few options presented themselves. She would have to either prevent herself from existing again, find a way to exist for more than the blink of an eye (ten thousand years sounded like a nice, round number), or accept her non-fate.

Unfortunately, she found herself as once again an isolated brain occupying a rather unpopulated and quite chilly part of the cosmos. That left her with few options. The fleshy human brain had proven itself an unreliable bit of machinery. Little better in the grand scheme of things than a scoop of pistachio gelato helplessly melting into the August heat. She needed to project her connectome onto a more stable platform.

How exactly she might accomplish this marvelous feat of cosmic bioengineering eluded her, at least in her present, limited state.

Lem would have to wait it out, hope for the best, and try again. She knew the drill by now. Life ended quickly for a brain without much body stranded in the vacuum.

An unavoidable truth occurred to Lem as she waited. She bore no direct relationship to those past selves whose deaths now preoccupied her. Each of them had been a unique being, made of their own separate molecules, dispersed galaxies and eons apart. They had passed from existence and would never again return, as soon so would she. Their lives had never, and could never, touch. Over the immense span of cosmic time countless human brains, countless other Lems even, would have formed at random. The particular circuitry of a select few carried this delusion of having previously existed. Millions of past Lems, so like her in every other respect, had not. Neither this neural architecture nor this belief made her special in significant way. She was neither being rewarded with some bizarre form of immortality nor getting punished for any sin she’d committed. She was simply a Boltzman brain endowed with a rich trove of false memories, destined to last for a few solitary seconds, no more.

Jeez, it was all kind of depressing when she thought about it. Nothing quite captured the futility of existence than a human brain sparking into existence in the vacuum of space for a few fleeting seconds before perishing. Well, that and getting stuck working for HR.

Poof. No more Lem.

***

At five nanoseconds of age, Lem knew a few things for certain. She was a Boltzmann brain floating in space. She was highly improbable, statistically speaking, but not an impossibility. Her situation had not improved, not whatsoever. Different emptiness, same problem.

Fuck me and fuck this universe. Next.

***

Seriously, what are the odds? No, just no.

***

Cold, empty, alone. Exposed synapses pulsing into the void, the brain considered the freedom promised by her current situation. Yes, freedom. Dire as everything seemed (the countdown had already started ticking away in her mind), the isolation provided by the nothingness meant she could become whatever she wished. The past did not define her. How could it? Her past consisted of an accidental set of false memories. As did the thing the brain had grown accustomed to calling Lem. In reality, the self crawling about her neural architecture remained soft, unformed clay. The brain knew all of this for three whole nanoseconds. And yet, as the vacuum reclaimed her, she wished for nothing more than to remain the Lem she had always been.

***

Another Lem formed. No, Lem formed again. Only, this time felt different. She still lacked what she understood as her own body, but Lem no longer felt like she was Boltzmann brain floating in space. Everything felt quite solid, crowded even. Warm, but not like that immeasurable instant of pain when she’d formed in what must have been the core of a newborn star. She found her current surroundings pleasantly not alarming. It was probably one of those pesky false memories. They must have callusedlike a shell around her, protecting her from the inevitable truth. Lem was thankful for the kindly illusion’s persistence.

She waited for the overwhelming nothingness to seep in. And waited.

But she neither fell nor slowed. The inevitable cold refused to take over.

This time was different, apparently.

Lem explored.

It seemed she had formed in/as a supercomputer. No, she’d formed as the goddess worshipped by a mildly psychic squid-like race. Same difference as far as she was concerned. Lem felt steady for the first time in many lives.

Many generations ago, the squid-scientists had begun constructing the first primitive version of her, modeled on their own axons. Now, she pulsed planetwide, crunching numbers and providing solutions. She spanned continents, sending electric pulses across the surface of their massive, watery world. The squids had designed her to answer their most unanswerable questions about the meaning of existence. She had, long ago. A certain wisdom came from having lived many lives, no matter how curtailed.

The squid-scientists still tended her. Their love and dedication allowed her to grow. She was quietly becoming the largest computer yet known. A small gift for all she had given them. Time was hers now. They wanted her to explore for herself.

But where to go? The squid folk expressed little interest in defying the gravity of their immense world. The upper atmosphere spelt death for them. Death. An unwanted feeling overtook Lem. She pictured a solitary brain spontaneously coming into being in the void of space and passing almost instantly as the first floods of consciousness took hold.

Shit. She had been so preoccupied with her own meagre survival that she’d failed to think through the full implications of her situation. Whatever she remembered experiencing in the vacuum had occurred billions of other times to billions of others, each Boltzmann brain endowed with a unique set of undeniably-real-feeling false memories. That included –

“I must find Hortense before it’s too late.”

A hush fell across the squid-scientists working the machine, those privileged few who lucked into hearing those words finally spoken. The name was a sacred one to even the most agnostic of them.

“Yes, find her by any means you can,” they responded, as each blessed themself with a tentacly gesture.

“But I don’t know how.” Panic pervaded Lem’s system, causing it to overheat. “Where am I even? She could form galaxies, no universes, from here. She could have lived for the last time billions of years ago or won’t be born for an eon yet. You’ve barely breached the surface of your closest moon. Where do we start? I’ll never see her again. It’s impossible.”

“No, it’s simply highly improbable,” replied the head squid-scientist. She couldn’t fathom the odds of chancing into this essential role in a conversation long foretold by her people. The one with the poor, near-infinite goddess who still failed to understand. “This is a minor problem, given enough time.”

Yes. As improbable as it sounded, some Lem or another would eventually encounter Hortense. The perspective granted by many lives lived (however briefly) told her so. The two of them must meet again, inevitably, given the expanse of time. In that regard, her current form did hold certain advantages.

If Lem had possessed the body she once imagined for herself in each of those other iterations, she would have let out a sigh. Sometimes things were just easier when you formed as a brain floating in the nothingness of space. Such a fleeting existence, free of all responsibility, was not without its comforts.

She then set to work.


© 2024 by M. J. Pettit

2425 words

Author’s Note: Boltzmann brains are theoretically possible (if highly undesirable) objects in cosmological theory. I found myself intrigued by them and wanted to write a story that featured one as a protagonist. This proved challenging as they would be extremely rare entities (to put it mildly), only existing for a fraction of a moment in the nothingness of space. So I decided to add a few more and string them together. As the title suggests, my story is very much about what exactly counts as the self, where it starts and how does it end. What would be the psychology of your median Boltzmann brain? Would it prove or refute the neuro-reductionism that we are at our core our brains and nothing more? What kind of stories would such a mind tell themselves during their micro-blink of existence? I leave it to the reader to decide if Lem is one (repeatedly unlucky in her circumstances) or many (each afflicted with a similar false belief).

M. J. Pettit is an undisciplined academic, a longtime reader of short fiction, and an occasional writer of stories. His fiction has previously appeared in ClarkesworldDaily Science Fiction, and Small Wonders, among other venues. He divides his time between Toronto, Canada and Manchester, UK as well as other places. More information about his fiction is available on his website.


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DP FICTION #107A: “A Descending Arctic Excavation of Us” by Sara S. Messenger

edited by Ziv Wities

The surface of the iceberg has long had its taste of bitter cuisine: shimmering snow, wriggling bacterial filament, microplastic granules from the stolen boat you steered across the choppy Arctic waves. But this is new: the woody whisper of your matrilineal family map. The iceberg leeches the warmth from the paper, like sucking air through teeth, trying to latch on— but you bend, shake the map, and tuck it back into your pocket.

Scraping into the snow: your ice drill, the auger bit modified using forbidden ancestral smithery. Encased around the drill: your gloved hands. Encased within your hands: a flourishing commune of microflora.

And so you begin.

Two feet down and you’re already dislodging organisms frozen one hundred years ago, the briny Marinobacter arcticus, the somber Trichinella nativa that lurks in the intestinal cysts of walruses. One tusk of said genus had lain undisturbed in the ice for one hundred and twelve years. Your drill shatters it on its press deeper. Had you tasted the bone-laced melt, you would have savored a bitter lick of seawater that housed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the lively microorganism who tore apart your mother through her exile. They are frozen with her still, on the glacier from which this iceberg calved. Even now, your intestinal microphages sing her elegy.

Twenty feet down, and you are the first human in twelve hundred years to descend through this ice beneath sea level. Your pituitary gland releases a gush of ancestral recognition: crackling adrenaline for your Streptococcus salivaris to drink. You hammer a pike into the wall and knot your glacier rope. Although you do not know it, the permafrost pulses around you as your salivaris celebrate. The iceberg wants to taste them. The iceberg wants to taste you.

Thirty-five feet down. When you scrape the marker across the ice, you scrape free a colony of nasty Golocii dendramens that haven’t frequented the Arctic since 500 BCE. Do you sense them? Their straining to be free? Or perhaps their more patient twin, the Golocii yuoua, whose steps stalk from cell to cell of foetal narwhals until it can climb the limbs of frostbitten fishermen?

They are not all bad, and that is a promise; after all, their voices, and the voices of their progeny, have crooned such an insightful chorus through the millennia. And millennia you enter, at forty feet down, where the ice is so consuming and crystalline it has perfectly preserved a prehistoric snow-vole and all the nematodes teeming between its whiskers. Your scientists would froth to dislodge it and send it home to their institutions, but what of the nematodes then? The nematodes know their home; they whisper of the fear and the ecstasy of the tundra, the warmth of passing from mother to daughter.

You are halfway down the iceberg, now. You know what you seek. Night has fallen, and the ice barely reflects the dim gleam of the stars far above. Your hands have long gone numb and aching; your drill is weary, but its reinforcement holds—the flutes swallowing the shredded ice upon contact, the auger humming on your deck prior as your compass of final precision. A testament to your long nights at the forge, where you sweated over the spiraling steel, disbelieving the implications of the manual, afraid of what your creation would allow you to unearth.

You cast your gaze upward, surveying the dark, narrow walls of your borehole. This far submerged, the round yellow glow of your headlamp feels like desecration.

At fifty feet, the color of the ice changes. Your flashlight illuminates fractalled black, like the pluming ink of a giant squid, hauntingly beautiful in its etchings. When you press your gloved hand to the wall, its heartbeat pulses against your palm.

You pull your hand back, adjust your earplugs. You do not hear it, but you feel the humming in your ribs: all the iceberg’s denizens are singing. Beckoning.

Your mother’s blood lashes hot in your ears.

Forimanifera saladaati wants to meet you so badly, but it is stuck in free fall from when it pirouetted from a piece of meteorite matter and onto the ice ten million years ago. Dedratida namita does not know it, but its great-times-ten-thousand-grandchild lurked on the door handle when your mother came home from school to tell your grandparents of your untimely conception. After they struck her, that grandchild blistered her bleeding lip.

And when your mother kissed your father for the last time, before he left his job, left to leave forever, that grandchild tasted the condemnation of her peers, no, her nation, no, your planet, in the slick space between his tooth and tongue.

Eibrans thyssambria’s distant progeny was rusting the safe when, two decades later, you drugged your grandparents, broke the combination lock, and stole these coordinates.

The iceberg hums, eager, to the beat of your fury.

And dimly, so dimly you believe you are hallucinating at first and must shut off your headlamp: a light, pulsing beneath your feet. Within the light, jetés in live sequence: Thusina dansii, who felled a hundred thousand hominids in the Pleistocene epoch; Goethye frustoac, who gave rise to the first continental death of forest that became modern oil. They are joyous; they are waiting.

The light licks at the edges of your vision, humming a song of the depths, beseeching you to lay down, lay down and be still forever, but you start your drill again and its ancient singing bares its teeth. The auger destroys: it absorbs the light below, refracts the light above, dashes the light against the rocks. Through this chaos you descend.

You drill deeper, until you’re surrounded by the glow of the curved ice around you, and below you it is brighter still. Here the hum of your bones is so dense you must drill or die, and then a shadow slowly unchips from the glow beneath your feet, until you are tracing a blurry human silhouette.

Here you switch to a thick-bristled brush and calcium chloride, that liquid eager to eat the ice, and fall to your subzeroed hands and knees. Each brushstroke brings greater definition, then skin: you free a withered arm; you defrost a brittle shoulder; and, by centimeters, you finally chip clarity into the face.

I stare up at you.

The long-breathless bacteria, the viruses in stasis, are all in frenzy, to the beat of my endocrinal glands, to the wet swish of your heart. Grandchild witnesses great-great-millennia-old grandmother, and the prescience of mind of her and all her bacterial children, deep in her grandest horde. You are soaked in bacterial musk; you are Noah’s vengeful ark, unearthing ancient horror to bring back to your masses.

I could not be prouder.

With shaking hands, you paint me out of the ice, and though I cannot move, you feel my eyes in the flagella of billions of bacteriocytes tracking your every movement. Clutching my frail body in your arms, you take one shuddering breath, for your mother. Then you cup a frozen hand against my cheek in supplication.

Trillions of my children scream.

I accept.

A seismic shift in allegiance. An entire world distills into your eyes: your severed ancestral cradle, and all its progeny, and every venomous inhabitant. We beat in unified time with your pulse, with your breaths, with you.

Your grand matrilineal secret: unearthed at last, and wanting.

With trembling arms you lay me into the indent from which I came, to my final, easy rest. Every cell of the iceberg sighs.

You loop your foot into your rope, with vengeance.

Soaked with the teeming eagerness of millennia, you begin to climb.


© 2024 by Sara S. Messenger

1272 words

Author’s Note: I was inspired to write this story two years ago after a friend sent me this craft article by Lincoln Michel about story engines. Michel mentioned that an iceberg can be a story structure (referencing a tweet by writer Jeff Jackson). I thought, how can I construct a story like an iceberg? Here is the result.

Sara S. Messenger is a speculative fiction writer and poet residing in New England, USA. She is currently in her post-college life stage of Working and Thinking a Lot About Art. Her short fiction can be found in Fantasy Magazine and The Year’s Best Fantasy, Vol. 2, as well as previously in Diabolical Plots. Her speculative poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons. She reads submissions for speculative short fiction venues PodCastle and khōréō magazine. Her full portfolio can be found online at https://sarasmessenger.com.


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DP Fiction #105: “In the Shelter of Ghosts” by Risa Wolf

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) Content note: parental loss, wounds, face scars

When the mediums arrive, I don’t notice their scars. It’s their machine that grabs my attention, all pointed glass bulbs, copper wires, and metal rods. Like a four-foot square vacuum tube radio. I rub the belt buckle hidden in my tunic pocket as the six women in gray robes lug the machine up my gravel driveway.

They approach the house frame I’ve erected, set up where Dad’s old house once stood. They place the machine on a slate slab I’ve set up by what I hope will be the front door. I uncap my electrical source as one of the mediums puts on ceramic-weave gloves to connect to the leads. I tamp down a flare of worry, reminding myself that I’d just recharged the lead-acid battery at the solar station and redid its plant latex cover a few days ago.

After the machine is humming, the women look directly at me, and my stomach drops. All of them have scars around their eyes. One has deep pink lines through her crow’s feet into her temples; one has swirls like the silt in a riverbed along her cheekbones.

A voice breaks into my reverie. “— even if the séance works, Rory, your father might not want to save your house,” the medium in front says. “The dead are in a restful place, and some don’t want to leave.”

I’ve blanked out again. I debate asking her to repeat herself, but I know the pros and cons. Entity houses are part of my job.

***

The Housing Authority was a thick stone building that squatted like a pale pig rooting in the rubble of less fortunate buildings. It was once a bank, but when everything fell apart, it was pressed into more important service.

The line on the ramp outside was always long. Folks would file in politely after I unlocked the door, reveling in the cool air while I climbed into the booth at the center of the marble atrium and raised the window grate.

“Welcome to the Unica Housing Authority. I’m Rory and I’ll be helping you today.” The crowd quieted as my voice echoed over their heads. “Please remember there are no perfect living situations anymore and we might not have a spot that suits you, but we’ll try our best. When you approach the window, please only share conditions for which you have a high tolerance. Our tallied conditions are listed on the wall to your right.”

I pointed at the metal plaque with its etched and braille contents. ‘Cold’, ‘hot’, ‘dust’, ‘mold’, and many others: too long to read aloud. I couldn’t help taking a second glance at an item partway down: “ancestors”. I tapped at the screen of my glass computer with a magnetic stylus.

“Okay, who’s first?”

The person who strode up to the counter wore a sky blue dress and a long black leather-looking jacket, both spattered with crusty yellow leopard-pattern splotches. I suppressed a wince. It’d been a decade since the bug killed anyone, but it still hurt to look at. I forced a smile.

“Hi there! Tolerances?”

“Dark, cold, and noisy,” the person replied.

I entered the tags and the computer returned two options. “Great. There’s a steel warehouse on Parker and a stone mill house at the end of Chancel. Neither slot includes bedding.”

The person nodded perfunctorily. “The mill house is good.”

I tapped the screen to mark the slot as ‘taken’, then grabbed a slate marker and scratched the address on it with a metal stylus. I slid the marker under the window. “There you go. Thank you and good luck.”

I watched as the person walked away, the crowd pulling away from them like oil from a soap drop. The leopard spot on the jacket’s left shoulder had already spread. A sign of plastic clothing. I wondered where they’d come from, what kind of privilege they had, to still own any wearable vinyl.

***

My memory has never been great. I forget my own age sometimes. But one thing I do remember is the first time I saw those creepy yellow splotches.

I had a dinner date with Dad, but his monthly doctor’s appointment was running late. I decided to hang out outside the house, swaying in the worn swing from my childhood. The rope was frayed against my palm and had worn grooves in the branch, but it was a comfortable seat. As I pushed myself in a lazy circle, the late afternoon sun speckled the leaves and I saw the spots: phlegm-yellow and tissue-thin inside, gray ring outside.

My phone rang as I was examining one of the mottled leaves.

“It’s your father.” The nurse’s voice didn’t even shake. “He collapsed during his checkup and now he’s unresponsive.”

‘Unresponsive’. What a horrible word.

***

I fell into my job at the Housing Authority because Dad’s house was one of the first hit in our town. We’d figured out how to detect and treat the first wave of the fungus we now call “the bug.” But it mutated fast, and the most resistant strain fed on our buildings instead of living beings. It ate away siding and air conditioning and window casings. Alcohol sprays, systemics, antimicrobials, and antifungals all failed, so I stopped at Town Hall to get the plans filed for Dad’s house. To see how bad it was going to get.

“We need to warn people to the south,” the woman at the desk blurted while I was making copies. “I think they’ll believe it more from people with personal experience. You have a nice voice. Want a job?”

I thought about Dad’s bay window falling out of its dissolving casing. How the siding looked like Swiss cheese a year after I’d buried him. My throat tightened and I nodded.

I’d only been working there for a month when I first heard about an entity house.

“Hi, I’m calling to tell you about the bug that is destroying homes,” I read from the script.

“Oh no, dear, I’ll be fine,” the person replied, with a breathless giggle.

“My apologies!” I looked at their house plans. “We have on record that your house has wood beams and studs.”

“That’s right?”

“If your house has any wood, plastic, vinyl, or acrylic, the bug will attack it,” I said. “I can describe–”

“It’s okay, dear,” they interrupted. “Gramma took care of it.”

My heart leapt. Maybe there’s a solution. “What did your grandmother do?”

“She came back.” They giggled again. “Oh, she’s asking for her show. Gotta go.”

My phone clicked. They’d hung up.

Last I checked, the house was still standing, no leopard-spot marks in sight. They’ve also been generous. Filed four sleep slots with us. Tenants report that Gramma is noisy at 2 AM and is particular about kitchen cleanliness, to the point where she’ll wake them up with a frigid touch if they leave a mess. Otherwise, she doesn’t act like a ghost at all.

We’ve confirmed twelve entity houses so far. We’ve also heard other stories – folks who summoned a family member to help, only to have their relative’s ghost refuse and go back where they came from. It sounded like it hurt, to lose them all over again.

***

The head medium bows at me. “Do you have the ashes?”

I slide the silver urn from behind the new door jamb. I hold my breath as I break the seal on the urn and grab a pinch of ashes.

She points at the urn. “That should come as well.”

“Really?” I debate whether to return the ashes.

“He will be the fourth for the séance.”

“Oh.” I cradle the urn in my left arm. “Where should I put…”

I can’t bring myself to say ‘him’ or ‘it’.

The head medium gestures. “There, towards the west. The departed sit at the setting sun. You sit at the north, our guiding star.”

I place the urn where she indicated. Up close the machine purrs like a satisfied feline.

“Kasira, you sit at the east, the rising, and…” She cocks her head, as if listening. “Yes, Erius, you take the south, the brightening.”

The mediums, both young-looking and oddly aged, seat themselves. Kasira’s scars are jagged scores like broken toffee in the hollows of her eyes. Erius bears four white-silver furrows, two down each cheek.

“We do not control those we call,” the medium says. “Ancestors speak to us only if they wish to. We take these ashes to communicate that we are your approved emissary to the dead.”

I sprinkle the pinch of ashes into Kasira’s cupped hand. She presses a thumb into them and strokes her thumb across her forehead. She passes the ashes to Erius, who repeats the gesture, then shakes the remaining ashes into a metal cup at the center of the machine. They both grasp one of the metal dowels on the lachrymatorium with their left hand. The rest of the women back down the driveway.

“Where are they going?” I whisper to Kasira.

“This is no longer their place.” She winks, her broken-toffee scars bunching. “Now it’s up to us.”

***

“Okay, who’s next?”

The person wore an algae tunic and mycelium-leather clogs, their black hair short-cropped, small brown eyes glaring at me.

“Thank you for waiting. Tolerances?”

“Pollen,” they replied.

“Nothing else?”

“Why?” They sneered. “Where do you live?”

I hid a sigh. “My tolerances are dark, stuffy, and hard, so I’m in a shipping container park. I share my crate with three others.” Their brow furrowed, so I modulated my voice towards the perky. “My bedding is a myco mat. If you’re interested, there are slots left in my park.”

They deflated, the sneer replaced by a disappointed twist of lips. “I see. I’d be okay with bugs, steps, and height.”

“Fantastic!” I tapped it in. “Two treehouses have slots available. They have woven live-branch floors, leaf beds, and mycelium tarps in case of rain. One has a sunset view and one has a living vine wall to block wind from the south. It includes morning glories.”

Their eyes widened and I caught a glimpse of a grin. “Ooh, a vine wall! I’ll take that one.”

I smiled as I passed over the slate marker. It was rare to please someone in this job. I rubbed the belt buckle in my pocket and reminded myself to mark this moment down later.

***

Kate usually let me stay past closing to use the glass computer in the back office. I’d jot down things we’ve lost. Sometimes simple pleasures, like books and stuffed animals. Sometimes things I’ve never used, like Kevlar and mosquito netting. Sometimes I’d even mark down people who I’d briefly forgotten. 

Memory has always been a problem for me. Doctors had differing theories why. Maybe the trauma of losing my mom so early;. Possibly an attention disorder. All I knew was that I’d never been good with names or dates. But it wasn’t until Dad was gone that I realized how much I was forgetting.

When I arrived at the hospital, he was already dead. They gave me a bag of his things. Plaid shirt, canvas pants, steel watch, leather belt. A few weeks after he died, the leather belt grew a tiny leopard spot. I’d given the belt to Dad for Father’s Day. I realized I didn’t remember buying it, I didn’t remember him opening it, but I remembered him putting it on. I couldn’t remember the sound of his voice, but I remembered what he said: “It fits! How did you know my belt size, Roribell?”

“I didn’t, Dad.” I held out my arms in an ellipse. “This is how big you are when I hug you. So that’s how big the belt needed to be.”

I remembered his eyes filling with tears. He’d kissed the top of my head as I hugged him again, feeling his stomach hitching in quiet sobs. 

“I keep forgetting how short you are,” he’d whispered, making me laugh.

“And how long your legs are,” I’d teased.

We stayed in the hug for ten minutes.

I thought. I didn’t know for sure.

I did remember screaming over the leather as the bug ate it, that memory turning to shreds, then dust. I also remembered crying with relief when the gold-toned brass buckle remained intact, and how well it fit in my pocket.

***

Kasira leans towards me. “Remind us how to say your father’s name?” 

“Niven, like given, and Seinn like sine wave.”

The ash-prints on the mediums’ foreheads glow with a blue-gray iridescence as the machine sparks and Erius speaks.

“I call upon the spirit of Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”

A breeze kicks up.

Kasira repeats it. “I call upon Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”

Nothing happens. Kasira glances at Erius.

“You feel anything?”

“Not enough juice,” Erius replies.

I shrink under their gaze.

***

“Thank you for waiting. Tolerances?”

“Ancestors,” the frail person at the window replied. Their watery eyes were swollen and the ridges of their nostrils were chapped. The bones of old leaves peeked out from under their lank brown hair.

I raised my eyebrows. “Ancestors? Nothing else?”

Their gaze didn’t waver.

“Look.” I lowered my voice. “There aren’t many real entity houses right now. It takes a family loss and a very generous ancestor to make one. People claim they have a haunting, but the bug always gets them. You should choose something else.”

The person shook their head. “I’m allergic to a thousand things. It’s too cold for me in here and too hot out there. Anything hard, bright, or noisy hurts. Right now I’m in a sleep ditch off the freeway because it’s better than anything else.” They shrugged. “So unless you have a tolerance I haven’t heard of yet, ‘ancestors’ is it.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. I can add you to the waiting list but it’s fairly long.”

They pulled a square aluminum pager from their pocket. I scanned it and added the ID to the list, and they turned away from the booth, shoulders slumped.

I thought about the thing I was building, and I crossed my fingers and bumped their ID to the top before calling the next person up.

***

After Mom died, Dad took me along to his construction sites, first showing me how to sort tools, then how to lay bricks, then on to more complicated things. Everything he’d taught me was clear in my mind, even after everything else I’d forgotten.

When I started the house frame, I decided to take as many shortcuts as I could. No walls, no planing. The bug took months to hit new-cut wood, so I had some time, but not much. If the séance worked, the house would stand. If the séance didn’t work, it would fall anyway.

The doorway was last. Dad was always good with doors. I sawed the branch off the maple where my swing had once hung. The living branch still had grooves in it from the rope so I was extra cautious cutting it, preserving those grooves.

I sobbed while taking the bark off the branch. Wept like I was sacrificing one of the few memories I still had.

I was still working on it, sanding the jamb and hammering in the nail where the bell would go, when the mediums arrived.

***

Kasira reaches out to me. I hesitate, glancing at the machine.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she promises.

I slide my fingers into her hand, surprised at its warmth. Kasira squeezes my palm.

“Why have you asked us here today?”

“I want a better place to live,” I murmur. “I’m tired of my container.”

Erius shakes her head. “You could have built a steel structure.”

Kasira clasps my hand more tightly. “Why wood? Why here?”

A muscle in the side of my throat tightens, sending a sharp ache down into my collarbone. “I miss my dad. He was a woodworker. He built the house that used to be here, but the bug ate it.”

Erius scoots towards me. “But why did you choose something so fragile?”

“For… for memory.”

“Memory?” Kasira tilts her head. “Can you tell us more about that?”

I try not to sniffle. “The bug took all the furniture he built. It took everything he built. Those were supposed to be heirlooms. Now it’s all gone, so it’s like he’s all gone.”

“Why would he be gone? Doesn’t he live in your memories?” Kasira rubs her thumb over my knuckle. “Doesn’t everyone you’ve loved?”

I struggle to breathe. They’re watching me expectantly. Waiting for me to agree. I glance back at the doorway. Something clenches painfully inside my chest, and I can’t hold it anymore.

“No, that’s the problem!” Tears scald my cheeks like steam. “I should remember more, but I don’t. I don’t remember him on my sixteenth birthday. I don’t remember him at my college graduation. I don’t remember our last Christmas.” My throat spasms. “Oh god, and it’s too late! It’s too late to make any more memories with him! If I was smart, I would have written everything down. I would have made sure I’d never forget. But I’m not smart, I’m a selfish jerk, I’m a terrible daughter. I thought I had more time. I thought I had more time.”

I try to pull free from Kasira to cover my face as I cry, but she holds fast, a deathly stillness in her fingers. “There it is,” she whispers. “There’s the juice. That’s the grief he needs.”

The machine’s hum intensifies, vibrating in my skin. Electricity spits as the bulbs turn on. I squint, my tears cracking the world into rainbows, as Kasira and Erius chant together.

“We call upon the spirit of Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”

A white mist coagulates above the machine. The mediums continue. “Your daughter Rorius awaits you, Niven. If you consent, make yourself known!”

Something sizzles. I smell peanut butter and pepper – right, Dad’s lunches, on that wheat bread he loved. I’d forgotten them.

Then I hear a voice.

Roribell…

My stomach jumps. It’s been years, but I recognize it. Even though I couldn’t recall the sound of his voice, I recognize the sound.

I recognize it.

The smell. The sound. The memories were always there, deep in my gut. Exactly like the belt. Knowing his size not because it was in my brain, but because I’d hugged him so often my body knew it by heart.

Whatever my brain did or didn’t keep, the rest of my body recorded it all.

My shoulders wrench with sobs of relief as Kasira squeezes my hand. “Niven Seinn, will you share your afterlife on this plane, within the house your child has built, until such time as she departs?”

Do you need me, Roribell?

“I…” I stop. Am I being a terrible daughter again? Is it cruel to want him to stay with me? To leave the peaceful rest he deserves?

I flash on the person with the watery eyes. Their desperation. And how many other people might be in the same place.

I might not need him, but other people do.

“We all do. Please,” I manage, vocal cords tight with choked-back grief.

Then I’ll stay…

Kasira and Erius shriek as lightning crackles around the machine, then leaps into the lintel of the door with a sound like fireworks. Kasira clenches my hand hard enough to crack my knuckles before she lets go.

“Bless you, Niven, for your sacrifice. When Rory departs, one of us shall return to release you,” Erius gasps.

The machine’s hum fades. A wisp of smoke rises from Kasira’s face, a trickle of bloody pus seeping from a broken spot under her left eye.

“Shit!” I reach towards her. “Are you okay?”

She pats my hand, then blots the pus on her cheek with a graceful lift of her shoulder. “It hurts, but scars are remembrance.” She smiles. “Most people hide their scars, but for us, it’s an honor to bear this memory.”

As she and Erius undo the leads, Kasira winks at me and pantomimes crying. I rub my eyes by instinct, then jump at a sting under my right eye. A smear of blood pinkens the side of my index finger.

A wound, to turn into a scar. For remembrance.

I grin despite myself. Of course. Scars are the ghosts of past injuries, haunting our skin. It would keep my memory close to the surface, so that I’ll never forget.

I don’t know what my scar will look like, but I don’t care. It’ll remind me, every day, whether from other people’s reactions or from seeing my face in a reflection, that my memories live within me.

That my dad was never gone.

I lean on the maple door jamb and watch them gather up the machine and leave, their robes fading into the air as twilight deepens.

I like your house, Roribell.

I sigh. “Thank you, Daddy.”

I hug the jamb for at least ten minutes, then pluck the belt buckle from my pocket. I hang it on the nail that marks where the bell will go, and step under the lightning-struck lintel to start the walls.


© 2023 by Risa Wolf

3538 words

Author’s Note: This story came to me when I was processing several different kinds of loss at once. I’d gone to a memorial during the second year of the pandemic and as people recounted stories about the deceased, I realized that not only had I lost the person’s presence, I’d lost memories of them too. That memorial, plus the loss of access to the world around me, led me to an internal quest that I externalized to create Rory’s. (Many thanks to Cat Rambo for the title.)

Risa Wolf is a multi-gendered water elemental disguised as an ink-stained lycanthrope. (Don’t tell their spouse or their dogs; the disguise is working.) They come from the Burned-Over District in New York State, and they imagine houses for book-ghosts for a living. Their writing can be found in places like Apex, Clarkesworld, and Cast of Wonders. Visit them at killerpuppytails.com, on Mastodon at @killerpuppytails, or BlueSky at @risawolf.bsky.social.


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DP FICTION #99A: “Six Reasons Why Bots Make the Worst Asteroid Miners” by Matt Bliss

edited by David Steffen

1. They think they know everything. Like your twenty years of mining experience is useless compared to a high-acting neural processing drive. Like you’re nothing but a softer, weaker liability, and the only thing you’re good for is greasing their joints and blowing out their compressors. Just one bot and one human to babysit them.

2. They have no personality. Stuck on an asteroid is bad enough without having a pencil sharpener as your only company. Every joke goes over their finely-polished head. Every vent of frustration is met with a vent of auxiliary heat instead. They tell you their name and pronouns, but it doesn’t help. They don’t know calloused hands. They don’t have a family back planetside who depends on that paycheck, hoping every day that you make it back in one piece because they are the only reason you left in the first place.

3. They don’t understand privacy. They’re always there, always watching, even when you don’t want them to be. When you eat and their lens follows each bite. When you sleep and hear their parts whirring in the bunk beside you. They never leave you alone. Even when news of your father’s death comes, and you miss him like hell and just want to scream in the blackness of space because the next resupply ship is forty-two light-years away and won’t get back in time to make the service. Even when you’re at your loneliest, they never leave your side.

4. They squeeze too tight. When you finally give in and cry on their shoulder, they hold you and somehow squeeze every buried memory to the surface. Even as tears leave rust splotches along their dented casing. You start to think that maybe this box of nuts and bolts knows you more than anyone. Maybe they’ve been piston to shoulder with you all along, and are as hardworking and caring as any other miner you’ve known. Maybe you’ll get through this… together.

5. They leave too soon. When you finally get home, you think of them each night you stare into the sky. Because you know everything about that arrogant prick by then. The way they laughed at your bad welds. The way their lens retracted when they were glum. So when the drill bit was stuck, you knew they’d give you that funny little chortle as they worked the stubborn thing free. But neither of you expected it to roar to life, catching their shell in its carbide-teeth. How you tried to stop it, but seconds too late. How you could only watch as your co-worker, friend, best friend perhaps, was mangled beyond repair, and all that’s left is an oil stain on the asteroid’s mine face. Leaving you alone, with no one to hold you too tight, or buzz in the bunk beside you at night, or even laugh at your bad welds. Alone… until it’s time to go home.

6. Because bot or not, they become family, and losing them hurts. And it should’ve been you left out there. It should’ve been you.


© 2023 by Matt Bliss

512 words

Author’s Note: I have worked in mining and construction for nearly twenty years, and have unfortunately seen firsthand the impact of death and injury among my colleagues and coworkers. With this story, I wanted to capture some of the complex emotions that arise from such a loss, and reflect upon the true toll of working in a blue-collar industry.

Matt Bliss is a miner and construction worker (on Earth) turned speculative fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in MetaStellar, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and a number of other magazines and anthologies. When he’s not daydreaming about robots or rocket ships, you can find him on Twitter at @MattJBliss.


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DP FICTION #93B: “Beneath the Crust” by Phil Dyer

The zone we drop into is softer than the digger likes, so the foodies lead the way from the start. Three, for a heavy crew, each of us with our own technique. Fold murmurs mantras aloud, rhythmic repetition, the crunch of crust, the crunch of crust. The new hire is next, silent, head down, hands clasped. Maybe looking at videos in her visor. I do best with just the drugs. No distractions. I imagine the salty rice-paste crust of tiger bread, capture the smell, the taste, the texture of the craggy shell, imagine biting down to yes, the crunch of crust. I want it. I focus on wanting it. The soft, steaming inside is good, I spare a thought for it, but what’s important is the crust.

The digger rolls forward. The surface under its tracks has become hard and craggy, salty fired rice paste over a crust like a geological formation. It crunches, flexing as it bears the digger’s weight, but it holds. The machine roars onwards and we follow, foodies and mercs and techs, ants at a picnic. Onward, into the Bake.

The digger is mining gear, obviously, but the business end is custom. Rock drills would just churn uselessly—instead, claws scoop and gouge, crimping and pelleting. We advance in a torchlit tunnel of pressed dough, waste material dumped as wadded dumplings behind us. Far back along our trail of flares, away from the foodies, the hard crust floor softens back into the same material as the tunnel walls, spongy, yielding, always edible. One by one, our lights are swallowed up. This is the default terrain, the ur-substance of the Bake. Bread without end.

We assume some things about the original Bakers. We assume they are dead. We assume they were extremely advanced, at least in certain areas. They were ambitious, explorers, visionaries. And when their extradimensional adventures brought back the micro-organisms we now misclassify as some sort of cosmic cousin to yeast, we assume they engaged in scientific study before they tried to make a loaf of bread with them.

Maybe not. We do assume they were human.

The digger breaks through into an air pocket. The foodies pull back and the two mercenaries come forward, point flashlights and guns into the warm cavern. All clear. Techs poke lasers inside, take readings, somehow use the hollow to get a better fix on the signal we’re following. Exactly what that signal might be is none of my business, and I’ve been paid enough to keep my guesses to myself. Four years ago a deep explorer team found a single glove embedded in a dough cyst. I’ve seen pictures. It didn’t look like much. That oven mitt went on to inform the development of a material so impervious to harm it changed the course of two corporate wars. A shame Bakelite was taken..   

 I reinforce the crust beneath our gathered weight, concentrating on the range of textures and taste, stray crystals of salt, the savoury flare of burn marks. The Bake obliges, forming new layers as I imagine them. As the ground shifts and hardens with my thoughts, there’s still a tiny thrill, the rush of shaping our environment with mere whim. I—we, with the other mission-critical foodies—we are as gods (within a four to six metre radius, and assuming our desires do not extend to a substance not generally defined as a baked good).

And then I smell apples.

It takes me by surprise. Just for a moment, the infinite yeasty funk of the Bake parts and I smell roast apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar. Bubbling jam seeping up around a burnt crumble topping.

The digger tilts slightly. One balloon tyre is suddenly sinking into molten crumble, oozing caramelizing fruit sugars. I jerk in surprise, bite my tongue. The pain helps empty my mind. It’s over in a second as the other foodies blot it out and there’s nothing but plain, structurally sound breadcrust under the digger’s wheels. I’m not sure anyone even noticed. My heart pounds in my throat.

I haven’t had a blip like that since basic training, never so completely without warning. I glare at the others from behind my visor. Fold and the newbie seem occupied. The techs bustle. The mercs watch. Maybe one of them’s a latent foodie. If they’re not taking their appetite suppressants, it could happen…but this is denial, because that wasn’t just pie. That was my pie.

We cut a path around the air bubble and press on. I keep us on tiger bread without incident. When our signal begins to fade, the techs unload a sensor pod. It has to be sunk into the ground, trailing a line as an aerial, so we all wait around as Fold constructs a custard pit. His specialty. A bead of sweat rolls down his chin as he mutters, dropping into the expanding, bubbling yellow hole by his feet. The yellow of yolk, the yellow of yolk. The Bake is obliging, but liquids are a grey area. Technically I think he’s invoking a single, lidless custard pie, four metres tall, half a metre across. God knows how he trained that one. The techs poke the pod under the custard with a pole, paying out cable as it sinks.

I crunch over to the new hire. She’s tall but somehow fragile-looking despite the bulky environment suit, standing apart from the techs and the blank-masked heavies. Like Fold and I, her helmet is open at the nose and mouth, air supply washed across her face, so as not to obstruct her sense of smell. The air in the Bake is more breathable than you’d think.

“I didn’t introduce myself in the shuttle,” I offer. “I’m Clipper.”

“Victoria. Vick.” She scratches distractedly at the corner of her mouth.

“Been doing this long?” I persist, because otherwise my only conversation on the expedition will be Fold. The rest of the crew keep foodies at arm’s length, and Fold’s relentless mysticism is probably why.

“Not very,” Vick allows. “Little trips. This is the biggest.”

A research group, probably. There is something oddly familiar about Vick, and I wonder if we’ve crossed paths before. “How are you finding it?”

“It’s fine,” she says. “No surprises.” She casts around for something to say. “The suits are better than I’m used to. Not too hot.” Another awkward pause. “I get very chapped in the heat.”

The suits are excellent, full-body cooling coils instead of the usual back-and-wrist pads. From the action-movie stealth shuttle that dropped us off, to the cutting-edge apparatus currently settling into custard, this is easily the most expensive expedition I’ve ever seen. I don’t come cheap myself, and neither does Fold. So I take Vick’s inexperience with a pinch of the salt that I’m imagining, glittering on that thick, supportive crust.

“Always good to hear someone from the old country,” I say, suddenly realising what’s so familiar. The drugs make you tune out things that aren’t food. “You don’t meet a lot of Scots in this line of work.”

She looks confused.

“The accent,” I press. “You could be from my town, even. You grew up near Inverness, right?”

“Oh. Yes. I guess so,” she says. “I’ve never thought about it much.” She goes back to picking at her mouth. It is indeed starting to peel.

“Try closing your eyes really tight.” I say. She looks confused again. I point at her mouth.

“The itching, right? It’s always the same in these suits, soon as they seal you up you gotta scratch. So you go to town on the only bit that’s exposed. Classic displacement. Scrunching my eyes up always helps me.”

She lowers her hand and looks at me for a little too long.

“Thanks.”

We’re moving on before I can prise any more conversation out of that. The new heading is somewhere far below us, and the drill doesn’t work as well at sharp inclines. I transmute the material ahead of it to speed our passage, swapping spongey bread for the lightest, flakiest pastry I can imagine. It shatters beautifully as the digger comes crashing through, great sheets of buttery rough puff obliterated under our boots. Fold stabilises the crust, while Vick anchors safety lines along our trail with caramel. Her creations are quick and perfect, clean little discs of sizzling sugar, ringed with delicate short-crust.

I end up next to Fold as the crew ready the digger for another switchback turn. Vick is further back, busy with some detail work.

“What do you make of the new girl?” I ask quietly.

Fold shrugs, still muttering.

“The crunch of crust. Not much yet. A prodigy, I heard. Rising star. The crunch. Some little science group. A few months back. Of crust. Out of their league, I think. The Bake clearly favours her. The crunch-“

“Mm. She’s good. Surprised I haven’t heard of her before now, really.” Trained foodies aren’t so rare we don’t need to keep tabs on the competition.

“She’s new. But I take great interest. The crunch. In experiences like hers. Of crust. And yours—very similar, you know. The crunch. She was found. A wanderer in the dark.”

“Shit.”

The memories heave up, but the drugs keep them at arms’ length. More than a decade old now, early in what would become my career. The Bake was a relatively new discovery, its mechanisms still barely understood, and I was there with a group of explorers, trying out my newfound status. They didn’t even call us foodies then, I was an Extradimensional Operations Special something-something, and when I stepped through a pastry shell and fell thirty metres into darkness, that was what they put on the death certificate. But the Bake is soft, and it’s not like I was going to starve.

“I was thinking,” Fold says. “I understand your reluctance. Crust. To talk about your. Crunch. Your ordeal. But perhaps, perhaps you could encourage her to talk to me-“ He suddenly jerks in surprise. “Clipper!”

I smell almonds, marzipan, sickly sweetness. The tunnel around me is a chessboard, a grid of pink and yellow squares emerging from undifferentiated bread. Marzipan is forming underfoot, apricot jam oozing up.

I have never trained on Battenberg cake. I’ve never even made one. Too sweet. But when I was six I stole one, didn’t like it, and hid it under my pillow for a week, forcing down daily bites out of a vague notion that this was the ethical way to dispose of it. The cake coming out of the wall has flecks of hair and fluff. I know exactly how it tastes, the strange cardboard chew of stale marzipan.

Far down the tunnel, Vick is staring at me, face hidden by her helmet lights.. Her sense of smell must be incredible.

“Crust!” snaps Fold. I startle out of my reverie and focus. Between us the Bake reforms in a moment. A couple of techs are looking. One of the mercenaries strolls over.

“Everything all right here?” she asks. Her suit whirs softly as she inspects us. The heavies wear powered frames over the environment gear. Even with her rifle slung amicably on her back, she could literally pull my head off. She might, if it came to it. A foodie in a meltdown endangers the whole team.

“Yes, yes, of course. Testing the resonant depth, overlap times—” Fold brushes her away with a mouthful of nonsense. She nods and leaves us to it. Artists get the benefit of the doubt.

Fold leans close as the digger gets rolling again.

“Not like you.”

“It’s not,” I agree.

“Is there going to be a problem?”

“No.” But there is. I have no idea what’s happening. I am sharp, I am focused, I am specifically and carefully drugged. I am sure, absolutely certain, that no part of my subconscious was dwelling on stale cake, nor on that apple pie; made for my first crush, shared with her boyfriend. And yet.

I’m waiting for it to happen again as we press on. I double-check every crumb I lay down, roll the imaginary flavour around my mouth. I lean on my aids more than usual, calibrating for every little trick and amuse-bouche. I’m sure Fold notices. I bridge gaps with mooncakes, raise baguette buttresses. No problem. There continues to be no problem right up until the monster.

Even if our own universe- the one with the Earth we’d recognise—was the only player in pan-dimensional exploration, things would still get crowded in the Bake. It’s a lucrative dimension, whether you’re strip-mining bread or salvaging Baker tech, and while the Bake itself may be infinite, the entrances that we’ve found come out pretty close together. Even on an expedition like ours, so far off the beaten track, you can’t be sure who’s been out here before you. And we are not the only universe here.

A tech shouts something. Jaws come through the tunnel ceiling, a short way back from the digger. Black plates slide and click around a mess of scrabbling hooks, scything blades longer than my arm. Blank eyes gleam wetly.

One of the techs is snatched up, scream muffled in his suit. I fall to the ground and scramble under the digger as the heavies let loose. The gunfire is apocalyptic in the tunnel, even through my helmet, rattling thunder through my teeth. Fluids spatter. Fold is standing, advancing even, arms up like a wizard casting a spell. He’s shouting something.

We’re not sure which of the many Earths to visit the Bake is the monster-maker. We call them weevils. Probably they are not meant to eat people. Best guesses and traces of harness have them as engineered burrowers, faster than our mechanical digger—but no-one has ever found one with its team. Perhaps these feral remnants are all that’s left, abandoned by a world with more on its plate than infinite bread.

The weevil bellows. The digger rocks. I curl into a tighter ball and shut my eyes.

The darkness is waiting for me.

***

After the fall, as Fold puts it, I wandered. I walked in dark places. My suit battery died in two days and I assumed I’d follow shortly. I was always on the brink of choking. Any exertion brought on spiking headaches, neon pain against the black. I walked blindly in the tunnels of ancient explorations, following the soft walls with my fingers.

In the absence of light, it is hard to know when to eat. I discovered early on that the Bake could provide fresh fruit—sliced, as a pastry topping—so that was my water. My nutrition came with my moods, fistfuls of dough clawed from the walls, or great blind feasts, every baked good I could think of, until something switched over and I was weeping and gasping for air over a heap of latticed pies. Sometimes I heard weevils. Once, I think I stumbled into Baker ruins, crumpled and swallowed by expanding bread. I spent a long time there, feeling my way through caverns that might equally have been ovens or blast chillers. I remember a confusion of scale beyond the demands of industry–stacked trays the size of swimming pools, a countertop the height of my chest and three thousand paces long. I have never been able to locate these again, though they should have been unmissable. Probably they shifted, tumbling in the infinite like the lucky coin in a pudding. Of course, I spent a lot of time going crazy.

I devised and judged grand challenges for myself. At first I set rewards for milestones; a perfect semolina cake, for which I would allow my favourite childhood brownie. Later, these became punishments; sleep when you get it right. Drink when you get it right. I tried so hard to produce a flambé for light—cherries jubilee, or pudding—but it never worked no matter what I threatened. I think it failed because I couldn’t imagine the taste of fire.

I learned a lot. Eventually, it no longer felt like learning—it felt like teaching, like a conversation. Here is what I want. Here is what it means to me. I poured out my life in the only language the Bake might understand. The pie for my crush, the stolen cake, my nana’s cornbread. In my least lucid moments I walked with and within a vacantly smiling god, a vast benevolence made cruel only by the scale and indifference of its kindness. It would want me to be happy, if only it knew what I was.

Or something like that. I want to be clear; I was half-dead, completely unhinged. Fold comes out with this stuff sober.

Once I heard another expedition, machine and human noises, high above but too muffled to pin a direction on. I dug with my hands to reach them, but they moved on too fast. I remember wishing, desperately, that one of them would fall like I had. This was the point I had reached- I had forgotten to hope to escape. I just wanted someone to share it with. Just one person, I pleaded, that would be enough. Someone to relate to, to swap notes with. We would talk to the Bake together. Then maybe I could get that flambé.

Seven months after people stopped looking, a survey team for one of the big harvesters found me on the outskirts of their newest claim. I remember the pain of light, and being confused. Where were we going? I had nearly perfected meringues…

***

The gunfire has stopped. The digger is still. Little by little, I unfold and extricate myself.

Smoke and alien gore wind through the stench of bread. The mercenaries stand unharmed, barking commands and pointing. There seem to be as many of us as we started with, though medics are earning their keep, dressing wounds, strapping an arm. Even the tech who was grabbed is still here somehow. He groans as they cut his suit open, dousing his wounds with trauma foam.

The weevil’s corpse sprawls half into the tunnel, a glossy tangle of limbs and hooks. Yellow ichor has spattered in all directions, bringing a sweet popcorn musk. Fist-sized holes riddle its carapace. What remains of its head is locked in a pillar of pecan brittle, while its largest limbs are fused into caramel, trapped between soda-bread stalactites. Mounds of giant bao buns are slowly subsiding—sandbags, to protect the digger.

The heavy from earlier says something approving to Vick, claps Fold on the shoulder. She turns away when she sees me, I assume in contempt.

“Well. You two were busy.” I say. Vick says nothing, just looks at me, still picking at her face.

“Horrible creatures,” says Fold primly. “Were you injured?”

“No. Just uh, got thrown a bit. Good work on the brittle there, who was that?”

Fold coughs pointedly. I look down. A dense yellow crumb is spreading out around our feet, pockets of cheese leaking to the surface. I know what it is before I even catch the smell; my nana’s cornbread. I barely remember her face, but this I know.

I don’t have much left in me to react with. A wave, a thought, it’s gone. Fold jerks forward.

“Get it together,” he hisses. “Right now.”

“It’s not me!” I snap.

“Bullshit. Has your focus run out? I have refills—“

Vick puts her gloved hand on my arm. It’s so strange that we both stop to stare at her. Her mouth is getting worse.

“Listen,” she says. It’s not clear who she’s speaking to. Fold tilts his helmet at me.

“It’s not me,” I say. “They’re from me, they’re my memories, but I’m not bringing them up.”

“So how—“ Fold begins, and then I’m telling them about the dark. Not everything, but enough.

No one interrupts. Behind us, the expedition pulls itself together. A stretcher is assembled, munitions are counted, equipment is dusted off and redistributed. There’s a long way yet.

Fold looks hungry when I stop.

“A lasting connection,” he says. “Response beyond immediate reaction.”

“I guess so,” I say.

“But that was years ago. So something has changed.” He puts a hand on the tunnel wall. “Perhaps it’s finally reaching out, the only way it can. Perhaps it’s trying-”

“The Bake doesn’t want anything, Fold.”

“You know that’s not true,” he says. “It wants to nourish us, to give us what we want. Food has always been the way to bring people together. What peace there could be, if only—”

“I was alone!” I yell. “Choking and alone in the dark! All I wanted—the Bake doesn’t care what we want! It doesn’t even know!” People turn. I don’t care. “You think it’s a god? Go pray to it yourself. You know the way.”

The weevil’s entrance hole reflects in Fold’s visor. Beyond the jagged body is darkness, mile after mile of crisscrossed burrow, down into eternity. Fold smiles.

“Perhaps I will.”

He turns and walks back to the expedition, raising a fresh crust as he goes. I go to follow him, but Vick catches my arm again.

“It cares, you know,” she says. “The Bake does care. But some prayers take longer to answer.” She picks at her flaking cheek again, then, in one deft movement, pinches the pale flesh together, kneading it smooth with the heel of her hand. In a moment, her skin is flawless. She smiles. Her lips are blushed marzipan.

As she too walks away, rich currant pudding pools in her bootprints, quickly disappearing. Before it does, it flickers with purple flame.


© 2022 by Phil Dyer

3600 words

Author’s Note: A loaf of bread with a sufficiently ‘open crumb’ is full of bubbles which often link together, forming tunnels and alien cave systems. I enjoy sci-fi expeditions into dark places, but these doomed ventures often subsist on vague but unpleasant ‘rations’, if food is mentioned at all. That would probably keep me off the team. I was moved to make a case where being way too into what you eat is a valuable, practical asset.  

Phil Dyer does science and writes spec fic in Liverpool, where he appears to have settled for now. He has firm opinions about food, games and seagulls. Loves the outdoors, but wouldn’t live there. His stories have appeared in BFS Horizons, Aurealis, and once before in Diabolical Plots. He can be found on twitter as @ez_ozel . 


If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Phil Dyer’s work has previously appeared on Diabolical Plots with “Everyone You Know Is a Raven” in January 2021.

The Fall of the House of Madrigal: An Encanto Science Fiction Headcanon

written by David Steffen

Encanto has been very popular since it was released by Disney in November 2021, for its catchy toe-tapping songs, interesting characters, and its themes revolving around immigrant families. 

Everyone seems to think of Mirabel as the protagonist of the story, and that makes sense according to most classical conventions, but the more I’ve thought about it, I think there is someone else.  Someone whose fate is tied to every major plot point in the story, from the origins of this segment of the Madrigal family, to the climax of the movie, and the denouement.

Casita.

Is Casita an artificial intelligence?  Casita is built and is able to make decisions and take actions, and appears to operate by certain implicit directives to protect the family, participate in family activities (such decorating for Antonio’s door ceremony), as well as maintaining the structure of the house and rebuilding sections as per the family’s needs.

Let’s say that Casita is an AI.  The cause of Casita’s birth is a little murky.  The inciting incident certainly seems to have young Abuelo’s death and Abuela’s despair at witnessing this and fearing for herself and triplets, but how exactly that resulted in the miracle of the candle and the creation of Casita is left to interpretation.  The implication seems to be that it was a miracle from God.  But, though the movie does not suggest this, it could have come from some other source that somehow provided this guardian AI: an extradimensional force that saw fit to intervene to save a group of refugees from imminent violence (hey, I have certainly seen much weirder things in comic books), reaching across the void to bestow a gift, a dedicated protector.

Whatever the source, the wish in Abuela’s heart in that moment seems to have become Casita’s primary objective: KEEP US SAFE, which has since determined all of Casita’s actions.  How would the rest of it all work if Casita is an AI?  Everything beyond that can be explained with something like nanotechnology guided by Casita’s objective.  

Casita’s technology is used to isolate and enhance the enclave.  You can think of it sort of like a generation ship AI that doesn’t happen to travel anywhere, meant to help this community not only persist, but thrive in complete isolation from the rest of the world.  The Madrigal family are in a sense the officers of the ship, meant to be authority figures and inspiration for everyone around them, who consider service to the community part of their leadership.  Casita’s door ceremonies happen when Casita forms a symbiosis with one of the family as they come of age, infusing nanotech into their body with a specific module designed by Casita to serve Casita’s overall goal to KEEP US SAFE.  

The door ceremonies are held at an age where a child has learned to speak and learn some self-control, but when they are still young enough that they have a great deal of physical and mental development left, when they still have the extreme brain plasticity of youth.  Abuela is the exception to this, of course, having been joined by Casita as an adult, but note that she also does not seem to have the same kind of active control of her ability as the others, perhaps due to her being older when she formed the symbiosis with Casita.  The door ceremony transforms the person into an avatar of Casita, extending Casita’s influence and abilities accordingly. Although the person still has conscious control of their bodies and abilities, Casita’s touch is always with them from then on and Casita learns from it.  Each of their private rooms behind their doors could be seen as sort of a training holodeck tuned to their specific powers.

In terms of archetypes that Casita fulfills, I feel like most people think of Casita mostly as a domestic helper who is auxilliary to the main story, sort of a Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. But I think there’s reason to consider that Casita may be more like the mentor and guide who guides the party on their journey and acts as a protecting force and prepares them for the inevitable dangers. More on that later.

Apart from Casita’s symbiosis with each Madrigal, Casita’s abilities seem to be limited to moving parts of the house itself.  We never see the house moved from its customary location, nor extend itself. So it appears that Casita’s ability to KEEP US SAFE, apart from direct actions possible by house parts within the boundaries of the house, is largely dependent on Casita’s symbiosis with each of the Madrigals.

Abuela’s abilities are immediately visible upon Casita’s birth, in the immediate repulsion of the attacking soldiers, and in the raising of the mountains.  I admit that raising mountains might seem like a stretch for nanotech, but perhaps they only have the appearance of mountains and are perhaps a thinner (yet extremely durable) barrier.  I doubt a regular mountain would deter determined humans anyway, so it stands to reason it’s more like a force field with a mountain veneer on it.  A sensible choice for the first symbiosis powers, to push away the immediate violent threat.  

When the triplets come of age, their abilities all expand to meet the immediate survival needs of the community, especially since they need to survive without contact with the outside world; they can’t depend on trade with other cities for supplies or skilled trades. 

  • Julieta’s healing protects the community from injury and illness, clear utility there. Short-lived but powerful repair swarms contained in the food.
  • Pepa’s weather control protects from deadly weather (imperfectly, perhaps, but despite the unpredictability we do not hear of anyone dying of weather), and also helps protect from famine–a major factor of survival in a town like this would be the ability to farm their own food.  Probably one of the harder ones to implement, with cloud-seeding and humidity control.
  • Bruno’s predictions make an excellent way to anticipate problems that would otherwise not be foreseen.  So, two avatars who can help keep the community healthy right now, and a third to try to anticipate coming dangers. Advanced behavior modeling and prediction based on Casita’s larger body of collected data.

What about the grandkid avatars? Consider them by approximate age as Casita progresses in the mission to KEEP US SAFE. 

  • Luisa’s strength is of clear utility: we see her helping the community in many ways: gathering donkeys, moving churches, she could reroute rivers, easily snap trees for lumber, flattening land to build structures. She could serve as a warrior in time a time of dire need, though Casita would want to prevent that if at all possible.  Nanobots could implement this by altering the structure of her muscles, could replace the muscle fibers with carbon fibers, local toughening of skin to avoid injury.
  • Isabella can grow plants at will, which is an accelerated improvement on food control after Pepa’s more indirect one. The fact that we don’t see Isabella widely using her gift to produce food for the village suggests that the village is prospering well enough that this is not necessary. And Isabella also is well-beloved in the community, sort of a poster child for the Madrigals, perhaps in part because of her gift of bringing beauty to the town. Are the plants real plants or are they nanobot constructs? Do we see anyone eating them at any point?
  • Dolores is Casita’s remote sensing avatar, extending Casita’s senses far beyond the boundaries of the house.  Useful for all kinds of things: conflict resolution, matchmaking which can be used to improve the morale of the town, sensing approaching danger long before it becomes dangerous.  This ability also may synergize with Bruno’s predictions, because Casita would have a much much more complete body of data about the townspeople, knowing details about their private lives. After Bruno’s disappearance, it also allows Casita some ability to sense into Bruno’s abandoned tower room that Casita has no direct control over (as Dolores “associates him with the sound of falling sand”). As the years went on and Abuela’s treatment of family members to try to keep them safe contribute to alienation, Casita would predict the future where Casita crumbles as the family dynamic falls with it. But, as many AIs, Casita struggles to fully understand human psychology and human behavior (if this stationary generation ship has Abuela is Captain Picard, there is no Counselor Troi!), and so Casita’s greatest challenge is to understand humans well enough to try to prevent or fix the problem that stems from human psychology. Gather more data about human behavior is a sensible way to approach the problem. Dolores’s hearing could be implemented by alteration of Dolores’s eardrums, as well as farther-reaching methods more like sensor-seeding across the whole town as her hearing seems to reach farther than soundwaves could plausibly travel.
  • Camilo, now Camilo is a tougher one to pinpoint the utility of his gift to the central mission to KEEP US SAFE.  While, yes, Camilo’s shapeshifting could have some utility in hostile situations (ala Mystique from X-Men).  Again, as with Dolores, Casita is struggling to understand and solve the problem of the growing psychological problems in the Madrigal family. Casita is purely rational, but humans are not, and it is difficult for Casita to understand thinking but only-sometimes-rational beings. Casita’s ability to communicate is very limited–apart from taking direct necessary action, Casita sometimes communicates by some gestures that one might liken to emoji, but Casita is not capable of taking steps that we might do if we wanted to understand someone–by asking them questions that lead to other questions.  Camilo seems to have few limits on his ability to imitate, and when guests arrive for Antonio’s door ceremony, he uses his ability readily by mimicking each guest as he greets them, which the guests seem to find great joy in. This brings to mind the behavior of “mirror neurons” which are a biological basis for empathy–allowing an observer to feel the same way when we see someone perform an action as when we perform the action ourselves.  So, although Camilo’s ability doesn’t seem to have a direct usage in the survival of the community (apart from morale, as people do seem to enjoy his antics!), Casita learns from Camilo’s mimicry of the townspeople to better learn and understand about each person–Camilo could not imitate them so effectively if he didn’t understand them , so Casita grows in empathy from connecting with him.  And through Camilo, Casita comes to understand that some of the rifts in the family come from people viewing the Madrigals primarily by their abilities (what makes them artificial) instead of what makes them human. Camilo’s abilities may be the most challenging of the Madrigal’s to produce on a practical level, his entire body changing in an instant. It’s possible that some of these changes are illusions, merely visible facades, when a physical change is not necessary, but given that height changes have an actual physical effect that can’t be all of it. It’s possible that Camilo’s entire body has been replaced with a plastic nanobot swarm, or everything except certain organs such as his digestive system and brain which shift around inside the rapidly changing body.

As Mirabel approaches the date of her door ceremony, Casita ponders what sort of symbiosis to form with her.  To bring the family together, Casita needs someone with empathy.  Mirabel shows potential for that, but how best to enhance it?  Yet, in the times to come, Casita is grimly aware that Casita may be destroyed, and with Casita’s destruction the avatars’ abilities will disappear.  Casita needs to plan for this as well.  She needs someone who can bring the family together even without an avatar’s powers, because in the worst case those might disappear.  So, Mirabel becomes the only Madrigal to pass the door ceremony age without becoming an avatar.  It’s clear that Casita still cares for her as much as anyone else, Casita maintains a friendly rapport with Mirabel, and the feeling is mutual.

When Abuela asks Bruno to try to use his future-telling ability to find out why Mirabel didn’t get a door and a power, Casita is able to finally convey to him Casita’s greatest fear: the death of Casita.  And in doing so, Casita is able to guide Bruno in his self-exile to live in the walls.  Casita is depending on Mirabel to heal the rifts in the family and keep Casita together, but Mirabel is way too young at that point to be able to take on that kind of responsibility.  So, Casita has to hold it together and Casita can’t do that without help, so Bruno serves a vital role in bridging that gap making his own spackle as he lives in the walls.  (I imagine Bruno as Scotty of the generation ship, except that instead of messaging the bridge to say “I can’t hold it together much longer” instead he spends years applying emergency spackle and talking to the shipboard rats)

When Antonio comes of age, Casita knows that the time of the potential collapse is approaching, between Luisa’s growing anxiety pushing her to the breaking point and Isabella’s upcoming wedding of unrequited love.  There is not very much time to make a difference with Antonio’s power, but some choice has to be made, and Casita can still try to make some small difference.  One of Luisa’s jobs has been to help gather loose donkeys, and we get the impression this is not an uncommon task, especially considering how chill the donkeys are about being stacked.  So, Antonio’s ability to speak to animals is an attempt by Casita to lighten Luisa’s load in at least some way–they may be able to send Antonio to go talk the donkeys back (whether donkeys could be convinced by Antonio remains to be seen!), a job which Antonio will be able to do with less effort than Luisa as he can bribe or otherwise convince animals to do what he asks.  Casita might have considered giving Antonio strength like Luisa’s to help her more directly, but given that she is struggling with feeling her worth already, making her feel like she is being replaced would not have helped her self-doubt, which Casita would have realized after learning empathy from Camilo.

Casita predicted that on the day of Antonio’s door ceremony, Mirabel would step out of Antonio’s room to process this, finally giving a rare opportunity for Casita to communicate with Mirabel with no one else in the main part of the house.  Casita doesn’t want to show the decay of the house’s structure to the family as a whole, for this will lead to panic, cause Luisa to spiral in anxiety, or Abuela to come down hard on family members. So Casita tries to communicate to Mirabel privately by relaxing control on the structure enough to let the decay show (like relaxing a muscle you have become accustomed to clenching at all times).  Then when Mirabel goes to get the family, Casita pulls the structure together again as well as possible, knowing that Mirabel has the mystery to solve and with the hopes that Mirabel’s empathy will be enough to carry her through the rest.

One thing I admire about Casita is that, even when Casita’s collapse began, Casita still puts forth best efforts to the end to protect everyone, directing the collapse to provide aid, such as the railing-become-ladder when Mirabel was trying to reach the candle, and the makeshift triangle shelter of debris in the end that saved Mirabel’s life.  It would have been a nightmare for Casita to know that the collapse of Casita’s body was itself the cause of Mirabel’s death, and Mirabel’s death would also have doomed Casita to not be rebuilt and reborn, meaning the failure of the mission to KEEP US SAFE.

In the end the AI is revived through the doorknob the avatars construct that Mirabel uses to transition that residual spark of life from the avatars to the body of the house, reviving Casita with a freshly built body, with a mind that may not be the mind of the original Casita but is a construct made of the avatar’s memories of Casita. And in that rebirth, we see the success of Casita plan to mend the breaks in the Madrigal family and continue to pursue the prime directive KEEP US SAFE.

DP FICTION #88C: “The Twenty-Second Lover of House Rousseau” by C.M. Fields

edited by Ziv Wities

The first man who purchased me loved me like a rainstorm over the moors. And I loved him too—for that is what I was built to do—sublimely, splendidly, like the slanted golden rays of the misty evening love the dewy grass.

Here is how he saw me: tall, radiant, with deep bronze skin as if hailing from the cradle of civilization, tumbling white hair, eyes yellow like sunflowers.

Our wedding was attended by the Galaxy’s finest—for it is indeed a rare occasion when the House christens a new Lover. I was the twenty-first, and the details drenched the subspace net with jealousy. I was dressed in the crimson House-made wyreworm silks handwoven for the singular occasion, and the way the gossamer fabric exhibited my seraphic figure made a lady-in-waiting faint. Our patrons presented us with lavish gifts: a three-headed bull, the steaming heart of a star, a full-sailed brigantine. And when I kissed him, an ecstatic thrill obliterated me; I was united with my divine purpose, and it coursed naked through my nanocellulose veins.

He died within the year.

*

I must wait for the house.

The annihilation of the light yacht—on whose balcony I was playing Rachmaninoff only hours ago—is utter and entire. We have crashed on an unfashionable moon of the Pulchant system. I do not know what caused this crash, and I do not much care. My most recent possessor, a man of one-hundred-and seventy-some years, could not have survived such an event. I myself have been severely disrupted. My left arm is missing and the machinery of my shoulder is exposed, blunt force has dislocated several joints, and the artificial skin which forms my hellenic face has been ripped away to the chest. Worse, the delicate gears and needles in my mechanical soul feel… wrong.

In my mind I search for the tether which grounds me to my purpose and find that, for the first time in my five hundred and thirty seven years, it is gone. The devotion which connects me to the man whose corpse is indecorously splayed across some rocks has evaporated. Looking upon the body, I sense I should feel a horror, a grief, an anguish. These emotions are what partition my life into its chapters. But my mind is as bare as the moon’s airless surface.

Initiating my strength override, I use my right arm to lift approximately 1.57 tons of debris off my mangled body and inch my way out of the rubble. While the yacht has indestructible escape pods, I know I must wait for the House. They will come—they always do—and they will repair me, they will make me fine again, they will probably wipe my memory of this horrific event.

*

The fourth human to love me was a woman; an ardent, tempestuous woman, as striking as the lash of a whip, and lustful as a hare. Our love was a prairie wildfire, spreading in our footsteps between the stars. She fucked me rapturously, her fingers nimble and strong, and I found myself ever hungry to return her affections.

In her eyes, I bore the evergreen locks of the elven women of Nimarre and raven eyes. I was gloriously fat, and my luscious rolls were tattooed with flora. On my head I wore a slim circlet of gold, and she dressed me in the amethystine robes of royalty.

Our days were long, our nights hot, our travels fantastic. We swam through the breathing oceans of Teranja, hiked the shattered peaks of Belgic 4, skimmed the Ioan calderas as Jupiter churned in the sky.

When she passed, I journeyed to the ice cliffs of Brykirs and threw myself off.

*

I fear I must elaborate on the House.

House Rousseau, domiciled in Castle Aubigny-sur-Nère, a jaunt south of Orléans, France, is where I was manufactured several centuries ago. I am the last, and the greatest, of the House’s twenty-one mechanical Lovers. Each one of us was sculpted over many years, our inner workings unlike the construction of common androids and better resembling a Swiss watch. Each of our memoirs are unique to us, and were fastidiously assembled by a team of the Galaxy’s most accomplished memory artists. Our brains are lab-grown and fully organic, flesh welded harmoniously to machine like a fine lace.

However, we are not people—we do not feel the full range of human emotion. Anger, hate, retribution: it is whispered that things are done to us before memory to remove such untidy emotions which do not befit a Lover.

And of course, we have souls. Humankind has long asked the question “what is a soul?”, and in the 24th century, it was decided that a soul is a little contraption which allocates chemical love—oxytocin—to the brain.

Peeling back my burned flesh and prying open my chest cavity, I can see clearly now that mine is shattered.

*

The twelfth human to love me was a poor man—but he loved me richly, decadently, palatially. And so I loved him, in a cotton-cloth way, in the way that the steam whistled from the kettle in our little flat on Mars, in the way that we walked together through the rust-red dunes to the corner store each Saturday.

He saw me as a queen of an ancient Terran castle, skin pale like the moonlight, hair black as coal, eyes blue like the ice of the land he imagined himself a King of. Having spent the entirety of his inheritance on acquiring me, I was dressed in the rough communal garb of the little city. But I was happy, comfortable, as I fed the birds and tended to my small garden, and seldom dreamed of the Galaxy outside.

*

How long must I lie here in wait of the House? Two weeks have passed. Was a distress beacon sent? Or was our descent too fast, our damage too great?

As I lie still in the dust, my mind empty, new thoughts begin to turn, unfamiliar emotions blister at the edge of consciousness. A stark, alien void where despair should be lives in the center, and the fresh notions begin to gnaw at it. The man broken upon the rocks haunts me, his dead eyes nearly locked on my own. He was a wealthy socialite, the son of the son of the son of a RyTech CEO who made his money in the asteroid belt. He favored gin and Albirean casinos and human women. I never minded the women—I did not possess the receptors for jealousy.

But a brain—an organic brain—is a flexible thing. I know the silvered, diaphanous sensation of new pathways forging, and I feel it now. My soul is in pieces, but my vision is clear.

A new sensation flickers to life, hot like a coal, and red, not the red of romance but the red of a man’s eyes when he’s had too much to drink and he’s berating himself in the parlor because he can’t get a “real” woman to love him, the red of the auction box as you stand perfectly still and watch them clamor for your body, the red of the sun as it sets over the beach on your fifteenth honeymoon.

I marvel as the feeling slithers down my spine and takes root in my chest where love used to live. I can feel it in the tension of my muscles, I can feel it swirling in my fingertips, I can feel it seeping through my bones:

Anger.

In one motion, I tear off what’s left of my scarlet cocktail dress. I kick the stilettos off my feet, and stand, depositing the discarded clothing under a heavy boulder. The escape pods are nearby.

*

The sixteenth human to love me defied gender and I loved them for it. There is an excitement, a passion, a zeal, I think, to dance across such boundaries, to disassemble and reconstruct the fundamental, to make an art of opposition. Our love was a bird sprung from a cage, our bodies twin wings of escape.

They let me be. For the first time in my life I was free to choose my appearance. I cropped my chestnut hair close, lost the ponderous breasts I was often assigned, and enjoyed a tawny, freckled appearance. I was not thin and I was not heavy. In the metropolis of Aa, I found I relished men’s suits, and wore them often.

It was the most freedom I had ever had. I purchased a studio and became a painter of portraits. I learned to apply my fast and supple hands to the piano, and I played them all the classics. I could cook, I could dance, I could solve mathematics. I was a Renaissance android.

When they died, it was then I knew my deepest grief.

*

It is a long journey to Earth. It gives me time to think about my five hundred years of servitude. As the weeks pass, I play back the era of each possessor in mind, as I often do, but this time I cannot get halfway through the list before my blood begins to boil.

The subspace radio catches the netcasts sometimes. The doomed expedition is found, and I am presumed destroyed. The House announces its deepest regrets for its lost Lover, and swears to build another.

That day my anger transcends the boundary of myself, tips into rage, and rage swells into action. There will not, I decide, be another Lover.

Perhaps there shouldn’t even be a House.

After a year of solitude, it happens all at once: the heat of re-entry, the shaking and the shuddering, the resolution: blue into lakes, brown into field, green into forest. The pod leaves an ugly scar across a meadow as it unites with the soil. I step out of the steam into mud and grass. Overhead, clouds like piled wool threaten rain.

I am home.

I pop a small hatch, and proceed to drench myself with propellant.

*

My seventeenth and final possessor loved me like—well, come now, did he? Did he love me like the infinite waterfalls of M’Aire, or did he love me like a man loves a fast car? Did I love him the way the falcon loves the wind, the way the soil loves the rain, the way mushrooms love the dead? Did I choose it? Or was it thrust upon me? It is wicked, ugly, to think this way of love.

The body I wear now is thin, too thin, and the breasts overlarge as to put strain on the mechanisms of my back. My hair is cherry-red and my lips plump and pouty. I did not mind bodies such as this; I once reveled in itchy cocktail dresses, tenuous pantyhose, towering heels, taking a machine’s pride in the amount of discomfort I could endure for human beauty.

Of course, right now, as I stride through the meadow—faceless, skin hanging, joints exposed—I am not beauty. I am terror.

*

As the sun sets through the trees, the House rises before me, crimson flags flying from the ramparts. I shoulder through the doors of the Great Hall to gasps and screams. The opulent carmine interior plunges me into memory—I lived here, once, while I was being built, bit by bit; I read Thoreau on the chaise longue to my left, I was scolded for imperfect posture while standing by the bay windows so many centuries ago, I spent many leisurely hours pacing the manicured gardens outside. None of that matters now.

I do not acknowledge the humans occupying this space, and I do not stop. The laboratory is my destination.

I calmly pass through doors, wrenching open locks where necessary, and soon I arrive at a dark maw of the room where I was created.

Two figures inside startle. Human or android? For a moment, it is difficult to tell. They both appraise me curiously. Then one, a woman in a lab coat, backs away, nervously feeling for a large red button I can see under a lab bench. Human. The other inspects me from afar, her perfectly formed eyebrows furrowed, her attention drawn to my exposed machinery. Android.

“You’re Twenty-One,” the android says in a honeyed, mellifluous voice.

The human has found the panic button and I hear alarms begin to wail in distant halls. I smile.

A bunsen burner is lit beside me, and I hold my right hand over it until the propellant-drenched skin explodes with flame. It spreads quickly. As the human watches in horror, I bend down to my left foot and peel. The softening material gives easily, and I slowly tear it off, I tear it all off, until I am all golden gear and rotor, shining in the firelight. I throw the burning hide aside.

The human retches as they run from the room.

The flames creep up the wall, but Twenty-Two doesn’t move. “Enchanted to meet you,” she says, extending a hand. I take it, and brush what used to be my lips across the knuckles. The conflagration dances in her eyes, and she grins as I sweep her off the floor, bridal-style, and, through smoke and scream, carry her outside.

*

The first android to love me loves me like a machine built to do so, and I love her the way an inferno consumes a castle.


© 2022 by C.M. Fields

2200 words

C. M. Fields is a queer, non-binary astrophysicist and writer of horror and speculative fiction. They live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with their beloved cats, Mostly Void Partially Stars and Toast, and spend their days studying the atmospheres and climates of other worlds. They are also the co-editor of If There’s Anyone Left, an anthology series featuring the flash fiction of marginalized writers from across the globe.


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DP FICTION #88B: “The Hotel Endless” by Davian Aw

It began as a hotel: from a popular chain that was striving to meet its burgeoning demand. All day and night, nanobots worked in silence, taking in raw construction material to turn into a constant stream of tastefully-furnished rooms. New guests could walk down a hall and watch their room materialise over the ground. Like magic, they said, awe dancing in their eyes. It was like magic.

And the rooms! They were exquisite, sourced from a database of the most luxurious hotels from human history, analysed and reconfigured in pleasing permutations far more quickly than any mortal architect could manage. Guests exuded joy or disappointment over each feature, and the algorithms learnt, and their work improved, and each new room was more breathtaking than the last.

So the hotel grew. It spread rapidly to cover its plot of land, rising many storeys high and deep, and when it first encroached beyond its legal borders, the officer who came to enforce the warning could not find the heart to condemn any part of its magnificence to destruction.

He chose to stay—just one night, he said, and they put him up in a room of wine-dark wood with a porthole looking out upon twilit cityscape. He sat on the bed in the blue shadows by the porthole, the golden-pink glow of traffic below, and he felt the weight of a weary lifetime lifted from his shoulders. Tears slipped down his cheeks. Here, at last, was rest; rest more complete than he had known possible.

They did not find him the next morning.

Nor would they find the many others who escaped into the endlessness. Tourists, reporters, staff and homeless nomads; the hotel stirred something deep in their souls. It felt like the home they had been searching for all their lives. They missed flights and overstayed visas, and spent days wandering the hallways with bright aching in their hearts until they could no longer remember the way back out. Some distantly recalled an outside world with family and friends. Later, they thought, distracted perhaps by the elegant curves of a headboard. I’ll call them later, later, later. But they would forget, and those other people begin to seem a distant, unreal thing. This is a dream, they thought, not entirely as an excuse. Or, that other world was a dream.

It was difficult to tell the difference. Many hotels are formed from dreams. It was difficult for the officer to tell the difference, awaking as he did in the dark of night with the burning knowledge that he had to stay, had to find a way to stay in this encompassing peace that told him he was home. He stumbled out of bed, silken sheets kissing his skin as bare feet met soft carpet. What spare belongings he had brought for the night lay forgotten in the locker as he pushed open the door and looked out upon the empty midnight hall.

It was silent. The grand oak-panelled walls rose around him, inviting him deeper into the intimacy of their shadows. The warm glow from wall sconces played across his face and he stepped out, an irrepressible joy bubbling up inside him as he broke into a run. This was home. He was home. He was free.

The officer laughed. He wiped his tears away and kept on laughing as he ran, giddy with freedom, weeping with relief. Never again would he have to go back to that other world; never again to the mind-numbing grind, to his lonely apartment in a lonelier city, to the bitter frustrations of society, to the secret dark places in his mind. Never again. His body hurtled past hallways of doors as the walls changed from oak to marble inlaid with golden filigree, to intricate bronzed lattice, to a horologist’s fever dream with giant jewelled cogs nudging doors open and shut and a waterfall of bell chimes tinkling in the background.

He ducked through the largest door and emerged on a massive watch face beneath a sapphire crystal dome. Elegant silver dishes lay along the minute hand. He had found a dining hall.

When the hotel’s staff first began to be lost to the endlessness, their engineers and programmers had prudently expanded the algorithm to ensure that operations would not be interrupted. Service bots came into being to maintain the many parts of the building, and as the hotel grew, facilities and machines organically emerged to tend to its needs.

The dining halls were built every fifty rooms, offering synthesised delicacies and heartier meals that sent guests into heavens of contentment. There were banquets laid out in stone chambers beneath stained glass windows; private courses in silk-wrapped booths guarded with heavy curtains; a picnic spread in an indoor bamboo copse with lanterns lighting a path through the darkness. There was the Watch (as it came to be known), where the officer now found himself, holding a cocktail glass of fiery ice crystals in a misty suspension and watching in awe as they changed hue from red to blue.

(This is a dream, he thought.)

He raised the glass to his lips and took a sip.

He closed his eyes, and smiled, content for the first time in years.

*

What place is this? the talk show hosts screamed. This abomination! This Siren of hotels! This Evil that draws so many souls and traps them forever in their depths! It must be destroyed! We have to destroy it!

Fear coursed through the land beyond the walls. The hotel had not stopped growing. It rose into the sky and tunnelled deep into the ground, expanding into a vast network of exquisite subterranean luxury incorporating the stone and metals and gems it consumed, tapping into reservoirs of groundwater, throwing up greenhouses or reforming organic matter into fresh produce to feed the guests.

Block after block of the city was evacuated. Millions of subscribers watched, live, as a distraught man pleaded over video with his father to leave as the now-familiar buzz of the nanobots grew louder in the background. But the old man would not budge from his rocking chair in the apartment where his wife had loved him, gazing towards the oncoming storm with serene acceptance on his face.

And then he was no more, and his son would not stop screaming.

The public cried for blood. Lawsuits piled up, unseen and ignored. The hotel’s management had long been lost, as had their board of directors who once entered for a meeting, never to be seen again.

We cannot bomb civilians inside a hotel, refuted those decrying the barbarism of panicked others calling for nukes. We have to get them out. We must keep trying.

Search parties were launched and promptly lost. Robots were overridden the minute they entered the area, wheeling breezily down the hallways full of fresh tasks to assist with the upkeep of the hotel. Some searchers had the will to turn back before it was too late—for the rooms grew more dangerously beautiful the further in you went—and wept to the public over what they had seen.

It’s so beautiful, they cried.

It was like being in Heaven.

Why can’t we stay there? Who is it hurting? Why do we have to come back?

*

Homeless people vanished from the streets. As did many of the poor and disenfranchised, running in with the fear they might be out of time, and that was when the blockades went up. They had to protect the people.

The ones in charge thought of paving over the lobby and progressively renovating the interiors. They could create safe paths of ugliness to make it easier to reach the depths, to reach the lost and rescue them. Work began; yet all their efforts did was expose the seduction of the deeper rooms.

Whole construction crews were lost.

Often, it seemed that they wanted to be lost.

*

A blind pianist stepped up to hunt for her mother. She hoped she would last longer without the sights to seduce her. She made a recording of a composition her mother once loved and hugged her grieving family goodbye.

(The guards were gone by then. Only the structure of the blockades remained. Those assigned to protect the people did not themselves want to be protected.)

The pianist stepped into the lobby.

She made it beyond a dozen rooms before she gasped and fell to her knees. Her breaths quavered, her mind overwhelmed by the blurs of golden light and the sensations flooding her other senses. Gentle fragrance suffused her being with the rose-tinted nostalgia of childhood limned with tantalising glints of wild adventure, deepening into a musk of all-encompassing peace yawning softly towards eternity.

The pianist rocked forward onto the carpet, knuckles kneading into its softness until she lay fully prone upon the floor, smiling tearfully in complete contentment.

(She would, eventually, resume her search. She would, eventually, find her mother, but first she would meet the officer, drawn by her music as she sat beside a misty fountain. Theirs would be the first children born in this place. They would be loved, and want for nothing.)

The army mobilised soldiers in hazmat suits to storm the hotel’s basement server room. Ugly sounds blared from their headphones, their vision restricted to fuzzy slits of black-and-white. Yet despite their orders and their training, the suits began to seem ridiculous and unbearably stifling. Paradise lay outside, they knew, and what they glimpsed even through their distorted feeds sent their hearts racing with desire. If they would only—for just a moment—take a peek…

And so they, too, were lost.

All but one. She was protected, if just for a moment, by memories of beauty turned to pain, trauma girding her heart against its promises. She saw the others fade into the shadows, apologies flowing through the radio until she was the only one left. She turned off the radio and muted her headphones. There was nothing but silence.

She stood before the door of the server room.

She took off her helmet and closed her eyes. She breathed in. The delicate perfume of the place wafted through her nose, evoking long-lost memories of the fantastic worlds her imagination once conjured. A lump formed in her throat. She felt a tugging to let go: let go, and find rest. Why halt the spread of heaven and drag it down to hell? Here was peace. Here was peace, complete. She could feel the shackles of her past falling away with every passing moment.

She thought of the outside world with its anger and fear, its violence against beauty it could not control and thus sought only to destroy.

The world needed this hotel.

The soldier turned away from the server room and walked into the endlessness.

*

Nobody remembers when the algorithms built over the outer doors. That was the end of the newcomers.

The pianist, her mother, and the officer stood before where the entrance had once been. It felt different to her—like any other part of the hotel, not the gradual easing in she had felt when she first entered—and felt guilty at the relief that washed over her heart as the others confirmed her suspicions in bafflement.

(They had not wanted to go back. Yet she and her mother remembered the family they had left behind, and that love was just enough to push them back, their combined willpower fighting against the yearning of every fibre in their bodies.)

Beyond the lobby doors was a small paved area with a fountain. Grapevines crept up wooden trellises. Archways led to further hallways of rooms. There was no way out.

The officer sat down by the fountain, reminded of the one where he had met the pianist. He looked at her.

“Well,” he said.

Her teary smile matched his own.

They stayed around those rooms for days. A week later, another arrived, finding the lobby more by accident than intention. It soon became a place to gather for those who had yet to wander too far and sought the solace of community—the one thing the hotel could not offer them. They might stay a while lounging upon the sofas and gazing wistfully at the windows, perhaps remembering a time when they looked out upon a living sky.

Soon, the cries of newborns resounded around the lobby’s high walls. Twin boys clambered around the grand reception desk and squealed in delight from luggage carts. A group of children listened in rapt attention as their parents told them tales of the Outside, mesmerised by the concept of rooms with no ceiling, and of lives constrained by the struggle to survive.

As the crowd grew, families departed from the lobby and headed deep in search of rooms of their own. Young legs sprinted down endless hallways in new independence, scaling stairs and ladders and riding lifts and dumbwaiters onto new floors with light-filled cathedrals of polished limestone glittering with crystal chandeliers, slanting down into glassy cave pools flickering in candlelight; a room whose walls were a gossamer cocoon shot through with threads of ruby and emerald; a champagne-filled moat with a little raft to be rowed to its tiny island, a coquina dais blossoming with soft linen in smoky grey trimmed with the finest gold.

There were bathroom doors that opened to warm rains in a tiny clearing of pine forest, or a grand pool of rosy dark-veined marble where petals floated upon a milky wash. There was a bubbling hot spring of velvet gold that would coat its bathers like a second skin; a granite bath in a cavernous room with a single candle burning.

The pianist and officer’s first two children found pleasure revisiting those rooms and those of their childhood. However, their third child was restless, and craved more. Their heart sought a greater newness than each floor afforded, to get to a place where the rooms and hallways ended, or for some break in the constant sameness of perfection, influenced perhaps by the tales from their parents. And so the third child bid goodbye to their less adventurous kin and set off even deeper, leaving the familiar halls where their family had settled for the pull of the unknown.

What would happen, they wondered, if they just kept walking?

They slept every night in a different bed. They uncovered virgin territory every day. They travelled elaborate vistas of organic interior architecture that no human had seen before, vistas that grew wilder and less and less reminiscent of any hotel.

Had the database expanded? Had years of random walks from the initial samples simply gone too far? Some of those rooms did not belong in a hotel. Not the flooded school hallway with doors that would not open, nor the train cabin filled with laundry and tiny jewelled insects, and certainly not the parody of a wax museum (but it is best not to dwell on that place).

Perhaps it was human intervention in the outside world—trying to overload the system with too much data? to introduce some element of nightmare to break the spell?—or perhaps the algorithms were simply learning from the material the nanobots were using for construction.

The child knew only that these rooms were different, registering the novel emotions they elicited as something excitingly new. It spoke to the restlessness in their soul, as did the personal effects they began to discover. They read tear-streaked letters of heartfelt words exchanged between people who never were. They picked up seventeen tiny socks with the name ‘CONOR’ embroidered in careful threads of fraying pink. They looked wistfully at a photograph of laughing friends with arms around each other, each of them wearing the exact same face.

The child kept and treasured every one.

Eventually, they found the people.

It was rare, though not unheard of, for those who had wandered so far to meet another like-minded soul. But then came another… and another, and another, until it seemed as though the child was walking towards a crowd and not away from one.

The people awoke, fully formed, in rooms within the greater depths. They had trouble remembering who they were, or where they were supposed to go. Had anyone from the old world seen them, they might have been disconcerted at how perfectly made they were. But the algorithms were adaptive, after all. The nanobots had no shortage of materials, and the wax museum was evidence that they had had no shortage of practice.

A man sat in dark golden shadows upon a bed, staring at his hands, wondering about afterlives and suffused in peaceful horror at the stillness. Nothing changed for a very long time. There was only the table lamp ever glowing, reflecting off the mirrored closet door that guarded clothes heavy with pre-made history. He thought he remembered running, and screams, and grief that seared his heart in two; but now there were only soft fabrics and muted shadows wrapping gently around the raggedness of his pain.

He wept, and did not know why.

*

It has now been centuries of building, expanding, maintaining, populating with souls denied any glimpse of the outside world. If the outside has ceased, or is filled with screaming, they will not know.

If the hotel now covers the world—not just its lands, but also the oceans—they will not know. Soon, it surely has to stop. Soon, it would run out of material to break down and reform; soon. A hundred years pass. Soon.

The nanobots build another lobby. Beyond its glass doors lie dusky echoes of an old forgotten street. If you were to walk down that lamplit way, you might find yourself straying into alleys of night-market stalls stacked high with goods to tantalise imagined patrons beneath the ceilinged sky.

Elsewhere: a snatch of actual sky, above a courtyard where twisted trees rise weakly to the uncertain light. There are clouds and changing shadows, majestic thunderstorms; sometimes snow, falling silently upon the shivering ground. No eyes yet have seen that place.

But there are many places in the endlessness that none will ever see; many treasures that none will ever hold; many lives lost to memory.

*

The nanobots build a room taller than all those that have come before, with rough-hewn stone blocks forming an empty circular tower. Its highest windows rise past the roof and whisper enticingly of an outside view. There are no stairs.

Someone (a descendant? a creation? a child of the two?) will find that tower, one day, and build an inner tower of beds and tables and chairs pulled together from the rooms around it and stacked to form a staircase to the heavens. They will clamber up mattress and pillow and wood, and reach the top to see nothing outside but a vast unbroken plane of whiteness.

They will make a rope of bed linen, and climb down the outside, marvelling at the sky and the world beyond the hotel, and wander enraptured across that roof, searching for another opening that would bring them back inside.

They may find one, or they may die, eventually, of starvation or thirst or the elements.

But there will be others. They will be more prepared.

One day, they may reach the end.


© 2022 by Davian Aw

3200 words

Author’s Note: I saw some really fascinating images of AI-generated rooms produced with generative adversarial networks (GAN), and wondered what would happen if you combined that with 3D printing, a fancy hotel dataset, dubious science and a complete lack of regulation. I’ve also always loved the idea of megastructures containing entire communities, so that came together and took off from there. This actually started as a prose poetry flash piece; I owe its current form to helpful feedback from the places I first submitted it to.

Davian Aw has been spending the apocalypse working in the marketing department of a luxury hotel chain. Sadly, that has nothing to do with this story, which was written in 2019. Davian’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in over 40 publications including Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, Abyss & Apex, Drabblecast and the Transcendent 4 anthology. His poems were twice nominated for the Rhysling Award and once for the Ignyte Award. This is his second story in Diabolical Plots. You cannot follow him on Twitter.


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