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For everybody. Anthology copyright 2009 Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson. Component works are copyright their creators. This anthology is published under the Creative Commons BY-NC- SA 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- sa/3.0/) When copying or reusing material, credit the original author or artist, “as published in “Thoughtcrime Experiments (2009)” and link to http://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/. “Gaia’s Strange Seedlike Brood (Homage to Lynn Margulis)” art by Patrick Farley Table of Contents Introduction 1 Welcome to the Federation (Mark Onspaugh) 4 Jump Space (Mary Anne Mohanraj) 18 The Last Christmas of Mrs. Claus (Alex Wilson) 35 Qubit Slip (William Highsmith) 54 Daisy (Andrew Willett) 68 The Ambassador’s Staff (Sherry D. Ramsey) 77 Goldenseed (Therese Arkenberg) 102 Single-Bit Error (Ken Liu) 113 Friar Garden, Mister Samuel, and the Jilly Jally Butter Mints 131 (Carole Lanham) Appendix A: How to Do This and Why 159 Appendix B: Sample contract 172 Artwork Gaia’s Strange Seedlike Brood (Homage to Lynn Margulis) ii (Patrick Farley) Pirate vs. Alien (Erin Ptah) 3 Times Square (David Kelmer) 53 Bio Break (Brittany Hague) 101 Robot v. Ninjas (Marc Scheff) 158 Introduction by Sumana Harihareswara Welcome to the Thoughtcrime Experiments anthology. Our aim was to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy. My co-editor Leonard writes extensively on our methodology and aims in Appendix A, but the short version is: we did it. Here it is. There isn’t a theme, really, just “what we like.” It turns out that we like political satire and family drama and detective thrillers and fables and fable deconstructions and the mysteries of debugging. It’s all good stuff and we hope you like it. We received many awesome submissions. You’re just seeing a fraction of them because we couldn’t publish them all. Appendix A is a step-by-step guide showing you how you can do it too, with a few thousand dollars and some sweat. This is now your anthology. Everything’s licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike. You can remix the art, the fiction, and even this introduction. If you do cool things with Thoughtcrime Experiments, please let us know so we can rejoice. Or just let us know if the anthology rocks and you loved reading it. That’s what we’re going for. Acknowledgments Rachel Chalmers liked this project so much that when we announced it she offered to pay $200 so we could publish an additional story. And she did, and that’s what happened. Brendan Adkins helped with story selection, and then with proofreading, and then with layout. 1 Susie, John, and Maggie Chadwick made the cover photo possible. (Leonard took the photo itself.) Special thanks to Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden, John Joseph Adams, and Jed Hartman, for inspiration, encouragement, and precedent. Thanks also to Zed Lopez, the Creative Commons community, Mako Hill & Mika Matsuzaki, Mel Chua, Joe Wahrhaftig, Alexei Othenin- Girard, Rohit Khare & Smruti Jayant Vidwans, Kevin Maples & Beril Guvendik, Susan McCarthy & Daniel Gunther, Julia Bernd & Michael Ellsworth, Kaolin Fire, Chris East, our families, and the Gmail developers. Thanks finally to all our great authors and artists, and to everyone who submitted a story or announced the anthology. 2 “Pirate vs. Alien” art by Erin Ptah (erinptah.com) 3 Ever since he was a kid, Leonard has loved Keith Laumer’s satirical stories of Retief the galactic diplomat. Mark Onspaugh has written a story with the scope, ingenuity, and comic feel of the best Retief, but told from a very different perspective. Welcome to the Federation by Mark Onspaugh Gird Mackel was dreaming of happier times when the loud, shrill alarm of his Happy Tone clock-radio assaulted him into wakefulness. Gird had owned ten clock-radios in his life, and the first nine had been sensible enough to break when he hurled them across the room. The Happy-Tone merely bounced off the wall and continued to bray at him. It seemed indestructible. His assistant Huri had selected it on the basis of durability when she had purchased the cursed thing at Gal-Mart (“Where the Galaxy shops!”). Gird rubbed his eyes and got out of bed, gasping when his bare feet hit the cold floor. The heat was out again. Gird sighed and shambled to the bathroom, mentally going over his agenda for the coming day. The bathroom faucets belched out brown water for a good three minutes before clearing. The water got progressively colder, even though Gird had the hot tap turned up as far as it would go. Gird cursed the plumbing, something that had become a morning ritual, then splashed cold water on his face. He desperately wanted a shower but was afraid the frigid water might give him a heart attack. He tried shaving, but his Gal-Mart Shave-a-tron 5000 shorted out with a spectacular burst of sparks and smoke. He settled for splashing his face with the aftershave his son Nuul had sent him for the Blessing of the Fish and Waters Festival last year. It was a scent called Starduster, and it burned his face. Gird put on his suit and chose a clip-on tie from a rack in the closet. He had never mastered the art of tying the damn things. Traditionally 4 the men of Covalla had kept their neck and chests bare, to show that they were honest and that their twin hearts beat true. That was before the visits from the Federation of Worlds and the Kregaash Empire. Covalla, a tiny planet in an unremarkable system, had never had visitors from other worlds, let alone two massive collectives that spanned whole galaxies. The Federation of Worlds had been founded by Earth and a handful of sentient worlds long before Gird’s great-great-great-grandfather had been born. Because the founding worlds were on the opposite side of the galaxy, Covalla had been ignored for millennia. Then the Kregaash Empire had conquered a neighboring galaxy known to the Covallans as Pa-uul-ahuhuyan, or “The Great Oar of Pa- uul”. This region was known to the Federation as “The Large Magellanic Cloud” and to the Kregaash as “The Kregaashian Birthright”. Running low on races to subdue and abuse, the conquest- happy Kregaash had been looking to expand their empire, and their reptilian eyes had fallen on Covalla. Once the Kregaash Empire began making overtures, the Federation of Worlds decided they were interested in Covalla, as well. Both groups sent dignitaries and presents, and both sides told the Covallans how important they were. As a welcoming gesture, Gird’s grandfather Murr had led the boats out and caught a giant tren, a meaty fish large enough to feed the village and the dignitaries. Both sides seemed to appreciate the feast, though much of their portions of tren was later found in napkins stashed under the table. Both seemed to enjoy the traditional dancing and entertainment, though the wait staff later revealed that the Federation representative had actually been asleep and the Kregaashian was surreptitiously playing something called a “video game”. The Covallans were a good-natured and forgiving people, and they shrugged off these insults. Their world was pleasant, the seas were bountiful, and they loved sharing. If only we had been a little meaner, thought Gird. His car was still in the shop, so Gird waited for the bus to take him from the Presidential Palace to his office. In his great-grandfather’s time, all had lived in open huts on the beach. The leader, selected by rotation, showed his or her temporary position by hanging a white shell in the entrance. 5 Gird missed living on the beach. He missed the scent of the ocean, the cool breezes and light rains that soothed and lulled you to deep and restful sleep. He missed racing out to the boats in the morning, bringing in the catch and laughing, singing and dancing into the night. Most of all he missed making masks and costumes for the festivals and Sagas-by-Avatar. He had been very good at it before the Federation had banned such festivals as uncivilized. They’d appointed him President for Life after his father died. The bus arrived belching smoke, and Gird greeted the driver and the other passengers. Nobody smiled at him. They blamed him for all the changes that had come to Covalla. Gird sighed, and took a seat near the back. It was a half hour ride to New Paris, and he had forgotten both his paper and book of crossword puzzles. The bus went along Coastal Route 24, a four lane highway that the Federation had built to replace the first Federation road, a two-lane thoroughfare they had named Sea Front Road. In pre-Federation time it had been a small and lovely path called Minoh-Ul-kjavallah, or “The Trail Minoh the Sea God Took to Court Mother West Wind”. You couldn’t see much of the ocean, any more. The clear areas had become the sites of barracks for a proposed Federation base. The enormous base had been half completed when war had broken out near Antares, and all available Federation soldiers and engineers had gone to fight the good fight. Gird’s son Nuul was out there somewhere, fighting with the other fifteen young men and women deemed draftable by the Federation Infantry. Gird wiped his eyes thinking of Nuul. In the old days the boy would have been married and he and his wife would be part of the leader rotation.