Contents (Are What You Make Of Them) Editor’s Note —3— EP287: A Taste of Time By Abby Goldsmith —4— Speculative Fiction And Engagement Marketing By Josh Roseman ­—13— EP288: Future Perfect By LaShawn M. Wanak —15— Book Review:God’s War By Sarah Frost —22— EP290: Tom The Universe By Larry Hodges —24—

Escape Pod Interim Publisher: Paul Harding – paul @ escapeartists.net Founder: Steve Eley – steve @ escapeartists.net Editor: Mur Lafferty – editor @ escapepod.org Assistant Editor: Bill Peters – bill @ escapeartists.net

The Soundproof Escape Pod and all works within are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All works are copyright their respective authors. Hello all — We have listeners all over, and some of them will be heading into the winter months, but where I am spring has finally shook off the claws of winter. But in the slice of science fiction fandom we all inhabit, spring is really notable for the return of Doctor Who to the airwaves, and thankfully for US fans, it is far closer to simultaneous transmission now that it has been the last few seasons. Physical distance matters less and less for communication, which in prac- tice means that it is incredibly annoying to be in the US and looking at a twitter stream full of UK tweets about what the Doctor’s been on about that week. Spoilers suck (sweetie). And speaking of the UK, we were very lucky and happy to run an interview with Lauren Beukes, who won this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award for her novel Zoo City. It’s available in an audio episode on our website, along with a (still audio) excerpt from the book. This month we were happy to bring you six stories, three of them flash. We ran three of the four honorable mentions from our flash contest fiction, which we should have done well before this. The forth and the three outright winners of the contest should be following in fairly close order. We also brought you Abby Goldsmith’s A Taste Of Time, LaShawn Wanak’s Future Perfect, and Larry Hodg- es’ Tom the Universe. If you didn’t already listen to the on the ‘cast, I implore you to flick, scroll, click, or otherwise navigate several pages further in this to read them. Until next time, ——Bill Bill Peters Assistant Editor —30—

3 EP287: A Taste of Time By Abby Goldsmith 1. On the night she turned twenty-nine, Jane sat on her narrow bed, watching TV and drinking alone. She’d gone through a bottle of wine and was mostly through a second bottle. Tomorrow morning would be pain- ful. Or she could stop worrying about tomorrow. The ibuprofen in her cabinet kept popping into her mind. Jane wasn’t sure if all those pills chased by alcohol would be enough to end her life, but the idea of look- ing up how to commit suicide online seemed just too pathetic. The front door of her tiny apartment creaked open. Jane leaned forward, peering through her bedroom doorway. A black wine bottle stood on the floor, with a placard dangling from its silver ribbon. Her gaze immediately went to the deadbolt. It was in place, as she’d left it. Jane shut the TV off and listened for noises from the hallway. All she heard were the sounds of Boston traf- fic outside. Several weeks ago, after she’d come home to find her boyfriend screwing a fat chick on her couch, she’d had the locks changed. No one could have gotten in. Yet the bottle sat mysteriously on the wooden floor. At last, Jane crossed her apartment, checking every shadow for an intruder. She picked up the bottle. The placard had gilded letters, making it a potentially expensive gift. Tabula Rasa Warning: There Is No Return Jane flipped the placard over twice, but nothing else was written on it. She listened, alert for any noise. Mystery had never been much a part of her adult life, and it gave her a strangely excited feeling. If the warning label meant something like _poison_, it seemed like a more digni- fied way to go than pills and alcohol. Her reflection on the black surface of the bottle was disturbingly clear. There she was: Plain Jane, a frumpy woman with a double-chin and acne scars. She unscrewed the cap and popped the foil underneath. A stringent smell wafted up, making her wrinkle her nose and salivate at the same time. “Happy birthday, Jane,” she told herself, and swallowed a mouthful. Read More—> 2. Jane gagged on the sour taste in her mouth. She was so dizzy, she’d fallen . . . but she was sitting in an of- fice chair, with no memory whatsoever of leaving her dark and quiet apartment. Florescent lights beat down on her, and the familiar voices of a call center surrounded her. None of this was possible. She was back at her old workplace. It was a workday, late afternoon, judging by the angle of light. Ultimata Insurance had laid her off months ago, yet here she was. A man rapped his knuckles against Jane’s desk. “I gave you the files you needed, right?” Her old boss, 4 Moore, didn’t bother to wait for a reply. He was always in a hurry. Jane barely started to nod before he rushed away. The walls of her cubicle looked exactly the way she remembered. There was the photograph of herself and mom. There was the generic Ultimata calendar, flipped to October 2009 . . . Jane double-checked the year. 2009 was a full two years before the company downsized. If this was October 2009, then she was still employed. And still dating the jerk, Aaron. Her fists tightened, and she realized that her hand was clamped around the black wine bottle. She might lose her job more quickly this time, if they saw that. She hid it beneath her desk. “Jane!” Jane swiveled to face Stephanie, who worked in the cubicle across from hers. Stephanie was slim with bouncy golden hair, and never deigned to speak to plain Jane. Stephanie hurried across into Jane’s cubicle, giving a sneaky look both ways before crossing. She beamed at Jane. “Did I just see you sneak a bottle of wine under your desk?” she asked in a low voice. “Holy crap, Moore didn’t even notice!” Jane searched for a good, attention-deflecting explanation. “It’s a gift.” Stephanie’s look became sly. “Oooh. For your boyfriend. Is this your anniversary?” Jane shrugged, unequipped to answer. She wanted to study the wine. Tabula Rasa. Blank slate. But instead of erasing her memories, it seemed to have stuck her in one. She blinked at her computer monitor, then Stephanie. But Stephanie had never entered her cubicle before, she was fairly certain. This all felt far too real to be a hallucination. She glanced down at herself, and was thrilled to recognize her white floral-print blouse, which she’d ruined with a grease stain. This was 2009, before the grease stain. She decided to roll with it, and see how events played out. “Yes, our anniversary’s tonight,” she lied. Stephanie grinned. “How long have you been with him?” Jane was surprised by Stephanie’s interest. When she answered, she fully expected Stephanie to return to her own cubicle, but it seemed Stephanie wanted to talk about relationships. She’d just started dating a man whom she had doubts about, and wanted advice. Jane told her it was better to be alone than with a man who didn’t respect her. “Yeah, that makes sense.” Stephanie gave her a little wave. “Well, I’d better get back to work, but thanks for the advice.” The remainder of the workday passed without mishap, although Jane kept eying the clock on her monitor, wondering when–or if–she would wake up in January 2011. She had trouble remembering the details of the insurance claims she was supposed to be updating. Instead of cross-referencing data, she kept checking the news online, verifying that it was indeed October 2009. Earthquake recovery in Sumatra. Astronomers discover 32 exoplanets. The news gave her a weird sense of deja vu. Was this stuff really new to everyone around her? She wanted to ask Stephanie about future events, such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Would Stephanie look at Jane and say, “You’re crazy,” or would she laugh? Eventually, five o’clock rolled around. Stephanie wished Jane a happy anniversary and a cheerful, “See ya tomorrow!” Jane kept expecting this hallucination, or whatever it was, to end. But the office was clearing out.

5 She had nowhere to stow the black bottle, so she wrapped it inside her light jacket as best she could, and hurried outside. Colorful leaves against a deep blue sky confirmed that this was indeed October, not Janu- ary. She walked to the T stop and waited, trying to not smell the familiar stink of urine on the brick wall. A sick feeling bubbled in her stomach. Aaron would be on her couch when she got home. Unshaven, unem- ployed, alcoholic Aaron. Jane didn’t want to deal with him. Part of her would be pathetically grateful to see him, especially knowing that he hadn’t met the fat chick yet. But how could she forget the sight of him cheating on her, in her own apartment? Jane wasn’t good enough for him. He’d made that clear. The train doors parted, and Jane joined the crowd, taking the first seat that opened up. She studied the mysterious bottle as the T rattled its way across northern Boston. No label on its black mirrored surface. Why had it chosen a seemingly random day in 2009? Why not a more momentous occasion in her life? She traced the gilded letters of the placard. People gave her strange looks, but she didn’t care. Tabula Rasa. Jane vaguely remembered learning that term in middle school. It was supposed to apply to newborn babies, she thought. A baby was born with a blank slate, ready to receive every experience with no prejudgment whatsoever. A baby could become any sort of adult–lucky thing–but adults like Jane faced a far more predictable future, narrowed by years of layered experiences. There Is No Return. Goose-flesh rose on Jane’s arms. She looked around the train car, seeing it afresh for the first time. This was really October 2009, this was really her life . . . but her fellow commuters had never seen her study a wine bottle, before. Stephanie had never been friendly to her, before. Jane was creating a new future for herself. And she could not return to her old future. Her depressing twenty-ninth birthday was erased forever, exist- ing only inside her mind. One swallow of Tabula Rasa had made her twenty-seven again. She gripped the wine bottle for the rest of the commute, unwilling to let it out of her sight. 3. As Jane approached her apartment, she imagined dirty dishes piled in the sink, and dirty laundry strewn across the floor. Most of it would be Aaron’s mess. The thought of confronting him made her shoulders tighten. She sat in the stairwell to collect her thoughts. The black bottle’s surface gleamed under the yellowed bulbs. Jane wondered how far she could reshape her future, from here. Ultimata Insurance would still downsize her out of a job. Aaron would undoubtedly still cheat on her. Maybe she didn’t have to confront Aaron. Maybe she could erase him entirely from her life. If one swallow took her back two years, perhaps she could return to a time when she was happy. The cap of the bottle unscrewed as easily as before. Jane closed her lips around the bottle’s neck. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. 4. The absence of various aches could only mean youth. Jane felt as if she could run a marathon. She ran her tongue over solid and healthy teeth. She was thin, with long legs drawn against the car seat in front of her. A duffel bag sat beneath her feet. The red upholstery brought up feelings akin to love. She was in Luke’s car. Luke, the Harvard-bound kid, before he died in a car crash.

6 “Holy cow.” The redhead boy sitting next to her gaped. “Where’d that come from?” Adrenalin flooded Jane’s veins. She screwed on the cap and tried to hide the bottle, struggling to remem- ber the redhead’s name. Joe? Jason? Something like that. He was a skinny stick, not yet filled in to the width of his shoulders. Jane had dated him for a week or two. Was that before now, after now, or now now? “What?” Karen twisted around to look at them–an incredibly young Karen. “She has a wine bottle!” said the redhead boy. “Damn, girl!” Karen giggled. “Swiped from your mom?” Jane recalled how devastated Karen was after the accident in which Luke died. The couple had both been accepted to Harvard, but Karen took a year off and went to Stanford, instead. All Jane could manage was a weak smile. She dreaded seeing Luke’s face, when the last time she’d seen it was at his open-casket funeral. This was like living a movie where she knew the plot. Worse, it was like riding in a car driven by a ghost. How could she look Luke in the eye, knowing when his life would end? Would he believe Jane, if she warned him? “Can I have a sip?” Karen asked. “Me too,” said the redhead. Jane remembered him as a weak kisser, almost afraid of girls. She’d secretly been envious of Karen and Luke. But what was this redhead’s name? This would be embarrassing, if she failed to remember. Green forest rolled by on both sides of the highway. They must be on their way to Hampton Beach. Nineties-era cars and SUVs passed them. The sky was a shade of blue she’d nearly forgotten. Her teenage friends had shaggy or curly hair. She had no idea what month this was, or even what year. Cell phones weren’t widespread, yet. Unexpectedly, tears threatened. Had Jane truly erased her twenty-something self from existence? Was that entire decade of her life washed down the drain, a big fat waste that clogged her memories? “Whoa.” The redhead boy brushed his hand over Jane’s barely covered thighs. “Major goose bumps. Are you all right?” Jane wasn’t ready to deal with a day at the beach with her high school friends. She wanted to be alone, to think things through. “I’ll share.” She managed a shaky smile. Her own youthful voice startled her. “But I’ll go first.” She unscrewed the cap and licked the edge of the bottle. Just a taste. 5. The shapes around her darkened bedroom were achingly familiar. The glowing readout of her nightstand clock showed 3:37AM. Jane heaved a big sigh of relief. The bottle was noticeably lighter since her jump from age twenty-something to teen-something. She sus- pected that once the contents were gone, there would be no replacement, and she’d be stuck in whatever year she ended up. This is 1999, she told herself. It might be 1998, but the difference seemed minute. Tomorrow, or perhaps a few days from now, she’d go to the beach with Karen, Luke, and the redhead boy. And she would deal with it. She’d refrain from taking a sip of Tabula Rasa, no matter how much she wanted to escape. From now on, she would only move forward. She had a chance to redo all the mistakes in her 7 life. This was a gift. She capped the bottle and stuffed it in the place her mother was least likely to check; her underwear drawer. 6. Breakfast was a macabre affair. Her mother, transfixed by the morning news, insisted that Jane clean her plate. “And hurry, or you’ll be late!” she added. Jane had to think a moment before she recalled the summer she’d spent working at Dunkin Donuts. “Oh. Right.” She had one more year of high school ahead of her. This time, she would aim for the best college she could win a scholarship to. She wouldn’t waste time on the redhead boy, or any boy. Instead of getting drunk with Karen, she would try to emulate Karen’s study habits. On the news, the anchorwoman announced the Power Lotto numbers. Jane’s mother shook her head. “Wouldn’t it be nice to win that jackpot? We could sure use eleven million dollars around here.” Jane paused on her way out the door. She didn’t want to memorize the winning Lotto numbers, but they were so simple, they stuck in her head. 19. 5. 36. 24. 2. They reemerged in her thoughts while she worked the dough-nut counter, a mental chant, like a song that wouldn’t go away. 7. The jackpot was up to sixteen million, the highest the state of New Hampshire had ever seen. Jane knew that someone else would win tomorrow. “Please, Mom?” she begged. “Buy the ticket this once, and I’ll do all the house chores for a week, unless we win the jackpot.” Her mother burst out laughing. “Oh, all right. I can’t pass that deal up.” She wrapped her hands around the cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. “You’ve been acting strangely these last few days, you know that?” “How so?” Jane asked. The past five days had been torture. It was a small miracle that Jane hadn’t been fired; she’d forgotten the name of her boss. Now even Karen was teasing her about short-term memory loss. “Well, just . . .” her mother thought for a moment. “You’re spending time with me. It’s nice. I like it. You seem a lot more . . . mellow.” Jane laughed. She knew exactly how it felt to be an adult. Maybe her lost decade of life hadn’t been en- tirely wasted, after all. 8. “We’ve won! We’ve won! We’ve won!” Jane and her mother screamed together. 9. One day stood out in particular, to Jane. That day on the deck of the cruise ship, where she slipped per- fectly into Robert’s arms, and he held her while they watched the sun set over towering thunderheads on the South Pacific. Then they danced in the ship’s ballroom. If she could relive any day over and over with- out making it stale, it would be that day. But she hadn’t thought to touch the Tabula Rasa to bring back that outstanding day until decades later. By then, the intervening years stopped her from jumping back. 8 10. In her seventies, Jane had trouble sleeping. She tossed and turned, and kept touching the place next to her, where Robert should be. He was in a hospice, with Alzheimer’s. Jane feared that she might be headed down that path, herself. She exhibited no signs of memory loss, but her mother had gone senile during her last years, and Jane figured it was only a matter of time. For the first time in many decades, Jane allowed herself to think of Tabula Rasa. She no longer kept it nearby. The temptation was too great. She’d used it often during her lottery-winning years, enough so that the catchphrase “a Lucky Jane” was common in households across the United States. Jane belted her robe and slipped on her slippers. She found her walker and shuffled out of her bedroom, turning on lights as she went. The mansion was her dream home, yet it seemed huge and cavernous with just herself inhabiting it. She shuffled through the glass corridor that crossed a stepped waterfall, and through the music room, with its view of the lush mountain valley. The elevator brought her to the basement level. Here Robert kept a wet bar, and Jane kept her seldom-used study. She moved aside the Japanese wall hanging. Next, she had to use a box-cutter from her desk to cut away the wallpaper. When the steel door was visible, Jane removed a tiny key from its chain around her neck, and unlocked the safe. The Tabula Rasa gleamed inside. Its black surface was clean, as if forty-odd years locked in a safe had given it no chance to collect dust. Jane swallowed, mouth dry. She suspected the bottle was still half full. She’d only taken tiny sips and licks since her first lottery win. She sat at her oak desk, contemplating Tabula Rasa in front of her. She could return to the year before Robert developed Alzheimer’s. But then she’d have to watch him grow senile, all over again. That thought twisted in her like a knife. She could go all the way back to that one perfect day on the cruise ship. But then what? If she relived that day over and over, it would lose its poignancy. She could smash the bottle. That idea filled Jane with horror and urgency at the same time. She’d lived a good life. She didn’t need to do any part of it over again. The young woman who’d wanted to kill herself on her twenty-ninth birthday was a long, distant way away. Jane hardly remembered her. Nor did she want to. The bottle was cold and heavy in her old hands. She carried it to the wet bar, and swung it up, ready to smash it to pieces. But her hands faltered on the downswing. Jane caught the bottle before it could shatter. During her long life, Jane had assumed the Tabula Rasa was a personal gift. But what if she was supposed to use the elixir to help mankind? She could predict major events. Instead of keeping quiet the day before September 11th in 2001, perhaps she should have done something to warn people. So many catastrophes and disasters stood out in her lifetime. If the world media believed that Jane was a prophet, she could save millions of lives. Maybe that was her true purpose in life. Surely she couldn’t be meant to shrivel up and die, with half the bottle still full. On the verge of touching the uncapped bottle to her wrinkled lips, Jane read the placard again. There Is

9 No Return. She and Robert had built up a store of happy memories together. Jane hated the idea of erasing those ex- periences permanently from Robert. If she returned to 2001, before she even met Robert, their paths might not cross. They might not marry each other. But they’d had fights, hadn’t they? Jane used to wonder if Robert only saw dollar signs when he proposed marriage to her. She used to suffer a lot of doubts about him. Sometimes, she regretted not having dated before gaining wealth, just to ascertain that Robert was truly the best choice for her. Besides, poor Robert had already lost most of his memories. Tabula Rasa couldn’t change biology. He rec- ognized Jane, but he couldn’t speak with her anymore. All he could do was hold her hand. Jane swung the bottle up and opened her throat to chug. This time, she would save lives. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. 11. “I just know,” Jane said, frustrated. “Look, can’t you–hey!” She listened to the dial-tone, incredulous, then slammed the phone into its cradle. “What the hell’s your problem?” Allison, her roommate in the dorm room at Stanford, put her hands on her hips and glared. Jane ignored Allison. She’d already relived this frustrating day three times, and no matter how hard she tried to get the FBI and CIA to listen to her warnings, she knew they didn’t take her seriously. Either that, or they put her on a terrorist watch-list. The next day . . . Jane hated having to relive 9/11. She only went far enough to know that her warnings had failed. She eyed the black bottle. It was time for more drastic measures. Back to high school. Gulp. 12. “Trust me,” Jane said. “George W. Bush will be elected.” Karen gave Jane a weird look. “You see all this stuff in dreams?” Jane could clearly remember Karen as an old woman. Karen would have three kids and seven grandchil- dren. She shrugged, and tried to focus on the present. “Weird.” Karen shivered. “You’ve been right far too often.” “I see the future,” Jane said. “Can you see my future?” Karen looked at her intently. Jane gave a slight nod. “I see the future of everyone I know well. And Luke is going to die in a car accident two months from now, unless he listens to me.” Karen’s hands flew to her mouth. She backed away from Jane, eyes wide. “Okay. That’s really, really creepy.” Jane shifted on the bar stool in Karen’s house. She didn’t want to be creepy, but it seemed the only way to get people to listen to her warnings.

10 “I’m sort of tired,” Karen said. “Would you mind, uh . . . I guess we can talk tomorrow, in school.” Jane picked up her purse. Karen gave her a cold, “Bye,” and Jane knew that Karen would take pains to avoid her. 13. When the Prophet Jane turned twenty-five, her mother got her a puppy. Jane knew that was a bad idea. She almost asked her mother to return the golden retriever, but it melted into her embrace. “Cassi,” Jane named the dog. 14. Around the age of twenty-nine, Jane began to long for Tabula Rasa. She waited another seven years, until Cassi died. Death was creeping up on her, too. Jane knew she was only in her thirties . . . but she’d experienced a total of one hundred and eighteen years. Life was not nearly as enjoyable this time around. No one wanted to befriend the Prophet. Jane had saved lives as best she could, but every decision in her personal life ended in disappointment. She’d managed to meet Robert again, but bungled their first few dates, plagued by fears of repeating their mistakes and watching him grow senile again. And it seemed pointless to cultivate any romance. She would end up hitting the bottle again, sooner or later. When Jane brought Cassi to the vet for the last time, she realized that she needed to make a major, major change. A dog was hardly a family, yet Jane didn’t know how to face another year alone, without Cassi’s big smile. It was time to hit the bottle. Maybe this time, she could prevent her parents from divorcing. 15. The remaining contents of Tabula Rasa swished near the bottom. Jane hurriedly stuffed it under her school desk before anyone could see. Too late! She defiantly took a swig in front of her eighth grade teacher. 16. Jane stood in front of her bedroom mirror, horror-struck. What had she done? A ten-year-old girl gazed back with ancient eyes. Even as the taste faded, Jane wanted to vomit. She ran into her bathroom and tried to force herself to sick it up. But all she could do was gag. There Is No Return. She began to laugh like crazy. 17. Eleven-year-old Jane lay on her bed, listening to a Black Sabbath cassette tape and yearning for high speed internet access. She ached to see Robert. Or Cassi. She wanted her college friends, or even her high school friends. Her parents were monstrous. She’d forgotten how frequent and vicious their fights were. School was no escape. Jane had already grown up, attended two universities, experienced a long marriage and countless relationships, mingled with celebrities and politicians, and managed a vast estate. These 1990s felt like ancient history. Her classmates wanted nothing to do with her. They thought she was creepy. For her part, Jane couldn’t fit into their eleven-year-old mindsets. She failed to laugh at their jokes, couldn’t understand their stresses. Suicide had crossed her mind more than once. Her depression only added to her parents’ stress, making the fights worse. Jane didn’t think she could take another year of living like this. 11 Despite the mess her life had become, it didn’t take much effort to avoid the bottle. As the Black Sabbath music drummed over her, Jane closed her eyes and saw the graveyard where she should have been buried, side by side with Robert. She should have smashed the Tabula Rasa when she was old. Now she would give anything to return to that lifetime, when the world remembered her as Lucky Jane. 18. The black bottle still held some elixir in it. Jane swished it from side to side. If she estimated correctly, there was enough to erase eleven or twelve years. She licked her lips. She knew she shouldn’t. She ought to smash the bottle. But . . . What if she could be born again, as a completely different person? What if her parents raised a boy, or at least a very different girl? Would that child be ugly? Would that child always be plagued by regrets and envy? “Blank slate,” Jane whispered. “I love you, Mom. I love you.” She sat on the edge of her bed and chugged the last contents of Tabula Rasa.

—30— Abby Goldsmith is a a 2D/3D game animator and writer living in Texas. She has been a listener of Escape Pod since it started.

12 Speculative Fiction and Engagement Marketing Review by Josh Roseman I think it’s fair to say that speculative fiction has been hitting the “convincing people to vote for stuff using futuristic means” trope for a few decades now. From stories about voting how to kill people (or whether or not they should be killed) to more contemporary pieces about putting oneself up on the internet and taking votes and commentary on one’s entire day, the very concept isn’t exactly new. However, as often happens, reality is outstripping fiction at an alarming rate. How long can you go without someone on your Twitter stream or in your Facebook friends list asking you to click something, retweet something, or vote for something? The real question is: how often do you actually do it? Case in point: about a week ago, I submitted an entry to the American Gods contest, whereby regular people like you and me can audition for a role in an upcoming audio version of the book. (If you’d like to hear my entry, here it is.) The first round is open to anyone, and the winners of that round must garner the most votes from friends, family, and other folks they can convince either of (a) their narrative awesomeness or (b) their vote-worthiness. The 20 top vote-getters move on to round two, which I believe means that Neil Gaiman himself listens to their auditions and selects an indeterminate number of winners to actually appear in the publication. One might think that, with my nearly-300 Twitter followers and 430-ish Facebook friends, I’d have at least 100 votes by now. As of this writing, I have 23. I’m about 310 votes behind the #20 person (according to the 4/20/11 lead- erboard). The odds of me overcoming that deficit aren’t all that great unless I manage to get retweeted by someone with about 10,000 followers*. I mean, my mom can only vote once a day, and the first round ends May 2. So why isn’t this working like it does in fiction? Why can’t I just blast out a message and have people flock- ing to my URL to log in? Let’s look at engagement marketing (what people sometimes call “viral marketing”). Engagement market- ing is the concept of getting people to participate in the marketing of a brand. Thing is, I don’t really have a brand. If you’ve read my fiction or heard me perform an audio story, or you enjoy my articles and reviews here on the Escape Pod blog, you may have some passing knowledge of who I am**. Otherwise, my per- sonal brand, as far as you know, is just this guy asking for you to vote for him. Sometimes that’s enough — every now and then a co-worker says “oh, by the way, I voted for you”. To them, my personal brand is “the guy who gets the work done fastest and most accurately”, and I’m trading on that as hard as I can. I can engage my co-workers using that brand. But beyond that, yeah… just “that guy”. There are more than six billion “that guy”s*** on the planet. “That guy” simply isn’t enough. And that, I think, is one of the major reason people don’t vote for their friends or people they see posting calls to action on Facebook and Twitter. There’s just not enough engagement. On a macro scale, my day job is in digital advertising, and I see this a lot: companies ask potential custom- ers to engage with their brand by liking them on Facebook. The thing is, more and more articles like this one are saying that that doesn’t really create brand engagement. I mean, I like plenty of things, but I don’t 13 Like them on Facebook because, to be honest, all a Like means to me is more spam in my feed. There’s no value. Just like there’s really no value to being “that guy” and asking someone to vote for you for some random contest. I don’t bring anything to the table for you, and you don’t benefit. I’m not going to give you money or free gifts for voting. You’d be doing it out of the goodness of your heart. Some social media short-stories (including one I can’t remember the title of right now, but may have been by LaShawn Wanak) focus on people who do have something else that benefits the voter. And of course there are those stories that are about sex, where sex is the benefit — seeing it, experiencing it, etc. Much to my regret, I am not sexy and cannot offer that as a benefit. While speculative fiction gets a lot of things right, I believe that “getting people to vote for stuff” trope will continue to live on in the fictional realm. As we become more and more social online, the concept of engagement marketing will continue to evolve, and if Moore’s Law is any sort of a predictor, the concept of clicking the Like button being what marketers consider the be-all and end-all of brand engagement will fall by the wayside****. But because it won’t actually have happened, the stories will continue to be written. And I’ll keep on read- ing them. * Posit 23 individual votes out of 700 friends/followers = 3%. To get 300 more votes, I divided 300 by .03 and came up with 10,000 people being exposed to my message. I’m sure my math isn’t accurate, so please don’t call me on it. I’m just spitballing. And that’s kind of a disgusting phrase, if you think about it. ** And if you’ve heard how effusive Tony C. Smith is in his praise on Starship Sofa, my name might stick a little more. Every time he introduces me, I blush a little — I’ve never been good at taking compliments. *** For the purposes of this example, a girl can be “that guy” too. **** So, how did I do? Did I successfully camouflage a “please vote for me” message in a piece about speculative fiction and present-day marketing? Did my brand engage you enough to get you to cast a vote? Or am I going to have to write an article about site registrations and barriers to entry? Because I totally can. Don’t think I can’t. Hey, maybe that’s my next story idea — vote for me to prevent me from doing something. Might be something to that…

—30— Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Big Pulp, and on the Dunesteef and the Drabblecast. He also has a decade of news and feature writing experience. Visit his website at roseplusman.com, or find him on twitter @listener42.

14 EP288: Future Perfect By LaShawn M. Wanak I saw you at a party once. You stood by the bookshelf, reading a tattered volume on Proust. You wore an orange and yellow XTC shirt beneath brown flannel. I bumped your elbow by accident and you looked up, your eyes startling green. I smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Nina.” “Hi. Eric.” I trailed behind you for the rest of the party. You introduced me to your friends and I laughed at their jokes. Twice, our sleeves brushed against each other. Around two in the morning, you left with your friends. An hour later, I also left. I crossed the empty cam- pus, humming under my breath, wondering if I’d ever see you again. The watch on my arm beeped. ### “This experiment will measure how small changes occurring before a certain event affect its outcome positively and negatively.” The chair is her creation. She bought the frame on impulse at a medical supply shop. The conical helmet, perforated with slender tubes, fits on top. Whenever she maneuvers her head beneath it, she thinks of the hair dryers at her mother’s beauty salon. All those bulky astronaut bonnets lined in perfect rows, vibrating air molecules to a feverish pitch. She likes this scientific homage to her mother extracting time from thin air. “Recording of the control event complete. Setting a change in a condition set slightly in the past. The goal of this first jump is to see if this will change the outcome of the event to a more positive circumstance.” She types on the laptop built into the armrest, then glances at the elaborate flowchart tacked upon the far wall of the laboratory. Written in her own hand, neat and precise, equations and sums branch and connect like a roadmap of a probability highway. She wonders which formula will have his lips pressing against hers. “Test #1. Begin.” ### I saw you at a party once. You stood next to Muriel, hair rumpled, clothes wrinkled. I had my hair permed that morning so it hung straight over my eyes. I wore tight-fitting jeans and a blue top with spaghetti straps. I didn’t speak to you, just hung out with a couple of my girlfriends. When “Atomic Dog” came on the stereo, I shimmied to the bookcase, shaking my hips and wiggling my butt. Only then I noticed you, you and your startling green eyes. You smiled and said, “Hi, there.” Muriel looked over and pulled you from the room. Later, while getting punch, I looked out the window and saw you and Muriel standing on the sidewalk below. She cupped your face, pulling it down to meet hers. I thought, Shame. He had nice eyes. Then someone stepped on my foot and I swore, loudly. As the guy next to me apologized, the watch on my arm beeped. 15 You went on to have three children with Muriel. It took several years until I said yes to Brenton. ### She rises from the chair, pulling the sensors from her body. She takes a sip of lukewarm coffee and frowns at the chart on the wall. The outcome remained the same, but that was to be expected. With so many variables, it will take time to narrow down the finite set of outcomes, both positive and negative. She isn’t worried; after all, only two possible outcomes can come from this event. She picks up a black magic marker and crosses off a number with an ‘X’. ### We came to the party together, your arm slung around my shoulders. You and I had met several weeks before. Within a week, we were dating. Within six weeks, we were an ‘item’. Muriel was there as well, dancing alone by the bookshelves. Though my hand was buried in your back pocket, you couldn’t tear your eyes from her. I distracted you by pulling you over to introduce my friends. You nodded, laughed at someone’s joke and glanced towards the corner. Brenton asked if the punchbowl needed to be filled. I went to check it out, but when I came back, you were gone. I looked around the room, but you had vanished along with Muriel. With a sinking feeling, I walked over to the window. The two of you stood together on the sidewalk, she cupping your face to bring it down to hers. You didn’t hear me banging on the window or crying out your name. As I leaned my head against the glass, my watch beeped. You broke up with me without saying goodbye. Three weeks after that, you left Muriel for someone else. ### “Professor, look at this.” She sets the petri dish under the microscope and observes the professor as he peers through the eyepiece. She already knows what he’s seeing: crystalline branches, splitting off in different directions, growing like a snowflake created in God’s palm. “What is it, Nina?” “It is a memory that I never had. A choice I’ve never taken.” He looks up at her. “You’re using this to predict the future?” “Not ‘the’ future. ‘A’ future.” She lays her hand on the helmet. “The chair allows me to see non-linear time. I can study the branches leading up to a single event and set variables accordingly. In a few brief moments, I can experience several different lifetimes based on that single change.” The professor frowns at her, then at the chart on the wall, speckled here and there with tiny ‘X’ pinpricks. “So you can watch the outcomes of a choice without suffering the consequences.” “I wouldn’t necessarily call it that.” She runs her hand fondly along plastic and chrome. “It simply turns wishful thinking into reality.” ### I’ve known you all my life. We grew up in the same neighborhood. Our mothers put us in the same playgroup. We went to the same public school. You had a hard time with math, so I tutored you. At first, you didn’t like it; you thought it 16 was stupid for a girl to tutor you. I said for each answer right, you got a kiss. After that, you showed up every week. We hung out a lot in high school. By then, I was tutoring other guys. You played our kissing game with other girls, but you still considered me your best friend. In college, I fell in love with a guy named Brenton. Our mutual friend, Muriel, wouldn’t give you the time of day. One night, you called me from a party, your words emotional, slurred. Muriel had left with some other guy. I was in a middle of an argument with Brenton. I walked out on him and went to join you at the party. We laughed and danced with each other by the bookshelves. Later, we stumbled out into the cool night air and collapsed against a wall. Your fingers fumbled on my blouse; your breath hot upon my neck, smelling of punch and beer. I dug my fingers in your silken hair, gasping, glancing up at the silent moon. As I fumbled with your zipper, the watch on my arm beeped. Afterwards, you walked me home, both of us suddenly sober and quiet. Brenton and I made up, but I never told him what we’d done. You and I drifted apart, too embarrassed to remain in contact. Years later, I got a letter from you. I ripped it up without opening it. ### The professor turns from the chart. “But what about ego preservation?” “What do you mean?” “If the essence of who you are is based on your own experiences and memories, wouldn’t viewing these alternate choices also alter you?” She laughs. “That won’t happen.” “How do you know?” She raises her arm, the one with the watch, “This keeps me grounded. It pulls me back before anything permanent-” A soft crack makes them both turn. The petri dish has burst, spreading a lattice-work of thin frostlike threads down the microscope base and across the table. Grabbing a spray bottle, she quickly spritzes a solution over the engulfing crystal. The fragile structure dissipates into an alcohol-laced mist. The professor flaps his hand in front of his face. “And what, Nina, do you call that?” She turns her head, hiding her grimace. “It only shows that I need a stronger dish.” ### We went to separate grammar schools, but attended the same high school. At college, we shared one class: Economics. I sat in the front, you in the back. You dropped out after three weeks. We saw each other at a party; you showed up with a red-head, I was on the way out with Brenton. Our arms brushed as we passed each other. You turned to say hello, but Brenton pulled me away before I could say anything back. I graduated with honors with a Ph.D. in Mathematics. I didn’t know what happened to you. One day, I went with a group of physicists to a lecture. We were discussing the butterfly effect when I looked out the car window and saw you-in a wheelchair, clothes filthy, beard and hair matted. On top of your amputated legs, you held a cardboard sign: “HELP THE HOMELESS”. You stared at me with those startling green eyes.

17 “Stop,” I said, “Stop the car.” My watch beeped as I reached for the door. The car moved on and soon you were lost. Five years later, I accepted the Nobel Prize for my contributions to Quantum Physics. I used my knowledge to search for you in timelines, but I never, ever found you again. ### Using the party as a control event isn’t working. She stares at her chart, tapping the magic marker against her lips. She thought that by now she would have seen two realities-one negative, one positive-branch from the single event. A couple of times, it comes close, very close, but each time reverts to a negative outcome. That last one was interesting. She takes out a highlighter, traces the formula in fluorescent yellow. She’ll have to come back to that possibility. But then, she thinks of his eyes, piercing through her other personas, pinning her true self upon the chair. “Perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way.” She rips off another large sheet of paper and tacks it up on the remaining empty space in her lab. She scribbles her formulas, several loosely-scrawled numbers escaping onto the bumpy surface of the wall. Satisfied, she doffs her lab coat and applies the sensors to her naked body: head, neck, shoulders, under- arms, between her breasts, right hip, around her left toe. She types in the modified conditions, then makes adjustments to her watch. “All right, then. Test #353. Begin.” ### We never met in college. We met at Mr. Gee’s Grocery Store. You were in Aisle 6, looking for Pampers. I told you that the store brand was much cheaper. We laughed for a little bit, then you asked me out for coffee. You were a father working part-time from home. I was a stay-at-home mother. Neither of our spouses knew about us. One warm spring day, while our children played outside, you and I twisted on bedsheets: your mouth moist and hot upon my neck, shoulders, underarms, between my breasts, right hip. You sucked on my left toe as David pulled into the driveway. We didn’t hear him open the front door, nor did we hear him mount the staircase. As my watch beeped on my nightstand, he pulled the gun from his holster. In court, he swore that the safety was on. I divorced him and endured a nasty custody battle. You remained in a coma for six months. I couldn’t visit you due to the restraining order from your wife. ### “Are you all right?” His name is Gary. He’s good looking, in that young, fresh-from-the-dormitory sort of way. He’s supposed to be her intern, but nowadays she doesn’t want anyone in the lab with her. She looks up from her hands and says, “What makes you ask that?” “It’s just that you don’t look so good.” “I’m fine.” She goes back to staring at her hands spread upon the cafeteria table. He sighs and takes the seat across from her, spreading out several sheets of paper. “I’m having a hard time with these calculations you’ve given me. I don’t know why, but each time I check the results, the equations seem different. It’s like they’re mutating.”

18 “That’s impossible. They should stay the same.” She lightly traces the raised blood vessels running beneath the brown skin of her right hand, imagines them bursting out from her fingertips, lines of red and blue capillaries branching out in all direc- tions. “I know. I’ve checked and rechecked. It’s weird.” He looks at her carefully. “Are you sure you don’t wanna go out and get some coffee or something? Go get some fresh air?” She’s faintly amused that he’s trying to ask her out. But those wide, earnest eyes are baby blues, cheerful as a sunny sky. Innocent. Unappealing. ### I never went to college. Ran away from home at twelve. Got pregnant at fourteen. Had an abortion. Preg- nant again at seventeen. Got another abortion. You saw me on the corner at 16th and Park, hiking my miniskirt up. I peered at you through the car win- dow, “Hey, wanna have some fun tonight?” You stepped out of the car, flashing a cop’s badge. Our arms brushed briefly as you handcuffed me. You pulled into the headquarters’ parking lot. I tried to act nonchalant, holding your gaze in the rearview mirror. Minutes later, my watch beeped, but I couldn’t silence it. My hands were still locked behind my back as my head bobbed between your legs. I was back on the streets by Sunday. Dead from crack overdose on Monday. Weeks later, you started a dif- ferent beat, having already forgotten me. ### The entire lab is wallpapered with formulas: on paper, on the walls, the linoleum floor, the ceiling. There are calculations drawn on top of calculations, Magic Eye illusions only she can decode. The one formula she highlighted, the timeline with the Nobel Prize, has already been written over six times, hints of yellow showing through black scribble. She has given up on using paper. It’s too limiting, too confining for her work. For every ten formulas, there’s a thick, black ‘X’ through them, solid, forbidding, accusing. She uses white chalk to write over the ‘X’s, expanding her writing space one a layer at a time. She stands in front of the latest calculation, the magic marker twitching in her hand. Just one positive re- sult. That’s all she is looking for. She watches the calculations spread, mutating right before her eyes. Every choice, another branch. She turns her head, another world forms. All she can do is change the variables, trying to get to the outcome she wants, continue the process of elimination. She viciously slashes the wall with the marker. ### I saw you at a concert. Either Pearl Jam or Oasis-I don’t know. All I remember is moving close to you, brushing my arm lightly against yours. You smiled down at me, draped your arm across my shoulders. “What’s your name?” you shouted above the music. “Nina,” I shouted back. You held me close for several more numbers, then began kissing me on my neck, my lips, my shoulders. You steered me out of the crowd and towards the parking lot, towards your van. My heart thumped in excitement, until two other men pulled open the door. As you pushed me inside, my watch beeped franti- cally. 19 The police found my corpse in a cornfield. By then, you were long gone. ### “I have reviewed your research and feel that extensive revision is required.” “May I ask why?” “You are straying from your original thesis. Before, you were just observing different possibilities, but look- ing at your latest research, it seems that you are trying to force a specific result-” “All I need is a little more time, please-” “Nina, you told me that these jumps aren’t affecting you, but they are. You’re losing your scientific objec- tivity; you’re growing obsessed-Nina, are you even listening?” ### You and I dated briefly in college. We hooked up again a year later. You proposed to me on a Sunday morning. I accepted, and we eloped that night. The first two years were absolute bliss. Then, when I became pregnant with twins, you wanted me to stay at home. I tried to study for my Master’s online, but I couldn’t handle the pressure and had to drop the courses. My life became filled with diapers and drool. I began to resent you, the freedom to move about, holding adult conversations on business trips that took you across the globe. I drank in the afternoons so I could cope with the nonchanging days. I also begin to watch you closely. You seemed too happy, too cheerful in your job. One night, going through your Caller ID, I ran across several numbers from a woman named Muriel. You told me I was seeing things-maybe I needed to see a doctor. I threw your phone out the window. You rushed out of the house. I flung through the window everything I could lay my hands on. Shoes. Plants. Books. My beeping watch. You yelled at me to stop, bent over to pick up the watch. The square glass candleholder-the one with the buttercream vanilla candle inside-smashed on top of your head. I got convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Days later, I committed suicide in my cell. ### In this world, she only saw him once, at a party, years ago. She always thought she would never see him again. Passing a restaurant, she glances inside and there he is, sitting at a booth. It catches her off guard; his hair is thinner, he’s put on a little weight. But without a doubt, it’s him. He sits across from another woman; their fingers intertwined on the table. They wear matching gold bands upon their fingers. The woman’s hair is short, just like how she used to wear her hair. She appears to have the same build, the wide hips, the full lips. Even the woman’s coffee skin is the same shade as hers. Outside, she lifts a finger, gently taps on the glass. She uses two fingers. Three fingers. Slaps at the window with the palm of her hand. Everyone in the restaurant looks up, including the man and the woman. She can’t stop herself, her curled fist making the window shiver with her blows. “What’s wrong with me?!” She screams, tears running down her cheeks. “Why not me? Why can’t we be happy together? Why? Why?!” The restaurant staff rushes out to pull her away. She howls, struggling to keep sight of him, watching him frown, those startling green eyes turning towards his wife, his mouth shaping the words, “Do I know her?” 20 ### I suffocate you while you lie in a drunken sleep. You die in a car accident a week before our wedding. I cheat on you with your brother’s wife. You steal my identity after a one-night stand. Everywhere I look, our relationship ends in disaster. My entire laboratory is coated in black. ### “As of today, your dissertation is terminated. You are no longer permitted on these premises. You will need to meet with your advisor.” She sets down the notice, rattles the knob to her lab one more time. Already they have changed the locks. Turning, she slides down, pulls her legs up, rocks herself gently, head tapping lightly against the door. They think they can stop the experiment by locking up her equipment. Bastards. Taking away the chair and laboratory won’t hinder her at all. They don’t know that all her calculations, all her formulas, had been fixed into her mind. She can just close her eyes and they spring up before her, stretching out in all directions. Let them keep the chair. She doesn’t need it anymore. The sudden freedom of it bubbles in her chest, rises up in her throat, escapes in a laugh. She pushes herself to her feet, already planning the next jump. Then she hears a tiny beep. She looks at her watch. It’s a graduation gift from her mother, a Precision Quartz timepiece, accurate down to the nearest mil- lisecond. She stares at it, then unhooks it, letting it drop to the floor. She brings her foot down on it, hard, feeling the crystal faceplate crack, then shatter beneath her shoe. ### In some alternate universe, you and I are happy. Somewhere, you and I are married, having children, raising a family. Somewhere, we are laughing to- gether, holding hands, growing older, deep in love. I just have to keep looking until I find it.

—30— LaShawn M. Wanak has had short stories published in Expanded Horizons, Daybreak Magazine and the Town Drunk. This story ran in the March 2010 issue of Ideomancer.

21 Book Review: God’s War Review by Sarah Frost Written by Kameron Hurley God’s War by Kameron Hurley opens with our hero, Nyxnissa, who has just sold her uterus for petty cash and then blown it all on drugs and gambling. Then things get worse. This book picks up the reader and drops them onto an alien planet, thousands of years in the future. It is a world where technology is pow- ered by genetically engineered bugs and the colonists are tearing their world apart to fight a holy war, the origins of which no one quite remembers. All the men of Nyxnissa’s nation are drafted into the army. Women are allowed to volunteer. Nyxnissa served her time on the front, and came home a hero, with a body covered in burns. Once the magicians — this book’s practitioners of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology — finished putting her back together, she joined the bel dames, an order of sacred assassins who hunt down deserters in the name of God and the Queen. She isn’t particularly successful at it. When she’s offered a job that promises to shake all the vultures off her back, she has to take it, no matter how low her odds of surviving it seem to be. The other protagonist in God’s War is a young man name Rhys. What terrible thing drove him over the border to Nyx’s country, which is not a safe place either for foreigners or beautiful men, is revealed slowly over the course of the book. He is as close to a pacifist as anyone can be in war-torn Nasheen, and as close to a romantic interest as Nyxnissa is capable of having. While it is unmistakably science fiction, this book’s form reminds me of some of my favorite urban fantasy. The focus stays on Nyx and her band of hired misfit. None of them can afford to worry about interstellar politics or the power struggle between the Queen and her bel dames. They’re too busy trying to and take care of the people they love. Some romance has been waved in the direction of this book, but thankfully it is not allowed to dominate the narrative. This book is brutal. Everyone and everything in Nyx’s world has scars from the war. The author is unflinch- ing in her descriptions of violence. I’ll admit to skimming some of the more graphic passages. I’d hesitate to call it gratuitous, though. Hurley understands that the life of a woman who collects blood debts is not one awesome shoot-em-up adventure after another. In the course of the book, Nyxnissa is broken down to the last slivers of her character. Her choices would not make sense without the violence that surrounds her. God’s War runs for quite a while before it tells the reader what it plans to be about. I did not mind that, because I was too wrapped up in watching Nyxnissa as she struggled to survive from one day to the next, as she tried (and inevitably failed) to stay ahead of the people who hated her. By the time the book gets around to mentioning the starships, the aliens, and the effects that three thousand years on an alien planet have had on its human population, they were just another set of interesting details added to the plot that had already sucked me in. Islam permeates every part of God’s War. I don’t recall another work of science fiction that featured a planet that was not only colonized by Muslims, but by waves of different Muslims of different ethnicities and traditions. The religions in God’s War seem rich and detailed to me. I would be very interested to hear the reactions this book gets from its Muslim readers. Now I am trying to find time to reread this book. I was not completely sold on the way it ended the first time around. As time has passed, though, I find myself growing more and more attached to God’s War. I’m glad I had a chance to read it, and I recommend it highly. God’s War is a fine piece of writing, and not one that its readers will easily forget.

22 —30— Sarah Frost is a science fiction writer who lives in Kansas. Her first short story, “Falls the Firebrand,” -ap peared in the March 2011 issue of Analog. She can be found on the Voice of the Vortex podcast, or trying to organize her library.

23 EP290: Tom the Universe By Larry Hodges I permeate this universe, which I’ve named Tom, and guard against its destruction. If someone had done that for the universe I came from, then Mary, my sweet Mary, would still be alive, and I wouldn’t have killed her and everyone else when I accidentally destroyed that universe. And now I’m on the verge of destroying much more. My name is also Tom. I was an undergrad in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that January in 2040 when I made the discovery that doomed us all. My field of study was cognitive science, the study of human consciousness. What makes us aware of ourselves? Is it just the biomechanical work- ings of the brain, or something else? Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improb- able, must be the truth.” I spent countless hours in the lab eliminating the impossible, and there didn’t seem to be anything left, improbable or not. The interconnectivity required for human consciousness to exist was just too many levels beyond what was possible. By all rights, we should all be unconscious blobs of matter mechanically going about our business as directed by electronic impulses from the brain, with no more consciousness than a calculator. I suffered brain cramps in the lab trying to figure out what improbables were left. When I could think of nothing else to try, it was time to relax and let my subconscious figure it out. So I got out the Frisbee and called my lab partners. Mary, Joey, and I–Tommy, as they called me–called ourselves the “ees.” I’d only met Mary when we’d started college, and adored how she laughed when I explained my love for her in neurological terms, with dopamine and neurotransmitters. We did everything together, or so I thought; classes and labs, movies, and late-night bull sessions with pizza and ice cream, usually followed by pints of morning coffee. Our future together was assured; as soon as we graduated, we would get married. I’d even convinced her we should wear purity rings–I had special ones made up with a brain emblem. Joey and I grew up together on the same street, playing stickball and videogames. He and I were going to be buddies for life. Professor Wilson, our adviser, reluctantly let the three of us be lab partners even though he said it’s best not to put friends together. Amazingly, we got a lot done when we weren’t reading the neurology cartoons taped to the walls or playing with Catzilla, the lab’s iguana-bodied, cat-brained hybrid mascot. And then came that morning when we went outside the lab on Charles Street to toss the Frisbee around among the oak trees by the front steps. The fresh air was an escape from the antiseptic stench of the lab. “You throw like a girl!” Joey said when my toss to him banged against the ground, way off line. He stood half a head taller than me, with that eternal mischievous grin I’d known for twenty years. He was the only person in the world who could get away with a ponytailed bouffant, which I would yank every chance. “Like a girl, huh?” Mary said, throwing the Frisbee as hard as she could at Joey, who barely blocked it. Mary grabbed the rebound and faked another throw while Joey cringed. “Want some more?” She was my sweet pixie, five feet of tiger and spice, never still, never silent. Recently she’d taken to tying her long blond hair in a ponytail like Joey, giving me a second target to yank. I was the smart one, with a crew cut. “Okay,” Joey said, “you win. You both throw like girls!” Mary smacked him with the frisbee again. As we tossed it around, I became aware of my awareness of the Frisbee’s location at any given moment. Somehow my mind tracked this and so many other things. The complexities were staggering. I got so 24 caught up thinking about this that I forgot to be aware of the spinning Frisbee coming at me. It went bonk against my head, and suddenly the answer to my question shook free. Great complexity meant great interconnectivity meant great density meant . . . it wasn’t just improbable, it was astounding. But it was the only thing that wasn’t impossible. The interconnectivity required for human consciousness could only be satisfied by infinite density at a single point. A singularity. Unless Mr. Holmes was mistaken, every one of us carries a singularity in our head. The mass doesn’t reg- ister in our universe, or else your body–and everything else for a long way around–would fall into it and squoosh, a quick way to end one’s existence. No, the singularity is just a point that floats around, stuck in your brain, presumably created while your brain was being created, with its mass in some alternate universe or state. Actually, as any physicist could tell you–and I’m not one, I learned this later on–singularities do not really explode, no matter how many times that happens in science fiction stories. All universes start as singulari- ties that expand exponentially, the so-called “Big Bang.” There’s no explosion, just a single point that gets bigger and bigger until you have a full-sized universe. “You okay, hot shot?” Mary asked. I realized I was still standing outside the lab, saliva trickling out the corner of my mouth. I wiped it off and re-entered the real world. “I’ve got something!” I exclaimed, as visions of singularities danced in my head. “So do I,” she said, hugging me, her red cardigan sweater pressing against me. Oh, if I’d only lost my train of thought and hugged back! I took off for the lab, colliding with three students on the way to the fourth floor. Mary and Joey followed. I ignored Catzilla’s rasping meow as I ran to my lab station to do research and think. Once I knew about the singularity in my brain, the obvious next step was to experiment on it. But a sin- gularity takes up no space, and is therefore rather hard to test. So I sought the advice of a physics grad student. I didn’t tell him why I needed to expand a singularity, and he didn’t tell me the consequences, thinking it was all just theory talk. He explained what was needed in the foreign language of physics, but I picked up the one part I needed: “Flood it with tachyons, so that the entire quantum evaporation happens in an instant.” I had no idea what the second part meant. It turned out that the physics lab had one of the new tachyon emitters, which he showed off for me. Just what the neurologist ordered! He assured me that tachyons were harmless, essentially massless–my eyes glazed over when he started talking about “imaginary mass”–and would shoot right through anything at faster than light speeds. I felt in sudden need of a tachyon shower. Mary and Joey had wandered off, which I thought strange at the time since we were at a key stage of our work, but I didn’t need them for this and so didn’t stop to wonder where they might be. (If I knew then what I knew now. . . .) When no one was looking, I turned the tachyon emitter on full blast, entered the tachyon field chamber through the “Do Not Enter!” sign, and the rest is. . . . I started to say “history,” but of course it was actually the end of history. The singularity in my brain ex- panded like any other “Big Bang,” creating a universe and destroying ours. Including Mary. My friend the physics major never said anything about branes. Not brains, but branes, one of those phys- ics terms that I knew nothing about back then. It seems our universe existed inside a brane, which in turn existed in a higher-dimensional space-time continuum, in equilibrium with other universes in their own branes. When the singularity in my head became a universe in its own brane, it knocked our universe and

25 its brane out of equilibrium. Our universe and its brane happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, near another brane which it now teetered into. There have probably been countless cases of singularities expanding into uni- verses, but only rarely–as in this case–is a new one so close to another that it knocks the older one out of equilibrium. What happens when two branes collide? Both of them, and everything inside, are destroyed. And it doesn’t take billions of years. Since it all takes place in a higher-dimensional space-time continuum, the collision takes place at all times and spaces simultaneously–as if that word has any meaning in this context–and the entire existence of the universe and its one hundred billion galaxies was wiped out. Not just gone forever, but never existed. The Milky Way Galaxy, Earth, humans, Baltimore, Frisbees, Catzilla, none of it ever hap- pened. Mary who? She never was, no matter how vivid her memory was to me. The only thing in my old universe that wasn’t destroyed was me. My body doesn’t exist anymore, and in fact now never existed. But when the singularity expanded from a point to an entire universe in its own brane, my consciousness expanded with it. That’s why I permeate this universe, which I named Tom since it all came from me. Every proton, electron, quark, lepton, tachyon, it’s all me. But I miss Mary, the rose of my existence. In my human form I had never appreciated her as I did now–and her death, or non-existence, was my fault. Was there any penalty, any torture, I did not deserve? I had actually done far worse, destroying the universe, billions of humans, and–as I soon learned–quadril- lions of intelligent aliens scattered throughout the universe. Yet these were just numbers, faceless hordes I’d never meet or miss. With Mary, it was the ultimate betrayal, her life snuffed out by me, the one person she should have been able to trust, in the second worst betrayal of trust I would ever know. Once free of my body, I had the quantum computing power of the entire Tom Universe at my beck and call, and I made use of it. I was a little confused during the Planck epoch (first 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang), but sometime during the Grand Unification epoch (up to 10^-35 seconds), I figured out what had happened. By the end of the Inflationary epoch (10^-32 seconds), I’d analyzed the previous universe and simulated in my mind all that had ever happened that I cared to see. (Of course, I never knew about these various “epochs” during my previous life.) Seeing all that I had obliterated in such detail forced me to face what I had done. They were not just num- bers or faceless hordes. They were real, intelligent beings, both human and alien ones throughout the uni- verse. Their hopes and dreams not only wouldn’t be realized, they no longer ever had hopes and dreams, or even existed. My crimes were almost imagining. It took a hundred years to get past my depression. But I learned something else in my analysis of my old universe. I learned what Joey and my sweet Mary had done. That made me forget about all I had destroyed. I decided there were three things I needed to do, three goals that I would devote my entire being toward achieving. I actually have very little direct influence over what happens in the Tom Universe. I barely have the horse- power to knock a stray pencil aside without a billion years’ notice. I can move tachyons about, but what’s the point of that? I’m the weakest of the five forces of nature, the other four being gravity, electro-magne- tism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. I have so little influence over anything with real mass that nobody, not even the Einsteins from both universes, would deduce or detect me. And yet, in cosmological time, I get a lot done. It took a huge force of will to concentrate on moving things just so, but I did so for billions of years as I influenced the movement of atomic particles this way and that, according to my calculations. It’s not easy when you have to constantly recalculate, thanks to the blasted Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the bane 26 of my existence. I remember how difficult problems used to give me brain cramps; imagine a brain cramp the size of the universe. That’s what you get when you spend a few billion years concentrating on one thing. But I got results. Professor Wilson would have been proud. With my influence over the course of a billion years, matter in one star system coalesced subtley differ- ently than it would have otherwise. Two hunks of rock, a few hundred pounds each, would have missed each other, but with billions of years of focused thought I got them to collide just so. A large chunk of rock broke off one of them, and took off into space, a meteor. (Actually a meteoroid, but I prefer the colloquial term.) The second hunk of rock ricocheted off the first and hit another meteor, knocking off another large chunk of rock. This meteor took off in the same direction as the first one, about a minute behind, just as I’d calculated. Those two meteors would take care of my second and third goals. But for now, forget about those meteors. They won’t be heard from again for ten billion years. My first goal was the toughest. Mary, sweet Mary, how I missed her! I set about recreating her and my old universe in all its details, right from the beginning. With the quantum computing power of the Tom Uni- verse, I could extrapolate all that had happened, and set about duplicating it. You can call me God, since I applied whatever light touches were necessary to recreate my old universe. Trust me, galaxy formation is not an easy thing when a ninety-pound weakling at the beach can kick sand at you and all you can kick back with are a few photons. Just to get the raw materials needed I had to cre- ate supernovas, and explode them just right. But a photon here, an electron there, and it adds up if you do it long enough. Soon I had the matter and energy needed, all in the right place at the right time. I created our solar system, Earth, life, evolution, hamsters, and eventually Homo Sapiens, all exactly as it had hap- pened in my old universe. It wasn’t easy affecting evolution since I could barely nudge a strand of DNA. I could move an atom so it affects a molecule, which affects a nucleotide, which affects the DNA. It took many millions of years, and I almost died for want of a galactic-sized aspirin. I had second thoughts about recreating history exactly as before, since that meant Hitler, bubonic plague, cooked spinach, and acne–five years of it for me–but any changes would alter future history, and I couldn’t risk that. Once I’d set the initial conditions early in Earth’s history, the rest was inevitable, with minor adjustments now and then, thanks to Heisenberg. As to the rest of the universe, I let it evolve on its own, and it ended up pretty close to the original. Finally the Tom Universe reached TOM, the Time of Mary. Oh, and me too. I got to watch both of us grow up. With me, it was diaper changing, playing with Joey, bullies stuffing me in lockers, dropping the fly ball to right field that blew the big playoff game–damn, I wanted to change that–then off to college. With Mary, it was diaper changing, ballet classes, middle school queen bee, high school prom queen, boyfriends I didn’t know about, then off to college where she finally buckled down and studied. We met, we dated, and then Joey joined us as we formed our lab group. Joey, Joey, Joey. The things I know about you now! But now I had Mary back. I couldn’t hold her in my arms because I didn’t really have arms, unless you count eighteen billion human arms, since they are all part of me. But after 13.7 billion years of planning and execution, her beautiful mind and body existed again. I had achieved my first goal. I caressed her with the molecules that bounced against her body, as well as from within, since the very matter that made up her body was me. I felt her at every level of existence, the limbular, cellular, molecu- lar, nuclear, and lepton/quarkular. Such sweetness and beauty...... and such betrayal. There I was, just as before on that fateful day, experimenting on my singularity, un- knowingly about to destroy the universe . . . again. And there, in Dr. Wilson’s office nearby, on his sofa, 27 were Mary and Joey, just as before, with their bodies–made from me!–entwined, their lips locked. Mary’s purity ring lay on a table nearby. I’d played it out in my mind a trillion times, always with the same result. Small bursts of cosmic rays spon- taneously burst into being throughout the universe as I heaved universal shudders of horror. How could they? In my youth as a universe, I could never go beyond that moment. What point was there? Mary and Joey betrayed me, and must pay the price. And yet, as I matured as a universe, my youthful hot-bloodedness was replaced by a more experienced thoughtfulness. It took nearly 13.7 billion years–just a few brief million years before Mary, Joey and I would come into existence again–before I could bring myself to look past the betrayal and calculate what would have happened if I hadn’t destroyed the universe. It was just a simulation in my cosmic mind, and yet it seemed almost real to me. # “I can’t believe we did that,” Mary said as she dressed. “Right here, not fifteen feet from the lab.” Joey was silent as he pulled up his pants and put on his socks and shoes. When he was done, he continued staring at his feet. “We’re his best friends, and look what we’ve done,” Mary continued. There was a long silence. Mary stared at her purity ring for a long time before putting it back on. Catzilla stood nearby, staring with ac- cusatory eyes. “We can’t ever tell him,” Joey finally said. “It would be too much for him.” “How can we face him?” Tears streamed down Mary’s face. “We won’t,” Joey said, his face granite. A week later, Joey transferred to another university, which he claimed focused more on his areas of neuro- logical interest. For several years he maintained occasional email contact with Tom before fading into his past. He never contacted Mary again. Mary missed a week of school, citing illness. When she returned, she surprised Tom with a candlelit din- ner and the finest French food. Thoughts of singularity expansion were put on hold. Later they would work out the theoretical framework for consciousness–including singularities and their part–and their research would revolutionize the field. When Tom wanted to expand a singularity, she convinced him the dangers were too great. A month after the candlelit dinner, Tom proposed. They married, had three kids, and had fifty happy years together. # I replayed over and over in my mind the simulation of what my life would have been like with Mary. The life I’d lost, and the two lives I was about to kill. A cosmic tear rolled down my metaphorical cheek. For ten billion years, the two meteors had shot through space for their long-planned rendezvous, my sec- ond and third goals. Now I watched as they approached Earth, just a few million years to go. What have I done? My betrayal was far worse than theirs. Mine was the greatest of all possible betrayals. One of the meteors meant nothing to me; its destination deserved its fate. I focused my will from every corner of the universe on the other meteor as it soared through space. If I could just nudge it to the side, even a few feet. . . .

28 I could have calculated in an instant if I would be successful, but I did not. If I was going to fail, I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to waste even a snippet of my mental energy on anything except saving Mary. I strained with all my mind, stretching the very fabric of the universe to the limit. If I had enough time, I could move mountains, but I did my best work in billions of years, not millions. The meteor lurched slightly to the side. Would it be enough? I pushed and pushed, praying feverishly to whatever god there might exist beyond me. I could feel the meteor as it continued to veer off course. It entered the solar system, still nearly on course. Fear permeated the universe as I watched it draw closer and closer . . . all I can do now is watch. The first of the two meteors, now the size of a marble after going through the atmosphere at twenty-six miles per second, comes through the roof. As I’d planned ten billion years before, it strikes my other me, seconds before he/I would start the expansion in the singularity in my brain that would have led to the destruction of the Tom Universe. My head splatters in spectacular fashion, with red flowering out in a contrived Fibonacci pattern of great beauty. I’ve saved the Tom Universe and all its occupants from myself, my second goal. Billions of humans and quadrillions of intelligent aliens will now continue to exist. I no longer care. The second meteor is only a minute behind. I’d fought it for millions of years, straining with every fiber of my being, and yet it is only barely off target . . . would my efforts be enough? I had been too afraid to calculate in advance. I can now see Mary and Joey in Dr. Wilson’s office, just as in our original universe, their bodies entwined in ways I would not believe possible if I weren’t sensing it with the very matter they use to do it with, their bodies. Joey, my good buddy and friend, is on top, facing Mary, who makes moan- ing sounds that I’d heard in my simulations a trillion times before. A second before the meteor arrives, I see my efforts are for naught. The meteor is off target by only a few inches. My piercing scream shoots through the Tom Universe, unheard by anyone as it echoes through my cosmic mind, rattling constellations throughout my universe on the microcosmic scale. The second meteor slices through Joey’s back and Mary’s stomach, leaving behind matching holes the size of Frisbees in their bodies and a trillion times larger in my heart. Catzilla, who’s been hiding under a nearby table, scurries from the room in fear. My third goal, revenge, has been achieved. In desperation I let loose a storm of tachyons toward Mary’s head. Since tachyons are essentially massless, I can maneuver them easily. The tachyons flood the singularity in her brain, which begins to expand. She will live! Embodied in her own universe, just as I am. Just as I had done, she will recreate our universe, and eventually me, and we will be together again . . . pleasure coarses through my universe. And then I freeze, my metaphorical jaw dropping. Mary’s expanding singularity is not alone. Tachyons have also flooded Joey’s brain, and his singularity is also expanding. I make one last use of the quantum computing power of my universe, and see the horrible truth. Joey’s and Mary’s universes, now in their own branes, are too close together. Their branes are on a collision course that will destroy both, leaving me alone in universal misery. “NO!” I cry as pain explodes through me. Closer and closer the branes move together for their inevitable rendevous. I react mindlessly, writhing in agony as my metaphorical muscles convulse. This has little effect on mat- ter, but like corks shooting from bottles, tachyons shoot out everywhere, permeating the very fabric of my universe. Singularities everywhere begin to expand. Not just the billions inside human brains, but also the qua- drillions inside intelligent creatures throughout my universe. Quadrillions of new universes emerge and

29 expand, in close proximity to their neighbors, overloading the uncountable branes. The branes, no longer in equilibrium, collide with each other like dominoes throughout the cosmos. One by one they pop like soap bubbles, until there is nothing, there never has been anything, and just as my existence ends, there is no pain. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more great content just like it.

—30— Larry Hodges is an active member of Science Fiction Writers of America with 40 short story sales. He was the unanimous grand prize winner at the 2010 Garden State Horror Writers Short Story Competition. A graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, he’s a full-time writer with four books and over 1200 pub- lished articles. He’s also a member of the USA Table Tennis Hall of Fame, which he exhorts you to google if you don’t believe it.

30