Contents

Title Page Letter from the editor EP327 Reveants EP328 Surviving the eBookalypse EP329 Pairs EP330 The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived EP331 Devour EP332 Overclocking EP333 Asteroid Monte EP334 The Eckener Alternative EP336 The Speed of Time Book Review: “Out of Oz” by Gregory Maguire Three Dragons, Three Tattoos: a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Part 1 of 2) Three Dragons, Three Tattoos: a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Part 2 of 2) Film Review: “The Hunger Games” Film Review: “The Secret World of Arrietty” Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Soundtrack Review: “Once More, With Feeling” The Soundproof Escape Pod Magazine

Digest 1, Q1 2012 Part of Escape Artists, Inc

Escapepod.org Editor: Mur Lafferty Assistant Editor: Nathaniel Lee Producer: Mat Weller Web Content Editor: Josh Roseman Publisher: Paul Haring Founder: Steve Eley

Creative Commons BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the authors Letter from the editor

Dear Faithful Listeners:

We’re back! Some changes in staff early this year caused us to miss some ebook releases, so we’re doing the first six months of they year in digest form to catch up. In this issue, you’ll get most of Quarter One, with stories from Ursula Pflug, Jay Lake, and Ferrett Steinmetz. Our most prolific blogger, Josh Roseman, had an excellent start to the year, with the in-depth retrospective of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, complete with a soundtrack review of Once More, With Feeling, in March. You will note that we are missing a few of the episodes from the first quarter, reflecting we were unable to purchase the ebook rights to a couple of episodes that we released via audio, but don’t forget you can listen to the stories at escapepod.org, for free. Stay tuned, soon we’ll be posting the Second Quarter digest, as it’s nearly June. Then we will have even more news to talk about!

Be mighty-

Mur Lafferty [email protected] Reveants by Judith Tarr

Janie wanted to pet the pterodactyl. “Here’s the auk,” I said. “Look how soft his feathers are. Look at the dodo, isn’t he funny? Don’t you want to give the quagga a carrot?” Janie wouldn’t even dignify that with disgust. It was the pterodactyl or nothing. Janie is four. At four, all or nothing isn’t a philosophy, it’s universal law. A very intelligent four can argue that this is the Greater Metro Revenants’ Zoo, yes? And this is the room where they keep the ones that can be petted, yes? So why can’t a person pet the pterodactyl? No use explaining that everything else was inoculated and immunized and sterilized and rendered safe for children to handle. Everything but the pterodactyl. They’d just made it, and it was supposed to be pettable when they were done, but not yet. There’d been plenty of controversy about putting it on display so soon, but public outcry won out over scientific common sense. So the thing was on display, but behind neoglas inlaid with the injunction: No, I’m Not Ready Yet. Look, But Don’t Touch. Janie reads. I should know. It’s one of the chief points of debate between her father and me. She could read the warning as well as I could. “So why can’t I touch? I want to touch!” She was fast winding up to a tantrum. I could stop it now and risk an injunction for public child abuse, or wait till it became a nuisance and we were both shuffled off the premises. Inside its enclosure, the pterodactyl stretched its wings and opened its beak and hissed. Neoglas is new, about as new as revenants; it’s one-way to sound as well as sight. The pterodactyl couldn’t see us or hear us, which was lucky for Janie. I wished we couldn’t see or hear it, either. It wasn’t particularly ugly, just strange. One whole faction of paleontologists had been thrown out into the cold when the thing came out of its vat warm-blooded and covered with soft silvery-white fur. Without the fur it would have been a leathery lizardlike thing with batwings. With the fur it looked like a white bat with a peculiar, half-avian, half- saurian head, and extremely convincing talons. Janie’s fixation and the thing’s furriness notwithstanding, it didn’t look very pettable. Its eyes were a disturbing shade of red, with pinpoint pupils. I wondered if it was hungry, or if it wanted to stretch its wings and fly. Janie had stopped whining. She was going to howl next. Something bellowed in the bowels of the building. Janie’s mouth snapped shut. “There,” I said. “Look what you did.” If that got me cited, let it. It cut off Janie’s howl before it started. “They’ve got something big down there,” somebody said. “Probably the aurochs,” said somebody else. “Mammoths trumpet like elephants.” “Maybe it’s a T. Rex,” said a kid’s voice. “They don’t have one of those yet,” said the one who knew it all. “They’d need a bigger enclosure than they can afford to build, with a stronger perimeter field. So they’re bringing back later things, because they’re smaller.” “But if they’ve got the mammoths—” “Mammoths don’t have teeth as long as your arm. They don’t eat people.” Janie’s eyes were as big as they can get. I got her out of there before she decided she wanted to howl after all. Ice cream distracted her. So did a pony ride in the zoo’s park—the pony was a Merychippus, a handsome little dun that looked perfectly ponylike except for the pair of vestigial toes flanking each of its hooves. By the time we picked up our picnic and headed for the tables by the mammoths’ pit, I was starting to breathe almost normally. If you haven’t got your kid license yet, you can only imagine you know what it’s like to take the qualifying exam. Studying for it is hell, and the practicum’s a raving bitch. Then when you pass and get the kid, six times out of ten you and your SO are so done for you split, and you get into a whole new brand of bureaucratic balls-up: the custody war. This was Marco’s year to have Janie. It coincided with his decision to take his statutory change-of-lifestyle, which wouldn’t have been quite so bad if he hadn’t decided to become an Atavist. I appealed, of course. How could any public office, even the Bureau of Family Values, consign a four-year-old child to the life of an Ice Age hunter? BFV could, and did. Healthy was one of the words it used. Back to basics. Good for growing minds. And, as the caseworker pointed out to me, it wasn’t as if the Atavists really lived as they did in the Ice Age. There weren’t any major predators in the preserve. My nightmares of sabertoothed cats and direwolves and charging mammoths were just that, nightmares. Even the Atavists’ League couldn’t afford the price of a revenant, let alone a whole ecology full of them, So what was I doing taking Janie to the revenants’ zoo on my monthly visiting day? Maybe I thought it would be a harmless way to spend the day, and she could go back and tell her father that I’d shown her what real atavisms looked like, and he’d get the message while I got points for culturally relevant entertainment of child during custodial visit. I got her back in nine months, but only if I demonstrated that I was still fit to keep her. If I blew it on points, Marco kept her. And she grew up wearing deerskins, with a bone through her nose. To be strictly fair, she hadn’t come out of the preserve this morning looking like a savage. Her hair was longer, and somebody had cornrowed it—not Marco, he didn’t have the patience for anything that persnickety. She was wearing pants I’d bought for her, and a shirt with a hologram on it, one of the Lascaux cave paintings. She’d been clean when she started, too. Ice Age didn’t mean Dirt Age, Marco was fond of pointing out. I couldn’t even complain that she was different. She hadn’t forgotten about cars and buses and taxis. The city didn’t make her whimper and cower. Whatever she was living on in the preserve, she wasn’t turning up her nose at ice cream or fruit juice or, goddess forbid, chocolate. The trouble was, I wanted her to be different. I wanted grounds to get her back permanently. If she’d started grunting and rooting for grubs, I’d have been on the net to BFV so fast, the phosphors would have been spinning. No such luck. The first visiting day, she’d cried when she left Marco, and cried when she left me. The second, she’d said a cool good-bye to Marco and an equally cool one to me. This time, the third, she’d kissed Marco good-bye and taken my hand and said, “I want to ride a pony.” “They don’t have those in the Ice Age?” I’d asked Marco. He wouldn’t give me the pleasure of looking annoyed. “We’re domesticating a few, but not for the kids, yet. Give us time.” Time was all he had, I thought of saying but didn’t. Now here we were, doting mother and loving daughter, carrying a picnic basket through the park to the best place of all, right up over the mammoths’ pit. There wasn’t anybody at the table I’d had my eye on, which I decided to take as an omen. We spread out our picnic, everything Janie liked best, peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and chocolate soymilk and green cheese puffs and her favorite edible thing of all, pink marshmallow bunnies. I figured when I packed the basket that I’d lose points on Healthy Nutrition and gain them on Allowable Indulgences. packed the basket that I’d lose points on Healthy Nutrition and gain them on Allowable Indulgences. Janie ate half of her sandwich, drank three swallows of her milk, ate one cheese puff and the tail of a marshmallow bunny, and said, “I want to pet the pterodactyl.” My blood sugar was in the stratosphere—I’d be eating broccoli for a week to compensate—but it kept me from flipping out a flat negative. I decided to try being reasonable. Sometimes it even works. “Why do you want to pet the pterodactyl?” “I want to,” said Janie. “Why?” I asked again. “I could pet the auk. I could pet the baby mammoth. I want to pet the pterodactyl.” “The pterodactyl’s not ready to be petted yet,” I said. “It might bite.” “It won’t bite me,” said Janie. “I want to pet it.” “Would it help,” I asked, “if I bought you a toy pterodactyl? Then you can pet that.” “I want the real one,” said Janie. She was getting that look again, like a thunderstorm about to break. “You can’t have it,” I said. “Does Daddy let you have anything you want when you’re in his cave?” “We don’t live in a cave,” said Janie. “We live in a longhouse. He lets me pet the pterodactyl.” “Daddy has a pterodactyl?” She nodded solemnly. Lying, I thought. Incipient pathology. Grounds for appeal? Not yet, unfortunately. “Then you can pet yours when you get home. Eat your sandwich. Do you want more milk?” “No, thank you,” said Janie politely. When I kept my eye trained on her, she picked the bananas out of her sandwich and ate those, and fed the bread and peanut butter to the pigeons that had been lining up since we headed toward the table. The mammoths moved around in their pit. They had their own Ice Age habitat, complete with miniature glacier. While Janie fed the pigeons, I watched an enormous female mammoth show a relatively tiny baby how to suck water into its trunk and give itself a bath. The mother looked like an ambulatory fur rug. The baby wasn’t much different from a very hairy newborn elephant. Janie fed the last bit of her sandwich to the greediest pigeon. “May we pet the pterodactyl now?” “No,” I said. “Watch the mammoths. They’re real Ice Age animals. Real hunters would hunt them to feed the tribe.” “Daddy killed a bear,” said Janie. “I like deer better. May I pet the pterodactyl?” “No,” I said. # Thinking about Marco killing a bear effectively killed my appetite. And I still had to get through the afternoon. Janie was fixated, there wasn’t any doubt about it. I gave up on the rest of the zoo after she threw a fit in the raptors’ habitat, and took her home till it was time to head back to the preserve. The caseworker was waiting for us. It was the female version this time, in mode six: pleasant but strict. “You’re back early,” it said from the wallscreen. “Certainly,” I said through clenched teeth. “Quality time, you know. Best spent at home in familiar surroundings, without external distractions.” Quoting the book never did any good with caseworkers. Human or AI, they all had the same level of cynicism programmed in. I was fairly sure this one was an AI. Its lip curled faintly. It didn’t say anything as I changed Janie’s shirt—substituting one I’d bought for her, with Lunar Habitat III on it—and asked her what she wanted to do. “Pet the pterodactyl,” she said. “Her new idée fixe,” I told the wallscreen. Janie was digging in the toy chest. I had her model farm all ready, but she wanted the dinosaur set. No guesses as to what she was looking for. “This signifies something,” the wallscreen said, frowning. “No kidding,” I said, just as Janie threw the whole bag of plastic monsters on the floor and started to bawl. “No pterodactyl. No pterodactyl!” “Regression,” the wall diagnosed. “Separation trauma. Acid indigestion.” Under cover of siren shrieks and fatuous declarations, I found the plastic pterodactyl. It was a retro version, the leathery lizard. Janie hit it out of my hand. “You should attempt to affirm the parental bond,” the wall advised. “Her craving for soft white wings represents a yearning for the missing mother figure.” “Marco’s got a whole clan marriage,” I said—all right, I snapped, at fair volume, to get above Janie’s roaring. “At last count she had half a dozen mother surrogates and a platoon of aunts and cousins.” “None of whom is her mother,” said the wall. That did it. “So give her back to me!” I yelled. Janie shut up. So did the wall. AIs don’t look nonplussed, but they get a look when they shift programs: a total and inhuman blankness. When it came back to life it was in a new mode: Bureaucratically Stern. “Regulations prohibit—” “Want,” said Janie. “Pterodactyl.” “All right,” I said. “You want, you get.” She didn’t light up all at once. She knew about broken promises. Marco had broken plenty. So had I. “The revenant labeled pterodactyl is off limits to—” the wall intoned. I shut it off. I had about six and a half minutes before it could key the override and come back on. That would be enough. What I needed to do, I do for a living, after all. I logged onto the net, triple-time, and hit the requisite nodes as fast as they came up. The headset needed modification, but Janie’s records were still on file from three months ago. Marco would pitch a fit. Atavists aren’t just back-to-the-cave cultists. They’re back-to-the-natural-brain ideologues, too. “Back to the natural brawn,” I muttered as I made the last couple of adjustments. I’d promised Marco I wouldn’t log Janie on or plug her in while she was in his custody. I hadn’t signed anything. Nothing in the rules said I had to deny her what she wanted because her father had a kink about virtual-reality headsets. Real reality hadn’t been cooperating, had it? “There,” I said to Janie. “Put on the headset and say ‘Pterodactyl.’” One thing about kids. Real’s real, and virtual’s real, too, if they want it bad enough. Janie got to pet her pterodactyl. The wall came back on while she was online. This time I got a human. I think. “Ten points off for shutting down the AI,” he said. “Twenty-one for ingenuity. Five off for the fit your ex-SO is going to throw when he finds out how you solved the problem.” “But he gets ten off for failure to consider the needs of the child,” I said. Then: “Wait a minute. You’re not supposed “But he gets ten off for failure to consider the needs of the child,” I said. Then: “Wait a minute. You’re not supposed to have a sense of humor.” “Sorry,” said the caseworker. He didn’t sound very sincere. We watched Janie. She was smiling in the headset, and her hands were making stroking motions. “She’s happy,” the caseworker observed. “And I’m not?” “Did I say that?” asked the caseworker. “Thanks,” 1 said, “but I can play my own head games. Am I supposed to be happy that my ex is a mighty mammoth hunter manqué and my daughter spends her life in a wooden firetrap? If he’d gone off and worked on a farm in Antarctica or something equally ordinary, I’d live with it. So what did he do? He turned into Grunt the Barbarian.” “I don’t find your daughter particularly barbaric,” the caseworker said. “Particularly for a small child.” “So she’s been coached,” I snarled. “Tonight at precisely 1900 hours she goes back to the preserve. She takes off her nice clothes, she puts on furs if she puts on anything, she has a nice dinner of raw bear tongue.” “Have you considered that your hostility may be affecting her responses?” the caseworker asked. I hit the off switch, but he was ready with the override. “You could reflect,” he said, “that the child’s father is concerned for her health when she leaves the preserve on these visits. She breathes city air, she eats city food, and she lays herself open to city violence.” “A wounded bear isn’t violent?” “It’s a matter of degree,” he said. “From the viewpoint of an Atavist, that is. I have to preserve neutrality.” “So why are you taking his side?” I demanded. “Because you can’t conceive of anyone’s being neutral,” said the caseworker. “If you leave in twenty minutes, you’ll just make the shuttle to the preserve.” “What if I don’t?” Caseworkers don’t do rhetorical questions. “Forty points. Cancellation of next month’s visiting privileges.” I hate it when a human being gets rational. # We were at the gate on the dot of 1900 hours. You’d expect something rustic for the entry to the Atavists’ preserve, wouldn’t you, unstripped logs or rough-hewn stone. This was just a gate between two concrete blockhouses, with a wall stretching off to either side. The preserve was a couple of miles past that, through a kind of no-man’s-land. It was huge, and it was complete wilderness, except where the Atavists lived. That wasn’t too close to the wall. Marco had to swallow his principles once a month and take the underground shuttle that ran the circuit of the preserve. He was always on time, coming and going. Ice Age hunters might live in an eternal now, but Marco was a lawyer before he filed for change of lifestyle. Scheduled down to the millisecond. I wish I could say he was dirty and hairy and smelly. He did smell like leather, but it was well tanned, and so was he. He swore he shaved with a flint razor; he had a couple of artistic nicks for proof. He looked healthy, fit, and disgustingly happy. Janie ran to him and hugged him. I stood there feeling empty. She was babbling ninety to the dozen, all about pterodactyls and mammoths and chocolate ice cream. “Chocolate,” sighed Marco. “I do miss chocolate.” “You know what you can do about it,” I said. Even before we split, I couldn’t talk normally around Marco. Everything I said came out sharp or whiny or both. Now wasn’t any different. “You’re looking pale,” he said. “Are you all right?” “Yes, I’m all right!” That’s the other thing. Looking at him always makes me want to cry. “Caitlin,” he said, ”you could get a month’s admission on Janie’s account. You must have that much time accumulated, at the rate you don’t use vacations.” He tried that every time. He’d tried to get me to move into the preserve with him in the first place, and never mind that the divorce had been final for a year. I can’t say I didn’t look at his bronzed muscles (skin cancer city, I reminded myself) and his air of complete satisfaction, and wonder, just for a nanosecond, if… ”No, thanks,” I said. “I hate raw bear.” I swallowed. “Good-bye, Janie. See you next month.” Janie pulled loose from Marco and ran to hug me. I thought of holding on and running, but I was supposed to be civilized, wasn’t I? I kissed her and said, “Be good.” “Good-bye,” said Janie. “Thank you for the pterodactyl.” The shuttle was waiting. Marco glanced at it but didn’t say anything. It was Janie who got hold of his hand and pulled him away. She was talking about pterodactyls again: big beaks, strong talons, soft fur. Nothing about red eyes or hunger, or yearning to fly out of its cage. “Next month,” I said to the shuttle as it pulled away, “I’m taking you to the Space Museum.” <<<>>> Escape Pod 328, originally released on January 12, 2012 Download audio Read by Mur Lafferty First published in DINOSAURFANTASTIC Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author Surviving the eBookalypse by Randy Henderson

I entered the City Public Library wearing my plastic replica chainmail and sword, and my suede “book jacket” with a laminated author’s license clipped to the collar. Before me stood a fully automated checkout kiosk for scheduling author recitals. The library floor beyond that was filled with neat rows of author cubicles, each with a desk and chair. Most were occupied. The air was filled with the soft tickity-ticking of keyboards, and the smells of coffee, “New Book” scented air fresheners, and Cup o’ Soup. Heads popped up over cubicle walls in response to the clacking of the door, then disappeared again when they saw I was no customer or potential patron. I understood their disappointed expressions too well. This was not at all where I thought I would be two years after publishing my first e-book. A woman’s smile caught my attention. It was like cherry-haloed sunshine, floating between her neon blue hair and her black lace dress. She emerged from a cube in the Romance section, walked up to me, leaned in close and sniffed at the air. Then she said with the hint of a Mexican accent, “I smell a transfer from Bainbridge library, no? An MFA boy, if I’m not mistaken?” “That obvious?” I asked. “Lucky guess.” She laughed, and flicked my author’s license. “Says so right here.” “Oh. Yes.” I felt the fool. I glanced at her author’s license. “Myra Sweet.” “That’s me,” she said. “So, the great literary novel didn’t work out like you thought it would, eh?” “You’ve heard of my book?” “No, but it’s the same old story. Follow me. I’ll show you around.” She turned and walked away. I followed in the wake of her sugary perfume, and my eyes were drawn down to the swaying of her hips. There lie danger, I felt certain, but tempting danger. On the back of her black suede book jacket were reviews of her work. “Myra Sweet’s recital style would make an audience in Antarctica sweat.” – Romance Recitals Monthly “Sweet lives up to her name with The Bride Wore Pistols. This one has to be heard to be believed.” – Jenna Johnson, Amazon-Random House “Myra Sweet blends sex and action so seamlessly her work deserves a new genre – sextion? Sacxy? Whatever, she’s smoking hot.” – Phoenix Jones I wondered if the reviews were real. I hoped they weren’t. If someone with reviews like that didn’t have a patron supporting her, what chance did I have? I reached back to make sure the blurb for my own book, “Magic Daze and Dark Knights,” was still Velcroed securely to the back of my jacket. We walked past the row of thriller authors, almost exclusively men with crew cuts dressed in various colored jumpsuits and bomber-style book jackets. A few of them gave me an informal salute or a cursory nod as we passed, and their musk cologne made me cough in response. We passed the row of horror authors, with their all-black clothing, red or black hair, and pale skin. Most of them arched a single eyebrow at me, or stared at me until I looked away. Further off I saw cowboys and cowgirls, Renaissance-garbed folks, and business-casual attire. Seeing so many authors of the same genre together just reinforced my opinion that “dressing to genre” was not a good idea for everyone. One man’s mustachio was another man’s weasely whiskers. One woman’s ghostly was another woman’s sickly. It reminded me to straighten my posture and suck in my modest gut. At the back of the library was a “timeline of books” displayed across the wall. We walked along it, following the growth and fall of the book, from Guttenberg and Cervantes to e-books and the print-a-book kiosks. At the end was a glass case with a collection of outdated e-reading devices, each with their own file format that had died with them. And after the timeline display sat, ironically, a bank of print-a-book vending machines. Anyone could pop in a memory stick with a pirated file, pay a couple bucks and print a copy of my book, and the only people who would see the money was the machine’s owners. It was hard not to be bitter about the way all this technology had helped destroy the old publishing industry before I ever got a chance to be published. At last we reached a small office in the back corner where I was introduced to Agnus the librarian, a thin woman with wild brown hair and a face frozen in an irritated expression. Her office smelled of corn nuts. “Transfer?” she asked. I nodded. “Andre Jackson. This library has the most recital requests for fantasy, so –” “Okay,” Agnus said. “Here’s your cube assignment and public housing ticket. You have two months left on your author’s license to find a patron or register fifty recitals. Otherwise your license will expire, you will no longer receive Public Arts Funding, and you will be removed from the library’s author listings. Questions?” “Just one,” I said. “What time do you get off?” “One hour after you turn into Hemingway,” Agnus said. “Save the charm for your audience. You’ll certainly need every ounce you’ve got.” She slid a virtual reality visor down over her eyes, effectively ending the conversation. Clearly, charming the librarian would not get me a favorable cube position or online listing status in this library. Myra led me to my cube. “So,” she said as we walked. “What kind of fantasy do you write?” “Historical fantasy,” I said. “Really? You know, I write historical romance, but I’m looking to make the jump to junglefey. If you’re any good, we should think about collaborating.” “Yeah, maybe,” I said. Me, write about Amazon fairies in steamy jungles, or jungle fairies fighting and loving steamy Amazonians? I swore I would die before I jumped on the junglefey bandwagon, and not just because of the confusion of Greek Amazons and the Amazon jungle. I agreed with my graduate advisor that such pulp was not literature, it was pandering to the lowest common denominator among decadent and lazy-minded patrons. Writing historical fantasy was at least close to my true literary interests, and it was compromise enough. “Right,” Myra said. “Well, while you’re thinking about it, I’d just like to point out that I had a patron for four years, and had a party draw rating of two hundred before I left. So don’t think you’d be doing me the favor, stud. It’s the other way around.” A party rating of two hundred wasn’t like having a spot on the New York Times Best Tellers list, but it would still guarantee Myra’s patron a decent attendance at any recital he or she sponsored, with a respectable return in stature and profits as a result. So I assumed she was attempting a joke on the gullible newbie. Pranks were common between authors in libraries since we often had too much time to kill between recitals. “Why are you here then?” I said. ”You should easily be able to get a patron.” “What can I say? I’m a girl of mystery.” Myra stopped and motioned like a game show hostess to a cubicle. “And here we are. Your new home.” A man’s voice said, “Your sword is wrong for your armor.” I turned, and found a man peeking over the cubicle wall at me in such a way that I could see only his eyes. He had on a wizard’s pointed gray hat. “Excuse me?” I said. “Your sword. It is clearly modeled on the Sword of State of the City of Canterbury, which was early –” “Waldo,” Myra said. “Why don’t we give the new guy a break on his first day, okay?” She leaned in close to me and whispered, “Waldo the wizard there is kind of Rainman meets Gandalf with zero social skills. Don’t take offense at what he says. He usually means well.” “Thanks,” I said. “No problem.” She stepped back. “I’ll go ahead and leave you to your literary ambitions. Let me know how that works out for you.” She gave me another one of those bright smiles, and walked away. Man, I thought, I hope I get out of here soon. “It really is the wrong sword,” I heard Waldo mutter. # The first two weeks flew by. I put my marketing plan into effect. I invested in a premium profile on Patron-Match.virt, uploaded new recital teasers to Café Virté, blasted social media, put up flyers, attended local conventions, the works. I even decorated my cube with a half-sized cardboard standup of a knight riding a horse. My goal was to be well-placed to promote myself to all the genre fans who would show up when Zachary Chenko came to give his guest recital at the end of that two weeks. Yes, the Zachary Chenko, shining example of how you could earn enough money and fame as an epic fantasy author to become your own patron. And the Zachary Chenko equally famed for his insulting portrayals of women in his fiction, and his womanizing and drunken exploits in real life. Yet despite my best efforts at self-promotion, I finished that first two weeks with just twenty-four e-friends and only four recitals performed in the recording-proof recital room. I had exactly zero patronage offers by the time Chenko arrived for his recital. Chenko strode in on a wave of alcohol fumes, a squat man with wild white hair and a pro golfer’s fashion sense, and announced, “I refuse to give a recital as long as that crowd of feminist harpies is outside having a PMS fit.” It turned out a group of women were protesting the recital. I peeked outside and saw signs being waved. Chenko Writes Women Like Pimps Employ Women

This is a Library not a Men’s Club Writing Sex Fantasies While High is NOT Sexy High Fantasy Chenko is Stank-o! Apparently, this had happened at every recital he tried to give for the past year. We waited to see if the protestors would leave or be cleared out so that Chenko would perform, and I managed to get an opening to speak with him alone as he was exiting the men’s room. “Sir?” I said. “I was wondering if you could give me some tips on how to succeed as an author?” “You’re black,” he said. “Yes,” I said, and felt the smile on my face stiffen into a mask. “Why are you wearing armor?” “Because,” I said, and took a calming breath. “I am a historical fantasy author.” “I see. Well then, my first tip would be to wear, I don’t know, Zulu armor or something. It’s not like Lancelot was black, kid. Write what you know – it’s the oldest tip around. Write about voodoo magic in the inner city, or vampire tiger people in Africa or whatever. No, scratch that, my first tip would be to not write fantasy at all. You’ll never get a patron that way. People just don’t expect fantasy from a black man. They’re barely used to it from black women, and I only listen to them if they’re hot.” I stopped myself from hitting him. Barely. That would only get me booted from the library and end any chance of getting published – end any chance of making him eat his words someday. I retreated to the bathroom instead, where I knocked over the trash can and kicked the stall doors until the anger dimmed and one of them was bent on its frame. Luckily, Chenko cancelled the recital and had left by the time I came out. But Myra was waiting for me. “You look hot, and not in a good way,” she said. “Something happen?” I shook my head. There was no point in whining about it to her. “I’m fine.” “If you say so,” she said. “Come on, I’ll take you out to lunch.” We settled on a 1950′s themed deli crowded with business-casual office workers who smelled of drudgery and cologne. Halfway through lunch, Myra jumped up from our booth and ran into the woman’s bathroom. When she came back, I said, “You okay?” She patted her stomach. “I will be in about six months.” “Oh.” “Indeed,” she said. “Want to guess who the father is?” “Uh, your former patron?” “My married former patron. Now see, you aren’t as slow as you pretend.” “Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I wondered why you would give up a successful patronage. And is that why you wanted to collaborate?” “Yep. If I had a fantasy co-author, that would help defuse certain expectations patrons have of me as a romance author. They would also be less worried about my being pregnant if I appeared to have a partner. And then there’s the little fact that I don’t know how to write fantasy very well.” I supposed that was the part where I should offer to collaborate. But I didn’t want to, and I did not. Instead, I changed the subject. “So,” I said. “What made you want to be an author?” “You want my patron interview answer?” She switched to a sultry tone, “I love to bring pleasure to others.” She smiled at me, then continued in her normal voice. “Honestly? I happen to like food and shelter and buying things, but I didn’t want a boring day job. And I’m a rather sensual person, but I didn’t want to be a porn star or a prostitute either. So, you know, this seemed like a nice compromise. Besides, inside this smoking hot bod lies the heart of a sappy romantic.” “Ah,” I said. “Ah,” I said. “Indeed. How about you? Why are you a fantasy author?” I thought for a minute. “Interview answer?” I did my best to mimic her sultry voice, “I love to make people’s fantasies come true.” She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, an honest laugh. My ego puffed up, and for a second I was tempted to build on my small success and flirt with her – the instinctive male response when a beautiful woman laughs at your joke. But I had also seen her verbally and brutally slap down plenty of would-be suitors in the library, and so did not embarrass myself. “Nice answer,” she said. “And the real reason? What made you want to be an author?” “The real reason? When I was seventeen, my mother died,” I said. “It was slow and painful. I didn’t know how I was going to get through it. Then my aunt gave me a paper book titled ‘The Life of Trees and Mothers,’ by Sara Sitaya. It was like the author knew all my feelings, all my fears, all my questions, and had woven a tale around them. That was when I first knew I wanted to author a great literary masterpiece, something that could touch others the way Sitaya’s book had touched me.” Myra was silent a minute, then said, “Have you written your masterpiece?” “No,” I said. “I thought I had, but apparently it wasn’t good enough. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. Like lots of people, I thought my book would be different, that people would be willing to pay for it. I even paid an e-mob agent for three-P help with publishing, promotion and protection –” “Are you crazy?” Myra said. “You’re going to end up writing V.P. Anders novels!” I shuddered. The e-mob had a whole stable of writers whose unlucky job it was to churn out new books in series created by now-dead authors. They had strong-armed the rights from the deceased’s families. It was even worse than their public domain “mash ups” which, at this point, were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. _Secret Garden of Triffids_? _Little Haunted House on the Prairie_? I shuddered again. It was my nightmare that in two months time I would find myself writing that crap as an anonymous word slave to pay off my debts (and of course to avoid bodily injury). “I know better now,” I said. “It wasn’t like my agent went under the business name ‘e-mob,’ and they didn’t teach us about this stuff in school. He offered to have his hackers take down any bootleg copies of my book, and promote me, and said they would just take their fee from the profits, no money down. It sounded great. But once I have a patron I can pay them off and put all that behind me, and I will write my true masterpiece.” “Well, I sure hope you get your chance. I’d love to hear it when you’re done. And hey,” Myra said, and put a hand on my knee. “Don’t be afraid to tell potential patrons that you want to ‘touch them’ with your words.” # Joey, my e-mob agent, was waiting in all his blocky balding glory at my cube when I returned from lunch. His goon stood behind him, a man with biceps like bowling balls who smiled at me the way a dog smiles at a mailman. “Yo dog!” Joey said. “Heard you’re not having much luck on the patron tip. That’s really too bad.” I had learned that Joey only used his outdated urban slang with his black authors. Lucky me. “I’m doing fine, Joey.” “Word! Just remember, you’re a great writer with a great attitude, and great things will happen to you. Like Alexander the Great — he didn’t just do well because of his name. Think about it.” Sadly, Joey consumed too much of his own product, namely, Self-Help books written by his hack writers. I certainly didn’t respect any advice he spewed. I did, however, respect the fact that his goon’s hands were the size of my head, so I kept my full opinion to myself. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.” “Word,” Joey said. “Oh, and I suppose I should also add that soon you’ll be doing those great things for us. Unless you pay us back, of course. See you in six weeks.” Joey and his goon wandered off. Waldo’s voice floated over the cubicle wall. “Alexander the Great conquered half the world by the age of thirty two. You’re almost thirty two.” “Thanks, Waldo. I know.” “He was worshiped as a god, you know. You’ve got … twenty-four e-friends. And I think most of these are porn spam.” “I know, Waldo.” “I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s a valid comparison.” “Drop it, Waldo!” # The next two weeks went better than the first two. My recital requests were increasing as my marketing plan and word of mouth started to have an effect. I even had a patronage offer. Unfortunately, it was from a man who spoke knowledgeably of medieval torture devices, and who asked suggestive questions about how well I could use my sword. I politely declined. I also managed to avoid being pranked by the other authors, although I began to wonder if that was a good thing. One of the more popular pranks was to sneak up and yank down an author’s pants during their recital. It had gained our library a bit of a reputation, which apparently helped draw in more viewers. Still, I doubted anyone at a patronage level would be drawn by such plebian entertainments, or be any more likely to employ me if they saw me in my underwear. It might work for someone like Myra, but not for me. Not that Myra seemed to be having any better luck finding a patron or a collaborator that she liked. And then Zachary Chenko returned. Myra apparently knew Chenko from her glory days giving romance recitals, and had hit him up with her ideas for a junglefey novel during his last visit. She had somehow convinced him that collaborating with a woman was the best way to repair his reputation, and now they began working together. I was tempted to tell her what he had said to me, but refrained. If I wasn’t willing to collaborate with her, then it didn’t seem right to mess with her other opportunities — even if the opportunity was with a complete ass. When I walked by the soundproof “quiet room” where they did their work, I saw that Myra had cracked the door open. Given the waves of Old Spice that wafted out, I understood why. “Zach, no,” I heard Myra say. “The Amazons are not going to be lesbian nymphomaniac nymphs from Lesbos. Now, I’ve got an idea for how they could reproduce using –” “Okay,” Chenko said. “Well if they are human then I still think they need to have men. How else would they become lesbians unless –” “Hijo de puta! For the last time, lesbians are born lesbians! They don’t have penis envy. They were not abused. They do not require men to hate in order to exist. And if you’d listen, the Amazons don’t need to be lesbians or have human fathers.” “So were you born a lesbian?” “No, Zach, I was not born a lesbian. Now –” “No, Zach, I was not born a lesbian. Now –” “Good. Then why don’t we go back to your apartment and finish this argument there, over some wine? Or I suppose some seltzer for you.” “Not going to happen. Now focus. Can we at least figure out who our Amazons are today, please?” “I know who they are,” Chenko said, and his voice took on a superior lecturing tone. “The women are a race of ensorcelled love slaves released into the jungle to battle for the right to breed with the men. The men understand and control the powerful magic left by their ancestors, and watch the women from their hidden city. But without direct exposure to the guidance and rationality of men, the women revert to –” Myra screamed, and something plastic was thrown against the wall. I hurried away. I was not envious of either Zachary Chenko or Myra. And while I had only a month left on my license and my e- mob deadline, I was feeling more hopeful about getting a patron than ever. I felt like I was just on the verge of success, and every recital felt like it might be the one that returned a patron offer. Joey was waiting for me when I reached my cube, his goon at his side. “Hey dog!” Joey said. “Heard the news?” “Actually, have you heard?” I responded. “I had a patron offer. And I expect more soon.” “Ah, so you haven’t seen this.” Joey held up a tablet and touched the screen. A vutube vid played of me giving a recital. I felt as though my stomach had just fallen out. “Shit!” I was ruined. Having your latest material on the virtnet was the kiss of death, especially for authors like me who relied more on content than packaging. Viewing online allowed a potential patron to skim, to skip, to get only a superficial impression and then move on. There would be no need for them to come audition me in person, where I would have their attention, their investment of time and personal interaction to win them over. Even if I could write all new material and get the word out in the next month, it would not be enough time to undo the damage, or generate new buzz. “So sorry to be the bearer of bad news, dog,” Joey said. “Just thought you’d want to get the four-one-one from a friend.” “Okay,” I said. “Send a friend over and I’ll listen.” “Oh snap! But hey, you made a good run at it. Still, you teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime, but there used to be plenty of fish in the sea, word? Think about it. “True up,” I said. Joey and his goon strolled off, both grinning. I turned back to my cube and grabbed my chair, ready to collapse into it. On the seat was a paper horse head. I looked up, and confirmed that it had been ripped off of my cardboard display. “What the hell?” An author prank, perhaps? But it felt more like vandalism than a joke. Joey? Waldo’s voice drifted over the cubicle wall, “It’s from the Godfather.” “What?” “The horse head. It’s from a scene in the Godfather, a mob warning, a reminder of power.” Joey and the e-mob then. They had probably made the bootleg vids, I realized, just another way to remove competition for their current authors and leave new authors with little option but to work for them. Joey was rubbing my nose in it. “You know,” Waldo said, “In the Godfather movie, they used a real horse’s head from a dog food factory.” “Waldo, please!” I said. “Not right now. I’m having a bad day.” I plopped down into the chair and rested my head on the edge of the desk. There had to be something I could do, some way to avoid becoming an indentured anonymous author. At this point, I would settle for a patron who paid with cheap room and board just as long as they advanced me the money I needed to pay off the e-mob. Waldo said, “Don’t feel bad. They recorded Ted Marko over in Thrillers too. Probably used lip-reading software and voice replication. I saw this example once where they lip read a guy right through the recording protection screen, and then had a virtual Elvis sing the words online. It actually made the author famous for a while as The Elvis Guy, but then –” “Waldo, seriously!” I said. And then thoughts fell into place like divers into a water ballet, forming a beautiful pattern. I might not be able to use Elvis to get my name out there, but I did have another option. “Waldo, you’re the best,” I said, and ran to Myra’s cube. She looked up. “Come to say goodbye?” “No,” I said. “How would you like to collaborate on a junglefey novel?” “Seriously?” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Andre, but to be brutally honest I don’t think it would matter now. With your license expiring soon, and those vids of you, I don’t think we’d have time to build enough buzz and –” “I have an idea about that. It means sacrificing your friendship with Zachary Chenko, however.” Myra raised her eyebrows. “Oh.” She smiled. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? At this point, I’d happily sacrifice Zach himself. Let’s hear this big idea of yours.” # Two weeks of marathon writing later, our plans came to fruition at a party organized by another of Myra’s contacts to announce Chenko and Myra’s collaboration. Myra was dressed in a flowing black dress, and I was wearing a tuxedo. I also carried a duffel bag with our book jackets in it. The party was in a three-story mansion that looked faintly gothic in style. The crowd of guests was spread throughout the first floor, mostly middle-aged women in evening wear, with the occasional author working the crowd in their genre costume and book jacket. I recognized a couple of e-mob reps as well, including Joey and his goon. They had gotten my anonymous invitation. “Hey buddy!” Joey said, stepping out of the crowd. “Hoping to get Chenko’s table scraps?” I shook my head. “You know I don’t have anything to offer a patron now,” I said. “I’m just here to support Myra.” “Yeah, tough break about those vids. Well, I’ll be in touch next week to discuss your work for us.” A chime sounded, announcing that it was time to gather for the recital. “Excuse us,” I said to Joey. Then Myra and I made our way to the recital room, a small private theatre with an interference screen erected in front of the stage like a glass wall to prevent most forms of recording. We found Zachary Chenko already waiting backstage, behind the curtains. He gave me an up and down glance. “What’s he doing here?” he asked. Myra brushed dandruff off of his shoulders and said, “This is Andre. He’s a fan, and just wanted to watch from backstage. Turn around, you’re a mess.” backstage. Turn around, you’re a mess.” Chenko grunted but did as Myra asked. “This had better work,” he said. “I’m tired of those crazy feminazis screwing up my gigs.” Myra pulled a rolled-up sheet of felt out of her sleeve and smoothed it across his back as she brushed with her hand. Chenko did not appear to notice. “There, looking good,” Myra said. “Now remember, stick to our story, no improvising. Just play nice tonight, and tomorrow you will be able to have recitals protest-free.” “Right,” Chenko said. “Let’s get this over with.” A second chime sounded. “Good luck,” I said. Myra winked at me, and took Chenko’s arm. Together, they parted the curtains and walked out onto the small stage. Zachary’s voice poured from the speakers in the room. “Welcome to a reading of A Woman’s View, a new short story by Zachary Chenko and Myra Sweet. Any unauthorized recordings or transcriptions are illegal, yadda yadda. Now, apparently there are some strong opinions about my supposed views and treatment of women based on my books, and a few … incidents at my recitals. Clearly, explanations and apologies are not enough. So I hope that my collaboration tonight with the lovely Myra Sweet, and the powerful message of the story we’ve written, will be the first step in demonstrating my true feelings and moving us past any misunderstandings. Thank you all, and now, A Woman’s View.” I went up on stage, and tapped Chenko on the shoulder. He turned around. “What?” he said. I yanked down his pants. There was a second of silence from the audience, and then several women began to laugh. The rest of the crowd soon joined them. Chenko’s face turned bright red, and from his expression I knew it was more from anger than embarrassment. He pulled his pants back up. “You’ve just ruined yourself, you talentless punk!” he said, and rushed offstage, pushing me roughly aside as he passed. I watched him go, with the large white letters on his back that read: “I may be an ass, but I would not turn my back on Amazonian Fire by Myra Sweet and Andre Jackson, a cheeky romp filled with love, lust and magic.” I doubted the audience was able to read much more than the first line, but it would get heavy viewing online. Especially if Joey was recording this, as I hoped he was. The e-mob would finally do their job promoting me, or miss out on all the views this event could get. And Joey would surely get in some trouble for not only losing me as a writer, but actually helping me to escape. Myra said, “Thank you all. May I introduce my true collaborator, Andre Jackson.” I bowed, and stepped up in range of the microphones. “Thank you. We will now recite the first section of our new novel, Amazonian Fire, and gladly accept offers of patronage following the recital.” Myra and I ripped off our tear-away outfits, revealing her leopard-skin one-piece and my gold lame’ fairy armor. I gave an especially wide grin to Joey, who looked as though he had just discovered there was no Santa Claus. Then we gave our recital, and the audience laughed, and cried, and applauded at the end with calls for us to continue. I was touching people with my words. I decided maybe this wouldn’t be such a horrible way to live for a while. I would still one day write the Great American Novel that would transform people’s lives and the world of literature forever. But in the meantime, what was wrong with a few steamy Amazons fighting and loving urban fairies? <<<>>> <<<>>> Escape Pod 328, originally released on January 19, 2012 Download audio Read by Roberto Suarez An Escape Pod Original Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author Pairs by Zachary Jernigan

I had been practicing turning myself into a knife. Between star systems I gathered and focused my particles into a triangle, a sharp shape. Hurling myself against the diamond-hard walls of my small ship, the point of the weapon hardened. I honed myself. You see, I had decided to murder my employer. I had studied his weaknesses and come to believe myself capable of the act. I did not know when and where, nor did I know what would trigger it. I simply knew it had to happen. On that day I would either die or buy myself a measure of freedom. Originally, this was the extent of my plan: To serve myself. My name is Arihant. I am one of two humans still inhabiting a physical form, diminished though it is. Outside the walls of my ship, I am in form a faintly translucent white specter, strong and powerfully built—an artist’s anatomical model. Over the years it has become difficult to remember what my face looked like, and thus my features are only approximately human, my head bare. My eyes glow the color of Earth’s sun. I am quite beautiful, Louca tells me. On more than one occasion she has run her hands over the ghostly contours of my body. “I wish you were solid,” she once said. “Oh, Ari. The things I would do to you.” Louca is the one I am forced to follow and observe. Her name means crazy—an appropriate name. She is the second human possessing a body. Technically, her body is a black, whale-shaped ship one hundred meters long, but her avatars take the forms of anything she imagines. Very rarely, she is human, and never the same person twice. More often, she wears the bodies of flying animals. She dreams of flying, which is appropriate. Our profession is transport. For three centuries we have hauled the disembodied souls of Earth—each stored in a projection cube—from star to star to be sold. They are quite expensive, I am told, but I have no understanding of the means of exchange. Nearly everything is hidden from me, and Louca sees nothing. The reason souls are bought varies. Often they are kept as curios. Sometimes they are used to attract customers to the buyer’s business. My employer used to goad me on these points: “Is it not wonderful to know your people are put to such good use? Imagine how happy it must make them!” But I know the truth. Even without physical bodies, men become lonely. They despair and I feel it. Surely Louca feels it; she goes crazier and crazier in such close proximity to ghosts. Before the events of this story, only the luckiest souls were bought in pairs or groups, a rare occurrence. Now, because of Louca and I, it is the rule that souls must be sold in pairs. It is my one accomplishment, making men marginally less alone. Still, I arrange nothing—I have no power over the situation. I follow Louca from a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers, never any closer, and report anything unusual. I need not watch very closely. Louca’s duty is to dream violent dreams, to defend and deliver her payload. Hopefully, her capacity for violence will never be tested. She is categorically insane—a fact that, my employer insists, makes her uniquely suited to the job of protector. Employer. Job. The terms are ridiculous, for Louca and I are not paid. Our terms of service are not negotiable. I am no one’s employee, but I prefer not to use the word slave. Or master. I cling to life. I value it, though what value it has is measured in a mere handful of molecules. I possess no unique or useful knowledge, only memories. My ship, small though it is, has several lifetimes’ worth of entertainment files. I immerse myself in virtual environments so flawlessly rendered I forget they are fiction. I have lived many lives, largely uninterrupted by my duties. An observer might call these lives empty, but between systems, often decades at a time, they are all I have. By my count, the year is 2432—though I may well be wrong, as we travel faster than the speed of light. Not that it matters; Earth is dead, ground up for fuel, all her souls absconded with. In the time it has taken me to lose track of my own lives—a hundred, a thousand years—the fate of mankind has not changed. I record these words for a posterity that will not exist. # I was interrupted in the middle of making love to a four armed, furred woman. My life of four years dissolved around me, and I woke in my single room to find a message written on the surface of my desk: We have arrived in the Sfari system. A quick check in my journal confirmed that we had visited it once before, nearly two centuries previously. A second visit is rare. Before/Under me spun Sfari, a blue-green marble. To my right, in the process of docking with a triple tori-shaped station, was Louca. She opened a bay door for me and I guided my ship inside. Several robota, eight-limbed and silvered, ignored me as they passed by in the maintenance corridor. Their carapaces nearly brushed the ceiling. An inspection team from the satellite, I recalled from last time. I found Louca in the debarking lounge. She had taken on the form of a five foot-tall flying squirrel, cartoonishly feminine—one of her favorites. A paw tapped the handle of the cart loaded with souls, eyes staring out the lounge’s one window. There was nothing to see but the pitted wall of the station. “How are you, Louca?” I asked. She turned and smiled, revealing large incisors. “Arihant! You wouldn’t imagine where I’ve been!” “I bet I can.” We have this conversation every time we meet. “No, no. I was a hawk.” She curled one claw, beckoning me closer as if to share a secret, and whispered, “I just flew in. I’m a hawk right now, actually, but you can’t really tell. A vicious hawk.” “You are?” “Yes. I am.” She rocked back, looked me up and down. “You look wonderful. Where have you been?” I considered my life, just erased. I had been an author of erotica on Luna, a famous man. I had had twelve children from seven women, a penthouse apartment in Saffron Towers, and an endless supply of drugs. It had been wonderful —wonderful but already fading, disappearing quicker and quicker the more I tried to cling to it. “Nowhere special,” I told her. Her rodent face managed to look sad. “That’s sad,” she said. The door irised open, admitting us into the station. # The cart guides us to the buyer. A cube intended for him/her/it glows and Louca hands it over. That is all, generally. Sometimes I am asked to demonstrate how to activate the soul projection, and I pantomime pushing the cube’s single button. I have been instructed that Louca is not to perform this action—perhaps because, unlike me, she could physically depress the button. I have been warned several times not to allow this to happen. Apparently, the customers too are warned to never activate the projection before us. This used to disappoint me. I used to long to see the person trapped within the device, but now I know it is for the best. If I see another human, I have to explain what I am and what I do. The schedule is the same every time. We deliver the souls and store the cart. If sales are negotiated in the interim, we return to the ship to retrieve more cubes. Thus, during the night—or whatever constitutes the end of the business day —Louca and I are allowed to wander. I do not follow her; I do not witness what trouble she causes. For me, carnal —Louca and I are allowed to wander. I do not follow her; I do not witness what trouble she causes. For me, carnal pleasures are had only in simulated life. Our first day in orbit above Sfari we delivered seventeen souls to representatives of—to my untrained eye—nine species. The final three transactions occurred at the central market, a raucous, jumbled warren of stalls displaying items recognizable and foreign. The various species eyed us with expressions I read as menacing, hungry, disinterested—never friendly. One smiled, or possibly grimaced, exposing blue and yellow gums. He gestured to me and tried to hand Louca a sheaf of goldleaf bills in exchange. “Fuck you,” she said. “I’m a hawk and you’d better back off. I wouldn’t sell Ari for all the gum in a candy store.” We locked the cart to a metal stanchion. There I said goodbye to Louca. “Goodbye, Louca.” “Wait, Ari. What are you going to do tonight?” “I do not know. Maybe I will get a drink.” She did not laugh or crack a smile at my joke. “Oh. Okay, Ari. I’m going to eat a rabbit. Bye!” She lifted her arms, let out a piercing cry, and bolted down an alley between stalls. I traveled the triple tori, a trip of six hours—approximately thirty kilometers. Each contained a different atmosphere, but this presented little challenge to me; I can pretend to swim as easily as pretend to walk. The satellite’s population was by turns elegantly menacing, sleekly torsional, gelatinously disgusting. Four of the species I recognized from sales earlier in the day. Free of containment suits, they were no prettier. It happened while I was watching diners from under a restaurant awning in the main torus. The establishment catered to what I thought of as Sfari’s native species, the one most represented in the satellite: a crow-billed, green bipedal people. I recognized one from a delivery earlier. He/She/It and several others stood on long, thin legs around a high circular table. On its top a projected woman danced. A human soul, the first I had ever seen. I stared at her naked body, unable to look away. She was beautiful, muscular thighs and arms bangled in silver and gold. She made me ache in a way unrelated to physiology. I have no organs, no bones, yet I swear I felt the sparse molecules of my being shudder collectively. I had seen real women, ages ago, another lifetime ago. I have made love to many more in virtual life, but this was something else—the essence of a woman, the essence of her dancing, not hips gyrating but the idea of hips, and breasts, the idea and memory of real sex… Suddenly, she looked up, stared at me as though she had felt my eyes on her. My reaction was swift—almost as if I had been planning to run, had known it was going to happen—as if my ghost muscles held the memory of flight. I condensed myself into a tight ball and rocketed away, but not before I saw the fear in her eyes. More than likely, she would be taken somewhere to be displayed, never to see another of her kind. Somehow, she knew. # We left, and I immersed myself in the best sort of lives, full of danger and sex, but they went sour. I flitted from one to the next, unable to find comfort. I was followed. On Crete in the fourth century BC, a young girl with golden eyes stood always on the periphery of public markets, watching me. When I walked toward her, she turned and fled, disappearing into the crowd. watching me. When I walked toward her, she turned and fled, disappearing into the crowd. On Barsoom, the ghost of a garroted princess floated under the surface of my villa lake, only seen from the corners of my eyes. The long strands of her purple hair became weeds that drifted under the hull, just out of reach. In my dressing room at the Ole Opry in 1937, I kept finding items I had not left: a hairbrush, a compact, a crushed package of women’s cigarettes. When I went on stage, my knees shook and sweat stained my underarms. Every woman I brought to my dressing room said the same thing: “Not tonight. I don’t feel right tonight.” As Oddyseus, I was haunted by visions of Penelope being ravaged by a crow-headed god. I woke in the night clutching my furs, hands and forearms cramped. My grip became weaker and weaker until I could no longer hold a weapon. I could not forget the image of the woman, dancing—her eyes meeting mine. I spent more and more time out of simulation, watching old movies and reading novels I have read many times. From time to time I watched Louca in the viewscreen, her twin lava-red exhausts lashing like tails from side to side, warping space in ways incomprehensible to me. I meditated. Oddly, the discontent focused me. I felt a control over my form I had never known. I changed form faster. My edge became sharper, my point harder. I became a better knife. # “You’re different this time, Ari,” Louca told me after we finished the deliveries. “I’m going to stay with you tonight.” Ten years we had traveled to reach Jejuno, a hazy, city-covered planet. Due to its triple suns, the world never became dark, just a greater shade of grey. We delivered seventy-three souls without incident the first day. The people of Jejuno, bipedal oxygen-breathers—to my eyes the unfortunate mating of toads and civets—stared at Louca and me in open curiosity but never opened their mouths to speak. She wore the body of a redheaded boy. It was a coincidence that he resembled the woman I had seen above Sfari. Surely it was. Nonetheless, her appearance unnerved me. “I am no different, Louca. Enjoy your evening.” But she insisted on coming with me. She talked nonstop as we walked at the bottom of a canyon of skyscrapers, along maze-like alleys winding through tent cities at the buildings’ feet. Nowhere was there a road wide enough for a vehicle. Above us, however, powerful aircraft boomed, snapping the canvas tent walls and blowing trash at our feet. She sneered. “It smells, Ari. Smells bad.” She draped a piece of purple cloth over her forearm. “Do you like this color on me, Ari?” She made me stop to watch a puppet show at the intersection of two alleys. We were watched as much as the show. “These people, Ari. They’re weird.” She stepped in a pile of dung or rotted trash. “Shit, Ari! What is this, shit?” At the largest intersection we had yet seen, she licked her index finger and held it in the air. “Right, Ari—definitely right.” The avenue opened up. In a few kilometers it had become a major thoroughfare of six lanes, along which segmented commuter buses puffed grey smoke from multiple rooftop exhausts. Motorcycles, two and three wheeled, weaved around the larger vehicles, wasp-engines piercingly loud. A median separated the two lanes, widened into a park of high deciduous trees. We crossed a bridge over the road and onto a path leading inward. Instead of becoming darker, the sky grew lighter. The shadows of the trees stretched behind us, fanning out to each side and, shortly, we entered a clearing where an artificial sun shone above the treeline. Children, the first we had seen, climbed on a series of large, colorful cages. “We should sit, Ari. Talk.” Louca sat cross-legged and patted the matted green vegetation. I sat. I did not look into her eyes. I remembered the near-sexual reaction I had had to the dancing woman’s soul. Discussing it with the Louca—especially as she was, in a body that resembled the woman—was impossible. Discussing it with the Louca—especially as she was, in a body that resembled the woman—was impossible. “Louca, there is nothing to talk about. Everything is fine.” “I know you’re lying.” She closed her eyes, stretched her arms as if they were wings. “How do I know? A hawk knows these things. We can see deep into the hearts of everyone, see fear and pain and desire. All of it. And you, Ari.” Her right eye popped open, fixed on me. “You’re radiating guilt. A lot of guilt.” “What do I have to feel guilty about, Louca?” She closed her eye again. She reached her hands out as if they were claws, grasping, and plucked an invisible thing from the air. “Ha! I’ve got it!” She cupped whatever it was in her hands, held it up to her ear, and shook it. Grinned. “It’s something to do with a woman, Ari.” Both eyes popped open and met mine. The grin disappeared. “You hurt someone. Oh, Ari, you hurt a woman.” For a moment it felt as if I had a heart—as if something inside me had misfired. But Louca could not have known about the woman, and I calmed as I thought it through. Maybe I had hurt her. There are a thousand small and unpredictable ways to offend an unbalanced mind. “I am sorry if I hurt your feelings, Louca. Whatever I have done, I apologize.” She laughed and closed her eyes again. “Ari, Ari, Ari. You’re an idiot, but I still love you.” I waited, but she would not speak again. Clearly, I was correct: I had done something to offend her. After several minutes of waiting, it also became clear that she wanted to be alone, and so I stood up to go. Louca could find her way to the shuttle; she always did. When I looked back from the treeline, she sat in the same position, listening to the secret in her hands. # My employer’s name was Slaf’Salakem. I thought of it as a he, but I am not sure this is correct. In appearance, he was a two and one half-meter high bluegreen reptile, proportions roughly that of a man. His smooth-scaled body shined iridescently. When he smiled, blood red gums retracted from long black dagger teeth, and all four sinewy limbs ended in sickle-shaped claws. His replacement, whom I also think of as male, is only broadly similar—reptilian surely, but large muscled and slow, peg-toothed. Still, I think they are the same species. I would rather picture one annihilating race than several. I write this and it sounds ridiculous, as if I still have hope. And if my description of them seems comical, somewhat cartoonish, then I have failed to describe them properly. Beyond their general appearance, I know almost nothing about the race that destroyed Earth. Overall, I found that I was not curious—that I did not want to know. How could a man cope with the loss of an entire planet, everything he has ever known? Knowing our destroyers will not make the tragedy easier to handle. After freeing me from the prison of my projection cube, Slaf’Salakem had told me what his people had done, what I was, and what I was to do. In perfect English, he told me, “Your chief value is predictability, Arihant. You will do as you are told. Never forget that you are my pet.” He introduced me to Louca—in suspended animation, wearing the body I assume she had lived in on Earth—and seemed to speak with a touch of affection. “She is crazy. She tried to bite me, can you believe? Of course, I will remove that memory. But the craziness—I will not remove the craziness. I would have her no other way.” He ran a clawed hand over her face. “She needs to be quick and strong. We have cargo others envy.” He glanced at me. “Report anything unusual—anything—to me. Initially, you will travel known, generally safe routes. You will become used to routine, and what constitutes a problem. I want to know if she becomes unstable. Tell me you understand.” Tell me you understand.” “I understand,” I said. There were so many questions I did not ask. Once, I had a family. I might have attempted to free them. I did not even try. Then, I was simply grateful to be free. My only questions were, “Why have us do this? Why not one of your own people?” My new employer had shown me the first of his rare smiles. “My people are too self-centered, good conquerors and bad nurturers. Other species we have tried on occasion, but the situation is much the same. No one wants to lose decades traveling the void. Though we paid well, we could not guarantee delivery. Too many factors in deep space. Sometimes violence is called for. Through eons of trial and error, we have found that no one protects the souls of the dead better than their own people.” # We delivered seven souls the next day. Louca was quiet and spoke nothing of our interaction the previous evening. I was happy to let it rest. I had thought about my conduct and was unable to fathom what I had done to offend her. It embarrasses me to admit, but I also considered briefly the possibility that Louca had in fact read my mind and seen the dancing woman. Before we stepped into the shuttle—nearly home without incident—she reached out to grab my arm. “Ari,” she said, and frowned as her hand passed through my shoulder. It had been a while since she had tried to touch me. “Ari,” she repeated, eyes wide, moving her hand back and forth in my chest. “Why, you’re a ghost!” She was forgetful. I looked down at her arm, cut off at the wrist. “You are right, Louca.” I turned to enter the shuttle, but she closed her fist inside me—and I felt yet another new sensation, almost like being unable to breathe. I found that I could not move forward, so I turned back to her. “No, Ari,” she said. “You’re a ghost right now, but you don’t always have to be a ghost. Nobody has to be a ghost. A ghost is a person with no reason to live. A hawk with clipped wings. Oh! You know what I think? I think you need to fill in your body, grow some flight feathers.” Her eyes widened. She grinned. “No. Even better, Ari. You need to find the man who clipped your wings. Clip his wings right back.” # Eight years of dissatisfying lives, focused only through the lens of my knife meditation and the reoccurring vision of the dancing woman, passed before we touched down again. Eight years, so easily glossed over, yet to do so is a denial of the truth, which is that the enjoyment I once took in simulated living had soured completely. Outside the simulation, I became increasingly aware of my own body. I itched—or remembered itching so vividly it seemed that I itched—and I felt hunger. Eight years, so easily glossed over. The planet Gratte was covered by a shallow aquamarine ocean spotted with innumerable brown islands. Louca met me in the shuttle bay, wearing the body of an Egyptian goddess, statuesque and sun-browned, hawk-headed, seven and a half feet tall. She waved fingertips in my chest and said, “You’re still you, Ari. A ghost.” Her hooked beak did not move when she spoke. I wondered if her breath smelled of meat, of rotted fish. “And you are still you, Louca,” I answered. “A raptor.” One great amber eye winked. We descended in a jacket of flame, in silence. Hammo, a walled city of dried brown clay bricks, was uninteresting, as were its people, walking on eight legs, clacking their claws and mouthparts unceasingly. The sound was maddening. were its people, walking on eight legs, clacking their claws and mouthparts unceasingly. The sound was maddening. After twelve deliveries—three of which oddly were pairs—the particles of my body felt jumbled. I doubted my control over them, as if my form were wavering in the hot sun. Louca disappeared silently just after the final delivery, off to her pleasures. I climbed the wall of the city and dropped to the beach below. The clacking of claws and mouthparts died away, and I began to relax. Lines of electric white writhed on smooth rocks below crystalline water. The sea extended to the horizon before me, broken only by humped bodies of islands too numerous to count. Close to shore, small fish and invertebrates flitted from rock to rock. A school of paddle-finned insects the size of sea turtles swam slowly just below the surface several meters out, feeding on something I could not see. As I watched, a dark shape detached itself from a distant rock and arrowed through the water toward me. The school of insects parted, but not quickly enough. Without slowing, the dark shape’s arms darted, impaling one, two, three. Yellow gore trailed in its wake. I waited. He rose from the water. His body glistened. Small black eyes, set deep in an angular skull, regarded me for a moment and looked away, uninterested. He held one fist closed, slender tendrils of yellow ichor dripping from it. “Hello, Slaf’Salakem,” I said. I was not surprised to see him; I half suspected he would be there. I had become used to meeting him on water planets. Slaf’Salakem enjoyed one thing above all else: Hunting. It was the only personal information he shared with me. During our meetings, he made displays of skill and talked of killing. I had once confessed to him a love for hunting, though his proclivities were vastly different from mine. He never bagged his kill. Many times I witnessed him moving on without pausing to examine what he had killed. The first time I witnessed this behavior was also the first time I remember wanting to kill Slaf’Salakem. I began trying to become a knife soon after. “Three pairs today, Arihant,” Slaf’Salakem said. “That should please you.” It took me a moment to understand that he was referring to the deliveries. “Why would that please me?” I asked. He shrugged. “They are your people.” He flicked a piece of viscera from his arm. “It is better for them not to be alone, no? Your people are very communal, if I remember correctly. Very poor survival strategy in the long run.” This was the other type of conversation I had with Slaf’Salakem. I believe he wanted to incite a reaction from me. This had always seemed the underlying purpose of our meetings—to anger me, belittle my people. Of course, now I know the truth: He was trying to keep my spirit under his heel, so that I would never consider betrayal. “It is?” I asked. “It is. And complicating for business. I find myself wondering if selling a pair of human souls is better for our long- term plans than selling just one. Pain is often more compelling than joy, in my experience—and usually more salable.” His eyes met mine and flicked away again. “Then again, it is possible that this is the wrong tack, as well. Perhaps I should simply raise the price of pairs, market them like one does a breeding pair. What do you think, Arihant?” I looked away. “How was your hunt?” He sighed. “Too easy.” He raised the closed fist to his face and opened it. A translucent blue globe sat within. It went into his mouth whole—a flash of blood red gums and ivory teeth. “Mm. Easy, but quite delicious. There is no way to tell the difference between male and female separr, and there are far fewer females than males. One must kill a dozen or so animals before finding an ovary.” # I did not kill Slaf’Salakem that day, though I wanted to, but the anger had not focused me into a weapon. While he talked of killing, a wave a nausea I could not explain passed through me. With no stomach, no organs to speak of, nausea is surely impossible. Yet I felt it, the urge to vomit. I feared that if I did my body would fly apart and I would be unable to piece myself together again. To keep from doing so, I fantasized about smothering Slaf’Salakem in a cloud, asphyxiating him. Thankfully, before I lost control completely, he grew bored with our interaction and dived back into the water, taking my nausea with him. Powerful strokes soon took him out of sight. I thought then that my plan was foolishness. I could not kill Slaf’Salakem. I had been a fool to think I could, had overestimated my courage and control. I turned my back on the sea. On the wall of the city above me stood Louca. I held up a hand in greeting, but she did not respond. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon. Curious, I waited for a reaction, some hint at her purpose. None was forthcoming. After several minutes—both of us standing motionless—she turned and jumped down, out of sight. I eventually followed, intent on explaining my interaction with Slaf’Salakem. As far as I knew, she was not aware of his existence, and I worried what conclusion she might have drawn from our interaction. That night, I walked the streets of Hammo, looking for her. The alleyways and avenues were quiet, utterly deserted. I circled the city by walking on the enclosing wall, but saw no sign of Louca. Near morning, however, as the horizon began to glow and the citizens started clacking their claws, I thought I heard one of her piercing cries, far out to sea. A guilty conscience, surely. My job is to watch Louca for signs of instability, and I had been lax. Her madness had always run along predictable paths, but if this changed she would be in danger. Slaf’Salakem would not hesitate to replace her. When Louca and I met at the shuttle the following morning, I said nothing, hoping she would tell me what it was she had seen, or what it was she had hoped to see staring out at the ocean. She did not. The feathers on her head were dark and stiff, stuck together in spikes. I suffered a moment of doubt and wondered—If I could pluck one of her feathers and taste it, would it taste like the sea? We walked in silence along Louca’s corridors. Before stepping into my ship, she finally spoke: “For a second yesterday, I thought you were hunting.” She angled her head down and turned so that I stared directly into one dark eye. “For a second, I thought you were a hawk, too. I guess I was wrong. I’m disappointed in you, Ari. No, don’t say anything—it’s okay, I forgive you because you’re not as strong as me.” She started to reach forward, but stopped centimeters from my chest. “I… Oh, Ari. I forget what you are sometimes. But don’t fret. I’m going to do something for you. Do you want me to do something for you, Ari?” Before I could answer, she turned and left. I wonder: What would I have said if she had not walked away? # Tava. Smoltwar. Klin-Klin. Abas. Berun. I remember the names, but not much of the places or people. Louca was twice forced to fashion modified bodies to handle the atmosphere. Once, she inhabited the body of a great clanking robot, and refused to speak. She beeped and flashed lights at me. Fortunately, we need not communicate to do our job, though I wonder if she interpreted my lack of comprehension as rudeness. On one planet we saw nothing but the inside of a bare room. For the first time, the customer came to us, and we were not allowed our shore leave. Louca, wearing the body of an immense bat, scratched gouges in the metal walls in her rage. I worried that it might become a regular thing. Maybe we would never see the surface of another planet. I knew I could do nothing for Louca in that event. Fortunately, it seemed to be an isolated occurrence. My relationship with Louca returned to normal. We never talked of Gratte or Jejuno. My relationship with Louca returned to normal. We never talked of Gratte or Jejuno. The space between stars was silent, as always. I had a lot of time to think, lives to squander. I stopped meditating. Gradually, the dancing woman left me alone. She disappeared and for a time I convinced myself that I had forgiven myself. Gradually, I gave up my plan for revenge. # This is not true—not entirely. I would not tell this story, otherwise. Slaf’Salakem is, after all, dead, but I am not the one most responsible. Louca has a passion for death I did not then comprehend. She is also more watchful than I knew, though I doubt she understands what she sees. She is all reaction, no forethought or reflection. The oceans of Xhef were nothing like the shallow, friendly sea of Gratte. Deeper and colder than Earth’s waters, Xhef’s oceans had given birth to an astounding variety of marine life. After our deliveries in the port city of Erois were completed and Louca disappeared, I watched the fishing boats unload at the docks. For several hours, the massive, six-limbed sailors of Xhef pulled no two of the same creature from their cargo holds. Toothy fish and finned reptiles of all sizes and shapes. I was not surprised when a small boat arrived bearing a messenger. Silent, the sailor presented a slip of paper to me. On it was written, Go with him. He will take you to me. I watched black seabirds fly as we hugged the jagged shoreline. The sky was overcast but bright, the kind of florescent white it hurts the eyes to stare into. Spires of dark gray rock, jagged and bare, rose like teeth to eat the landscape behind us. The trip to the small bay lasted less than an hour, but we lost sight of the city within minutes. In the center of the bay was a hole. Glimpsed now and then as grey waves rose and fell, the sailor gave it a wide berth. It looked very much like a whirlpool, but did not seem to affect the currents. The hole had to be artificial. Suddenly, waves of nausea passed through me—just as they had the last time I met Slaf”Salakem. The sailor pointed to the dark hole, and rumbled alien words. I needed no translation. I dispersed into a cloud and floated off the deck. Forty feet deep and ten wide, the walls of the well were black, smooth as glass. Slaf’Salakem stood on dry sand at the bottom, waiting for me. He wore an unusual garment on his torso, a harness or armored vest with two smooth silver compartments positioned over chest and upper back. His eyes followed me down. I imagine he wanted to show that he could see me, though I had not formed my body yet. “Hello, Slaf’Salakem,” I said, organizing my particles. He looked away, now dismissive. “Arihant. What do you think of my aquarium? Outside this temporary wall swim over five thousand species of carnivore, some no bigger than my palm and some well over fifty feet in length.” “Are you hunting?” I asked. He smiled an open, honest smile. He only displayed this expression when the hunting was particularly good. “Yes, I am hunting today, Arihant. Do you want to see the creature I am hunting? Good. Watch.” Torchlight bloomed in the bay. Beyond the wall Slaf’Salakem had erected, mobile lights were moving, illuminating three long, sinuous shapes. I stared, gradually forming a picture of the creature Slaf’Salakem was to hunt. Measuring fifteen to twenty feet, it was shaped somewhat like an eel though fatter, flattened horizontally rather than vertically. Its wide mouth could not close due to the length of its teeth. It had no eyes, though I doubted it suffered much for their lack. Though it moved slowly, I knew it could move quickly if the situation demanded it. It was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. The lights went out. “They are quite intelligent,” Slaf’Salakem said. “I have observed them for days. These three females control this bay, “They are quite intelligent,” Slaf’Salakem said. “I have observed them for days. These three females control this bay, protecting their eggs from other creatures and males of their own species with an enviably violent and cunning zeal. Alas, unprotected I am no match for even one individual creature, nor for many of her cousin species. I must protect myself with this wall, though I keep it very close to my body while hunting.” “You have no weapon,” I observed. He smiled again, clearly enjoying the subject. “In addition to protecting me, I can form atom-thin knives and spears from the force-field substance. Still, it is a challenging hunt. They do not die easily.” He stretched, grimacing. “And the generator packs restrict my movement. What one does for sport, eh, Arihant?” I said nothing. I remember thinking how often Slaf’Salakem mirrored my anxieties, how often he seemed to read my soul. A knife or a spear. “You will watch,” Slaf’Salakem said, “after I remind you of the terms of your employment. Louca has been watching me, as I am sure you are aware. I only became aware after our last meeting. She followed me, Arihant— she swam after me, chased me—and I want to know why. Beyond this, I want to know if she can be relied upon to do her job. If not, I will find someone else; perhaps I will even consider replacing you. It will not be easy to train your replacements, but I will not hesitate.” The nausea increased. I began to feel shaky, disparate, on the verge of shuddering apart. An image of Slaf’Salakem standing over the dancing woman’s broken body flashed in my mind. I observed it as I would the real thing—from a distance, unable to move. I knew then that if I did not act I would fail her. “I do not know,” I said. The particles of my being halted, as if waiting for me to direct them. “I know nothing about this.” Slaf’Salakem stared at me for a long moment before turning away. The irrational fear that he knew my thoughts returned. “Should I believe you?” he asked. He exhaled quickly, loudly. I realized that he was laughing. He continued. “I think I should. I trust you, Arihant. I trust you because you know your chief value. You know that I will see any change in you. You have neither the personality or cunning to betray me. You are a reliable old dog. Louca, on the other hand—I have decided that she will be replaced. She is becoming a liability, and…” I stopped listening. I now see that it is immaterial, whether or not Slaf’Salakem had been able to read my mind. It does not matter if he understood that I was gathering the courage to kill him. He had made a judgment: I was harmless. Every molecule of my being hummed with hate. I had finally decided that death was preferable to continued slavery. No, I thought nothing of my people, the thousands of souls I had helped sell into another form of slavery. I felt hate, pure and clean. I felt free. I condensed myself into a knife, a sharp shape, and aimed for Slaf’Salakem’s throat. I hesitated. A second. Two seconds. In that moment, the sky above went dark, and something entered the well. Something huge fell, screaming, wings folded to its side yet still brushing the wall. A shrill scream filled the bottom of the well, compressing my body tighter with its pressure. Slaf-Salakem looked up and I darted forward, burying myself in the soft tissue of his throat just before Louca slammed into the ground, crushing his body beneath her. # She died, of course, along with Slaf’Salakem. If the fall was not enough to kill her, the water caving in probably was. If that also did not kill her, the creatures of the bay surely did. Thus, Louca does not remember killing Slaf’Salakem. Her body was never recovered and her memories died on the Thus, Louca does not remember killing Slaf’Salakem. Her body was never recovered and her memories died on the planet Xhef. Louca-the-hawk never uploaded to Louca-the-ship. Whatever urge had compelled her to kill our employer died with her. Or it did not. Sometimes I think she is waiting for an opportunity, still. Sometimes I catch her looking at me while we walk behind the cart on our errand. When she is in the body of a human, I almost read the look as wistful—possibly even loving. During these moments I remember my mother, my wife, my children, and I feel warmth suffuse my body, and I think about the type of being I have become. I wonder. I wonder and maybe I remember what it feels like to be a true man. Altogether, it is not a bad thing to feel. But I cannot return Louca’s look. She is a crazy person. She needs me and in my way I need her, but it is best not to read too deeply into our relationship. It is best not to dream of being closer to her—of finding a way to travel inside her instead of so far behind. We would undoubtedly grow tired of one another, being cooped up together for such long periods. My employer’s replacement, Slaf’Samas, arrived three weeks after Slaf’Salakem’s death. He recovered the generator packs from the bay, but no body was found. I stuck to my story. Slaf’Salakem and I had talked for a time, and then he had dismissed me. “He died while hunting, then?” Slaf’Samas rumbled in a thick voice I struggled to understand. “He was hunting something dangerous?” I described to him the animals that Slaf’Salakem had shown me. “Then he was also being hunted?” Slaf’Samas asked. He wondered if this was a fair assumption. “I think it is a fair assumption,” I answered. It is perhaps that simple, the deception of my new employer. It is my understanding that he came into Slaf’Salakem’s position unprepared and uninformed. Certainly, he knew nothing of his predecessor’s plan to restrict the sale of human souls to pairs. And so, I dutifully informed him of the conversation Slaf’Salakem and I had before his death. With my help, Slaf’Samas grew to understand the economic benefits. He is, if anything, more unpredictable than my former employer—quicker to anger, quicker to threats. His loathsomeness, however, is manageable. He does not hunt, nor does he draw me into conversation. He is not stupid, but he is not a sophisticated mind, either. It is possible that I can deceive him again, win more concessions, but I do not suffer any delusions. Whatever my contribution, it will be small. Men are still slaves. Louca and I are no more than couriers. I record these words for a posterity that will not exist. <<<>>>

Escape Pod 329 originally released on January 26, 2012 Download audio Read by Matt Franklin of Fly Reckless Originally appeared in Asimov’s Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived By Keffy R. M. Kehrli

I am Sara’s second body. My first memory is of Sara’s resurrection in a room that smelled of cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide. “That’s funny,” a man said. The world felt raw, sore, and new. Under my back, my butt, my fingertips, I could feel every thread in the sheets beneath me. The blanket over my stomach scratched. Padded straps crossed my arms. “What’s funny?” This voice was a woman’s. “Got another error message,” the man answered. “Have you ever seen that one before?” I felt the sheets with Sara’s fingers, and the texture conjured memories I didn’t have. I should have known where I was and what I was there for, but I couldn’t catch hold of the fleeting thoughts. In the dim light of the room I could only see the ceiling. “Let me see.” I heard a frenzied clicking. “It failed twice?” “Nothing copied the first time, so I started over. It got about halfway through, and then it gave me this.” “Error two-one-five-two. Copy error,” the woman said. “I’ve never seen that before. I’ve never even seen an error in the middle of a transplant. Did you check the manual?” “It didn’t list this one.” The woman sighed and said, “The only thing I can think of is if we wipe everything back out and start over.” Operating tables, and the anesthetician’s face. Tissue paper examining tables, candles in a church. “She’s conscious, though,” the man said. “When the machine aborted, it sent the Copy Completed code. Don’t look at me like that! I don’t know if I ought to mess around with it anymore, or…” The woman interrupted, “You know we can’t do that without contacting the parents. Come on, we might as well go see what the damage is.” They stood over me. The man was the younger of the two, and he looked down at me from behind thick glasses. He held his clipboard tight against his chest like a shield. The woman stood closer to me; her hair was light, either blond or grey. She frowned like it was my fault. “Can you hear and understand me?” she asked. The man wrote something on his clipboard. I could hear graphite rubbed free, caught in the paper. My mouth felt dry, and my lips did too, as though if I tried to speak they would break apart. “Yes,” I managed. She unhooked the straps on my arms. I lifted my left arm and looked at the fingers, hand, wrist. Clean, and smooth, unmarked. Cat-scratch scar near my first knuckle, angry red and faded pink. “Do you know why you’re here?” I wanted to say the right thing, but I didn’t know what that would be. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t.” “She’s coherent,” the woman said. “We’ll have to call the parents.” The man nodded, and he was still writing. Scratch scratch scratch. He didn’t answer her. The woman disconnected something that slid out from under the skin of my scalp, and I didn’t like how it rubbed against my skull. “Make sure you tell them that we won’t require the final payment until we get this sorted.” “Copy error,” I said. “Is that why I don’t know where we are?” “Yes, Sara,” she said. “I think.” # I walk until I find a cabin in the woods, the windows broken out by tree branches, by wind and rain and thrown rocks. The door hangs far on its hinges. Shotgun shells, wet with rain. Raccoon droppings. These are the things that litter the floor inside. I step over them in Sara’s boots, into a cabin soggy and ruined from disuse. A dirty orange vest hangs on the wall over a stained and rotten mattress. Sara has been here before. I know this the way I know so many things. They are the ghosts of objects that live in my brain. I am alone. The house is alone. I wonder if the raccoons still come in and I wonder who owns what is left of this cabin. I climb sagging stairs to the loft. My feet sink into the wood with each step, and water oozes out. I realize then that I’m not trying to run away; there’s nowhere to go. # Sara’s mother was an angry red-faced woman with a screech-owl voice. I first saw her the day after Sara failed to copy into my brain. Sara’s father is a fat man with a neatly trimmed brown beard and big sad eyes. I wore one of Sara’s dresses, and I sat in a little chair. I listened to their conversation and I wondered what it meant for me. They called me Sara, but the word slid off my soul like water off glass. I made fists with my hands when I thought of that, and remembered that even the little things I knew, that birds sing and wolves howl, I knew because Sara knew them. The adults around me spoke to one another as though the twelve-year-old girl in question was not even there. In a way they were right, because Sara was still dead, and I was not. “You said there wouldn’t be complications.” Sara’s mother said. Her voice was low and dangerous. Doctor Camille was calm, even though she was faced with the fury of a mother who thought – as she had said three times already – that she was losing her daughter for the second time. “As I already told you, ma’am, we’ve never had this issue before. We’re running a check on the mem files now. There are a few possibilities. The mem could be corru-” “It had better not be! This is my daughter’s life.” “Honey.” Sara’s father put his hand on her arm. He only met my eye for a moment. Doctor Camille cleared her throat. “We’re checking our system for corrupted mem files. I suggest you take your daughter home for a few days. She is functioning.” “She doesn’t even know who she is,” Sara’s mother sobbed. “She might as well still be dead.” Doctor Camille looked at me. “The brain isn’t a computer,” she said. “It’s also possible enough of the files transfered that she’ll fill in the rest on her own. We’ll run another assessment in a week, and then discuss your options.” # # Sara’s brother Benjamin was not a twin any longer, and he didn’t say a word to me for three days. Sara’s room was left untouched after she died two years before, and I spent most of my time going through it. These were the objects that should have brought me memories, but all it did was make me feel like an intruder. No matter that the face I saw in the mirror was the same as the one in the picture frames. I was still not the girl who’d carefully lined up her shoes, sorted by color. I was not the girl who loved extinct sea life enough to cover my bed with stuffed versions of creatures now lost. On the third day, I sat on Sara’s light blue bedspread, with her computer in my lap. I used it to look for other people like me, for clones or failed memory saves. I found nothing. I shouldn’t exist at all, I gathered. It would be easier for everybody. I am nobody, and nobody says, “I am the clone of a dead girl, and I think…” “Mom cries every night because of you.” Benjamin stood in the open doorway, watching me with the same brown eyes I saw in the mirror. Brother. I ought to have looked at him and thought of that, and remembered what we’d done together, even if it was only a fight or an argument sometime long in the past. I knew this because I knew what a brother was, but I couldn’t feel it. A cold knot of anxiety tightened in my stomach. He crossed his arms and leaned on the door jamb. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. He knew what came before Sara’s death, and I didn’t. “I’m sorry,” I said. The words were like myself, small and unwanted. His face went funny, sank into impotent fourteen-year-old anger. “No you’re not,” he said. “You don’t even know what that means. You’re broken.” I held on tight to the computer. I said, “No.” I flinched when Benjamin entered the room; he was like cold air. “You still don’t remember anything, do you?” “You’re my brother,” I said. My. Mine. The words were only sounds, devoid of meaning. “They’ll send you back if you can’t remember,” he said. “If you don’t start acting like yourself again, Sara.” “Get out of my room,” I said. # Doctor Camille is here. She stands down under the loft in this ruined house. “Go away,” I say. “Leave me alone. I want to stay here. I don’t want to be Sara.” I hold onto termite-gnawed balusters like cage bars and look down at her. She’s wearing a clean black suit. She doesn’t look much like a doctor now, but then, she’s not at the hospital. “Please come down,” she says. “I’m sorry for the past week. We’re going to help you remember who you are, and then this will all be easier to handle.” She looks at the stairs like she thinks maybe she can climb them to me. Like she thinks she can save me despite myself. I don’t belong here, and I cannot stay. “I’m not Sara,” I say, again. I don’t know how to make her understand. “If I become Sara, then I won’t be me.” Doctor Camille frowns. # # I found Sara’s diary on the fourth day I lived in her room. She’d hidden it up on the top shelf of her closet, under a unicorn quilt. I pulled it down in a cloud of dust that made me sneeze. Patterned and blue, with a sparkle green gel pen clipped into the rings. If anything in the room were going to remind me of the life I was meant to claim as my own, it would be that. It frightened me. I climbed into the back corner of the closet, shoved shoes out of my way, let the clothing fall into place between me and the rest of the room. It was dark, but I could still read. Reading the diary felt like I was reading the story of somebody else’s life. No part of it made me feel that I was reading about me. I tried. Even though I already thought that I was not Sara, I needed to try. Maybe Sara was there, deep inside my head, waiting to come back out. I tried to think of the events in the diary as things that had happened to me. It didn’t work. Old crushes on boys who had been in her class at school, who would now be several years older than us. Nothing. They were nobody to me. I held the book open on my lap and traced my fingers along the words, feeling the indentations that ballpoint pen made on paper. Paper and pen, and not electronic; Sara left behind a tangible mark of having been here. I flipped through the pages as though some truth was hidden between them, and I could find it that easily. So much of Sara rested in the pages of this book. Not all of her, but the parts that she’d thought were important. I could memorize the events that Sara wrote down; I could pretend. If I pretended to be Sara, would her parents even know? Could I? Remember as much as I could of the diary, try to pretend that these were my own memories, instead of something I’d only just read. I closed the diary and held it in the dim light of the closet. # I come down from the loft. My dress is muddy, and so is my face from my attempts to wipe my tears. Doctor Camille smiles at me, but the expression doesn’t look quite right. She’s glad I came down, but she doesn’t feel any joy. I let her fuss over my appearance, wiping my tears with a bunched-up tissue and straightening my dress. I walk with Doctor Camille back to Sara’s house, and I drag my feet in the fallen leaves. They smell of rotting alder. “Sara’s dead,” I say. “You’re Sara,” she says back, and she tightens her fingers on my hand. “Do you remember what it felt like to wake up? It’ll be just like that, but you’ll remember the rest of your life again.” “That’s not what Doctor Emory said,” I tell her. I look up and watch Doctor Camille’s face. The way she sets her jaw frightens me, but she doesn’t rise to the bait. I think about pulling my hand from hers and running. # On the fifth day, the skinny man from Grief Abatement Services, Incorporated came out to Sara’s house. He walked with quick short steps and his hair scruffed out around his head. Unruly, long. I watched him come to the front door from Sara’s window, curling my fingers around each other. “Sara,” her father called to me from the door of her room. I looked back to him, but I didn’t move. “There’s someone here to see you.” I followed him back down the hall and the stairway, down to the first floor of the house. The scruffy man sat on the least comfortable of all the chairs in the living room, his briefcase pulled up onto his lap. Sara’s mother was not there. I hadn’t seen her since I arrived. I hadn’t seen her since I arrived. “Hello, Sara,” he said. “I’m Doctor Emory Bieber.” He smiled, and I could see one of his teeth was a silver replacement. “I’m not Sara,” I said back, automatic. It seemed the only thing I ever said to anybody. The smile went out like a light after someone’s hit the switch, and he looked over my head to Sara’s father. “G.A.S. sent her home like this?” Sara’s father’s hand tightened on my right shoulder, squeezing as though that would bring me safety. “We were told she might regain access to her memory if she were in familiar surroundings.” Doctor Emory looked back down to me. “Might I ask you some questions, Sara?” “I’m not Sara,” I said again. “Well,” he asked. “Who are you?” Cruel question, and he had to know that it was. I pressed my lips together. How could I have a name of my own if nobody would let me find out what it was? Doctor Emory’s briefcase had a hole in it, white threads sticking out. There were papers inside, and a pen. He put the case down on the floor and leaned forward in the chair, hands clasped loosely together in front of his mouth. “Why do you say you aren’t Sara?” I didn’t want to tell him the same thing I’d said to everybody for the last few days. But there was that subtle hope I felt, that maybe he’d understand me, unlike all the others. Maybe he wouldn’t put aside how I thought and how I felt as only being symptoms of something that should have been fixed already. And then again, how could I possibly explain something that I didn’t know in words? I only knew it through feeling. I fidgeted, playing with my hands. “I’m not,” I said. “I would know if I was. How do you know that you’re Doctor Emory?” I wasn’t trying to be a pain. Some part of me wondered if there was a feeling or sense that other people had, the sense of who they are, and that maybe that simply hadn’t copied with the rest of what Sara knew. Sara’s father took his hand from my shoulder. I wondered if he would leave me with the doctor to talk about what it meant to be Sara. And Doctor Emory, for his part, was struggling to satisfactorily answer my question to himself, so he could share it with the rest of us. He frowned and pressed a finger against his lips. “I suppose I worded that badly,” he said. “It’s unusual to think you’re someone other than you are.” “I just know,” I said. “I just know I’m not Sara.” “Do you want to be Sara?” he asked. Nobody, not in five days, had asked me that question even once. “No,” I said, and Sara’s father left without another word. “You don’t?” Doctor Emory fiddled with one of the latches on his briefcase without looking away from me. “Why not?” “Because I’m me,” I said, as though that were reason enough. And couldn’t it be? “I don’t want to be rewritten. I don’t want to go away.” I walked past Emory and he turned on the chair to watch me. I sat on the couch and pulled my feet up, sinking into the cushion. “Do you mind that I’m recording our conversation?” he asked. “Okay,” I said. I wondered what Sara’s father would have thought, had he heard that. I wondered what else was in the beat-up case. the beat-up case. “You’re a standard G.A.S. replacement clone, and you left the Center five days ago, correct?” I couldn’t think of why he wanted to know. “Yes,” I answered. “And there was an error, wasn’t there? But they sent you out anyway. How do you feel about that?” His look was too hungry, and it frightened me. For once, I didn’t want to say what was expected of me. I didn’t know what he wanted to hear, so I couldn’t avoid the answer. Where was Sara’s father? “I don’t know,” I said. I hugged my knees. I suddenly wanted to cry, but I couldn’t say why. “I’m not the person they want me to be. This isn’t my body; it belongs to Sara. But if she comes back, then where will I go? Will I be a ghost? Will I just go away?” “Do you think you’re a person?” he asked. And I couldn’t hold the tears back anymore, because how could I be anything else? “Of course I’m a person,” I said. I cried. He smiled, a nice smile, and he played with the latch on his briefcase again. “Thank you,” he said. # When we get back to the house, we don’t go inside. There’s already a car waiting to take us to the Center. I don’t want to get in. Doctor Camille pats my hand. Sara’s mother and father are inside the house, or maybe they aren’t home at all. I don’t know. Why would they come to say goodbye to me, anyway? I’m not their daughter. I’m a ghost. Doctor Camille lets my hand free long enough to open the door to the back of the car. I slide in over dark brown leather and let her buckle the seatbelt for me. I don’t look up until she’s closed the door, sealed me away from the rest of the world with steel and glass. In a window on the second floor, I think I see Benjamin. He doesn’t wave and neither do I. # On my last night, Sara’s parents fought. I sat in her closet again with the diary. I leaned my head against the wall, and I could hear them clearly through their closet. Sara’s mother sounded like a dying eagle. “You let him in? Do you know how bad this looks?” “He said he was a doc-.” “He was a reporter for Christ’s sake!” I flipped through the pages of the diary. I didn’t want to read them; I just wanted to feel the paper under my fingers. I wanted to feel something real. “I don’t think we’re being fair to her.” “Fair? Fair? How is thisfair to anybody? ‘Clones are people too: a shocking investigative report into G.A.S — what they don’t want you to know about replacing your loved ones.’” The creaking sound of bedsprings. Sara’s father’s voice was low and even. “I would never have agreed if I’d known it would be like this.” “Oh, sure,” Sara’s mother retorted. “You say that now. After you were the one who said we had to bring her home like she is. ‘Give her a chance,’ you said.” “This isn’t right,” he said. “That girl in there is not my daughter. That’s not right. We should have made them bring her back right, not take the “That girl in there is not my daughter. That’s not right. We should have made them bring her back right, not take the closest they could make. You tell me how getting G.A.S. sued is going to help anybody! If they get shut down, then we’ll never get Sara back. Don’t you care?” “I care more than you do.” His voice went up in pitch, raising with his anger. I closed the diary and held it so tightly that I could feel the corners of the cover digging into my skin. “That’s news to me! You just wanted to bury her and give up!” The bed creaked again. Someone standing? “We should have!” I heard their door slam, and heavy footsteps down the hall. A pause, and then the front door slammed, louder. And silence fell over the house. I crept out from the closet. I climbed into the bed and slid the diary under my pillow. I was about to turn the lights out when the doorknob turned, and Sara’s mother came in. Her eyes were red, probably from crying. I thought of what Benjamin had said, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to make her happy. She crossed the room to me, bent to kiss me softly on my forehead. She smelled like sickly orange perfume. I wanted to wave her away from me, but I settled for clutching the blue and white comforter in my hands. “Goodnight, honey,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll bring you back to the Center and they’ll put your memories back.” She tried to pull the blankets up to my chin, but I held them down with tight fingers. She gave up and turned the light out, felt her way back to the door. I waited until she was silhouetted in the doorway and then I said, “Sara’s dead, Mom.” # We reach the Center at mid-day, but we don’t go through the front doors. I feel like a fugitive, hurried out of the car and into the back door. I ask why we’re going that way, but Doctor Camille doesn’t answer. She leaves me in a little room with plastic toys for children much younger than I am, and magazines that nobody likes enough to steal. I pick up an orange plastic block that says “B” on the side just to have something in my hands. I can feel the imperfect seam left by the mold it was made in. I worry at it, running my finger over the rough plastic edge over and over. After a long time, Doctor Camille comes back. She’s changed her clothes and looks like a doctor again, and she waves for me to follow her through the double doors. “We’re ready for you,” she says. # I woke in the morning, as soon as the sun hit my second floor window and filtered pink through the Venetian blinds. At first I didn’t want to get out of bed. I flipped over onto my stomach, twisting around under the blankets. I pulled the diary out from under my pillow and turned it to the last page. I unclipped the pen and pulled the cap off. The end of the pen was warped with the indentations of Sara’s teeth. I realized then that I didn’t know what I wanted to write. “Dear Diary,” I started, and I crossed it out. Sara never started her entries like that. She just started with a date, so I wrote that in underneath the crossed-out salutation. “Sara,” I wrote. My handwriting looked nothing like hers. It was jagged in all the wrong places. “I was you for a week. I wasn’t very good at it. I’m sorry.” I looked at it for a while, watched the gel ink dry. I signed it, “Me.” I looked at it for a while, watched the gel ink dry. I signed it, “Me.” I snuck out the back door while the rest of the house still slept, tiptoeing through the yard. I ran when I got to the trees. # I wait. I lie on clean sheets and a plastic mask covers my mouth and nose. The lights dim to a soft red glow, and Doctor Camille rests one cool gloved hand on my forehead. She starts to count down from ten. I close my eyes. I don’t know who I’ll be when I open them. I’m scared. <<<>>>

Escape Pod 330, originally released on February 2, 2012 Download audio Read by Mur Lafferty Originally appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author Devour By Ferrett Steinmetz

“I want some water,” Sergio says. The bicycle chains clank as he strains to put his feet on the floor. Sergio designed his own restraints. He had at least fifteen plumbers on his payroll who could have installed the chains – but Sergio’s never trusted anything he didn’t build with his own hands. So he deep-drilled gear mounts into our guest room’s floral wallpaper, leaving me to string greased roller chains through the cast-iron curlicues of the canopy bed. “You’re doing well, Bruce,” he lied, trying to smile – but his lips were already desiccated, pulled too tight at the edges. Not his lips at all. I slowed him down; I had soft lawyer’s hands, more used to keyboards than Allen wrenches. Yet we both knew it would be the last time we could touch each other. So I asked for help I didn’t need, and he took my hands in his to guide the chains through what he referred to as “the marionette mounts.”

Then he sat on the bed and held out his wrists while I snapped the manacles on – the chamois lining was my idea – and we kissed. It was a long, slow kiss that needed to summarize thirty-two years of marriage. And it should have been comforting, but his mouth was a betrayal. His lips had resorbed from their lush plumpness. His tongue had withdrawn to a stub. His kiss still sent flutters down my spine. I pressed my hands against his back, moving towards making love, but Sergio pushed me away. ”We don’t know how transmissible this is,” he said. Then he tugged on the chains to verify he could lie down and sit up, but not leave the bed. I pressed the keys into his palm, trying to burn the feeling of his skin into mine forever. He snipped the keys in half with a bolt-cutter, then flung it all into the corner. “That’s that,” he said, and rolled away from me to cry. My arms ached - still ache – from not being able to hold him. Six days later, I’m still here. And Sergio is still leaving. “I want some water,” he repeats now. Louder, more insistent. Too angry to be really Sergio. “You never wanted water before,” I say, keeping a careful distance from the bed. ”You like orange juice.” Sergio tries to put his head in his hands. The chains pull him short. “For Christ’s sake, Bruce,” he says. ”I’m dying. There are going to be changes.” “Yes,” I say guardedly. ”There are.” “And it’s apple cider I like. In a chilled glass. From the local guao yan, no, orchard – and not that sugared crap you like. Don’t try to trick me, okay? It’s just insulting to.” He almost says to us, but then shudders. “I’m not going to do anything crazy with water,” he begs. ”I can’t turn it into. what’s the word? Flamethrowers. It’s water. I’m just. thirsty. I’ll fight with you about the things that matter, but. “Just get me some damn water!” he barks. I stare at him, knowing the old Sergio never yelled, wondering how much is left. Because I can see the traces of a young Sergio within the thing trapped in the four-poster right now. Sergio always Because I can see the traces of a young Sergio within the thing trapped in the four-poster right now. Sergio always had that perfect, youthful mix of good cheekbones and lean muscle. Now, his thighs and biceps are swollen like a hormone-stuffed steer – but aside from that, Sergio would be the envy of any plastic surgeon. His crow’s feet have been pulled from his skin, his collagen replenished. His hair, once a brilliant mane of salt-and-pepper curls, has turned a lank black at the roots. It looks like some horrid dye job grown out, all that silver dangling from ends of Patient Zero’s flat, dark strands. It makes me feel old. I am old – but even back when we’d first started dating, my colleagues always mistook me for his father – a constant humiliation. Sergio never flinched; instead, he squeezed my ass and asked, “Have you met my sugar daddy?” I hated that. It made him look like a whore, and he wasn’t. He used the money from his plumbing company to support me proudly, even though I was a sucker for pro bono cases that drove him batty. ”I never knew you had such a soft spot for hookers,” he’d joke. ”It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, knowing you love murderers, smack addicts, and me.” Then he’d look down into his beer bottle, and add: “But if it makes you happy, I’ll unclog every pipe in the Bronx to keep you funded.” “Do you even know how to fit a pipe collar?” I ask the Sergio on the bed. He shakes his head. ”You put – cement around it. Screw it into the next joint, I think. Can you stop the fucking examination and get me a goddamned drink?” Then he adds a muttered “Please,” and I see his humiliation. Sergio was infamous among my protestor buddies for his “handouts weaken both the giver and the receiver” tirades. Now he’s reduced to begging for water. So I walk down the spiral stairs to the kitchen, feeling battered by gaiety. We crammed our summer home with bright colors, festive nooks, sunny windows, making it the perfect escape from our sedate brownstone in Brooklyn – we hired caterers to fuel our infamous week-long summer fiestas, attended by all our friends. Now it seems like a brass band crashing through a Protestant funeral. I return and toss him a bottle of Andronico’s Distilled. He gulps it down gratefully. “Give me back the bottle,” I say. He crushes it into a curl of plastic. I glance at the chains: Sergio told me they had a tensile strength of 8,000 pounds. Is that enough? “I’m not a child, Bruce,” he snaps. ”You could ask respectfully. A man deserves jing yi hsi lao tu!” “I don’t know what the rules are, Serge,” I apologize. ”I can’t let you keep anything. If you. you’re wrong about what’s dangerous for you to have, and you. and I’m gone, then – then who’s going to handle your calls from the plumbing company?” His forehead, ridged with new protective bones, creases into a frown. It’s an argument to both sides, so I wait, knowing how many thoughts are in his brain now; he has to sort through them to figure out which ones are his. “That’s. reasonable,” he concludes, ashamed. ”Su liao. My quiet apologies.” He licks the bottle. “The water,” he says. ”It tastes different.” “It’s distilled, Serge. There’s nothing to it.” “I know that. But. I’m tasting top notes. Copper and manganese. And.” His face reddens. ”When I swallow, it gurgles in different ways – water sloshing down new pipes.” He laughs, weakly. ”Can I try one thing? Please? I swear, I will give you the bottle after this.” I nod, hating myself. I shouldn’t trust him. But how can I not? I still see Sergio. He grips the crushed plastic in one hand like it’s a microphone on karaoke night – but instead of bursting into his usual rendition of “I Will Survive,” he tears the top of the bottle off with sharklike teeth. The shredded edges dig into his lips. The plastic makes a horrid crinkling noise as a fist-sized chunk peristalts down his gullet. Then he looks at me, his distorted features a muddle of emotions; the satisfaction of a man who’s just had the meal he’s been longing for, the horror of knowing what that meal is. He drools blood and saliva on the shredded bottle. He slowly pulls it away from his mouth, then tosses it to me. “Don’t get near me,” he whimpers. ”Don’t go.” “I won’t.” Tears sting my eyes. ”I’ll stay until the last of you is. is…” “Absorbed.” He lets out a sob, then turns away from me, ashamed, hugging himself. He falls asleep instantly, exhausted from the transformation. “Please be a bad strain,” I whisper. ”Please. Mutate out of existence. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?” I lean against the blankets I’ve pushed against the wall and try to sleep. Mercifully, I dream of Sergio. # “You’re serving vegetables at a Living Will party?” said the man with the centaur tattoo, looking down at the Tupperware tray of broccoli in my hands. “How morbidly appropriate.” My dreams are bolt-holes these days; the only way I can get through this is to keep dredging up my best memories. And this one’s my finest treasure - the day I met Sergio. “If you like, you can do shots through the feeding tubes on the dining table,” I reply, glancing over; predictably, all the single guys are showing off by deep-throating the tubes and then pouring buttershots down. ”I figure that if I have to make the community deal with the realities of a spreading Gonorrhea-3, an upswell of assaults by fundie Levitikites, and New York’s chronic inability to acknowledge same-sex partnerships, I might as well make it fun.” “It was destined to be fun,” he says, giving me that lush-lipped grin. ”You come to a party where guys want doctors to pull their plug once they get a head cold, you know you’re finding men who give up easy.” He winks. I let the crowd keep bumping us into each other. His flannel shirt-sleeves are rolled down, nearly covering a magnificent Grecian centaur tattoo – and his smile is purest charm, a swarthy Cary Grant. The banter makes me feel like Hepburn. “So did you get your Living Will?” I ask. I don’t quite dare to place my hand on his shoulder to steer him towards the display. ”There’s a stack of samples in the corner.” “As much as I’m longing for you to witness me, I don’t think you have a contract to fit me.” “So you’re immortal? You don’t need a plan for death?” The room darkens. His lips shrink a little, revealing jagged teeth. That’s just the dream, though, foreshadowing. “Oh, fuck, I wish.” He laughs. ”All your wills there end in ‘When things get bad, cut me off.’ Fuck that. I don’t care if all that’s left of me is a pinky finger – I want that digit hooked up to the best life support system in the world, with a team of hot male nurses urging that nail to grow. There’s no God, nothing but this life, so my damn family can spend themselves broke – just keep me in the game, guys. You got a Living Will like that for me, uh..?” “Bruce,” I say – and as I juggle the tray to extend my hand, it’s him again, so beautiful and strong. ”And yes, I both can and should write you a will. Because your loved ones should know that you’re a selfish jackass who doesn’t care about the trauma you’ll cause them.” “So if I asked you to write me one, would that get me your number?” “Hell,” I smiled, fishing a business card from my vest pocket. ”You had that the minute you got my joke about the Living Will vegetables.” He takes the card, letting his hands brush mine in a way that I realized that this wasn’t simple flirtation, that he actually was going to call me - and the memory of his fingers on my wrist jars me from sleep. I awake to Sergio, only feet away and chained on the bed, and I remember his touch so vividly that I push my face into the blankets so I won’t wake him up as I cry. # My footsteps echo off of terracotta tiles as I pace the downstairs party areas, the couches as distant as islands in a sea. Our summer home was designed for crowds. I collapse into an overstuffed love seat to stare at our painted centaur murals. They’re galloping between Greek arches, dancing under the stars. Sergio loved centaurs. He’d pledged at Delta Lambda Phi, and even though he’d dropped out of college shortly afterwards, the Lambda centaurs had stayed with him. ”They’re in touch with their nature,” he said, “They can’t deny they’re beasts. But they master that to become something greater.” But as I look at the wilding centaurs, I see them for what they are; full men, being swallowed by the gullet of a headless equine. Their smiles have revealed themselves to be terrified rictuses as the fur creeps up their bellies, gobbling their human skin; their dances are frenzied contortions as the human torsos wave their arms in vain struggles to free themselves, the horse-halves galloping madly to befuddle them. They thrust their hands high into the air, knowing the infected DNA below their waist wants to fuse their fingers into hooves. I flee to my office, where the walls are bedecked with framed newspaper clippings. There I am, condemning the bombing of China. There I am, leading peace rallies. There I am, organizing the tenth anniversary candlelight vigil for the dead of Pittsburgh, Laramie, Tampa. There I am, an absolute fool in everything I ever did. I hear Sergio talking upstairs, and as always I unlock the gun safe – I’d fought against the damn thing, but Sergio needed his protection – and take the rifle into my hands, trying to envision how I’ll do it. I’ll slip my finger into this trigger. I’ll rest this barrel against his forehead. I’ll shoot, when the time is right. When is the right time to kill your husband? I put the gun away. Sergio’s muttering to himself in a glossolalia of English and Chinese, a smeared mixture of himself and Patient Zero. And I ask myself the question that millions of families wondered: Who is the man devouring my husband? Damn you, I think. My husband’s dying, but you? You’re immortal. Lurking in long-abandoned septic tanks for unsuspecting plumbers to find – all you need is one breath through a cracked HEPA filter, and you’re alive again. “They should have bombed all of China,” I mutter. “Bruce?” “That’s me.” I force a smile. ”Your ever-lovin’ husband.” “I forget you when you leave,” he says. ”I can’t remember things.” “That’s okay, sweetie,” I whisper. ”It’s fine.” “No. It’s not. There’s going to come a point when it’s not me. I’ll be gone. And I don’t know when that is. And if “No. It’s not. There’s going to come a point when it’s not me. I’ll be gone. And I don’t know when that is. And if I spend my last moment in existence looking at a fucking wall before I wink out and not – not seeing the man I loved, then – well, it doesn’t matter, really. It’s so fucking selfish – I’ll be dead a second later, vanished to nothing, and it’s stupid, but I don’t want my last sight to be a wall. I want it to be you.” “So I’ll stay.” I try to make it sound easy. “I owned. a plumbing company, right?” he asks. ”There were. watchguards in my profession. Government monitors, checking my staff for – for infection. How much time do we have?” I stiffen. A muddled Sergio might ask that. but it’s also the kind of data the thing he’s becoming would need to know. Answer no questions, the emergency bulletins had said. The cancer is a convincing actor. “I don’t know,” I say. ”How long do you have?” He slumps, disappointed. ”Bruce, use your head. The Chinks didn’t get James Bond for this – this Patient Zero crap. He’s just another hick zealot who volunteered for a, for a suicide mission – I remember watching my, his buddies breaking out in tumors as they injected them and locked them in cages, hoping maybe one of this next batch would turn into a biosoldier and not just a heap of leaking organs.” “Bruce, it’s okay – you don’t have to -” “No! He didn’t fucking eat, eat plastic, he ate turtle casseroles. Noodles. They turned him, me, into a fucking monster, this snarl-toothed hulk that needed to eat recyclables to feed his unbreakable bones, something where his own wife would have shrieked if she’d seen him. And once they’d made him into a killing machine, they fucking killed him, Bruce. They threw his body into a blender and made it infectious, but he was dead long before they figured out how to cancerize him. And now he has to eat his way out of people’s brains just to figure out where he is. “He doesn’t know how long it takes. He barely understands he’s here, Bruce. Every time I close my eyes I think I’m still in China, tugging at my cage’s bars with distorted monster-arms, wondering why the hell they haven’t shipped me to America. And then some part of me remembers America won the war a decade ago and I just want to tear everything apart, and it’s my rage, my anger.” I reach out to hold him. Patient Zero grabs my arm. It yanks me towards the bed, having lured me in. But some part of Sergio rebels: his feet shove against the soft mattress, smashing his forehead into the cast-iron frame of the four-poster. Blood spurts. Patient Zero lets go, cursing in Chinese. “You’ve got a week at most, you stupid fucker!” I rub my bruised wrist. “He was due for his monthly physical last Thursday! The CDC-P’s probably got a biohazard team at on our doorstep in Long Island – and then they’ll come here! Every agent in the CDC-P is looking for you, and I am going to see you amputated!” Patient Zero dissolves back into Sergio, crying low and hard. Or is it him? “Baby, please,” I plead. ”Don’t cry. I’m not yelling at you, I’m yelling at – it.” “I know that,” he says. ”I’m losing it, Bruce. My memories are all slurred - ” “I’ll be your memory, Sergio,” I plead. ”Just tell me what you forgot. I’ll tell you how it was.” He tugs on the chains so he doesn’t start clawing at his skin. The canopy bed creaks under the strain. “I have all these memories of you,” he whispers, “As a stupid hippie peacenik.” I open my mouth, but find no reply. “But here you are!” Sergio laughs crazily. ”You’re just like me, wanting to burn China. But it’s – it’s trying to convince me you’re one of those asshole protestors. Why would I have fallen in love with some stupid moonbat?” I shiver, thinking of all the fights we’d had over those goddamned peace rallies. “It’s changing both of us, sweetie,” I say, sagging against the wall. ”It’s changing everything.” # Sergio is screaming. He’s thrashing on the bed, chains jangling, flopping like a fish in a net. “Cramps!” he gasps, vibrating with anguish. ”Everything’s seizing up, Jesus, Bruce, it huuuuuuurts – ” I can’t touch him. “It’s – it’s growth pains, baby.” His centaur tattoo is stretching like taffy. ”All those new muscles – ” But I know what’s happening: Zero knows I won’t give it plastic. And so it’s accelerating the process, daring me to let Sergio die before it’s born. “I’m on fire, my legs, God, everything’s burning – ” shrieks Sergio, and I’m running downstairs to grab cans of peaches and TV dinners. It bites through frozen peas and tray alike, mashing them between ceramic teeth. When it’s done, it collapses onto the bed with a cocky smile that’s not Sergio’s. I curl up against the blankets I’ve pushed against the wall, ashamed. I’m negotiating with terrorists. I’m desperate for vengeance. I’m everything I ever hated. “A Republican’s not just a Democrat who got mugged,” I whisper. I want Sergio argue like we used to – but he’s too far gone to rise to that old bait. We always joked that our best foreplay was arguing. But he was furious at me for organizing peace rallies once the war started. “They watched their mothers’ eyes melt in Pittsburgh,” he said, planting his finger in the middle of my chest. ”In Laramie, their uncles mutated into killing machines that ate their children. And you’re telling them they’re selfish for wanting revenge?” My head was bandaged. They’d flung bottles. “We’re not without sin here, Serge,” I’d said. ”Our funding of resistance groups in Hong Kong? Our economic sanctions that starved their children? The blockade of Hebei province…?” “So you’re saying it’s our fault? Jesus, no wonder they tried to lynch you.” “I’m saying it didn’t come from nowhere. And they failed, Sergio. They didn’t win.” “Tell that to Tampa.” He walked away, too angry to talk. Later, he came back and bumped the top his head against my shoulder, our traditional method of asking for a hug. I put my arm around him. “You’ve been reading those dead family blogs again, haven’t you?” “I swear,” he grumbled, nuzzling me, “I don’t even know why I stay with you sometimes.” We made slow, mournful love – our own private vigil. Conjoined, we mourned separate things. Conjoined, we mourned separate things. Sure, I felt that same gut-quivering terror whenever I heard the buzz of a Chinese drone – but I would not fall prey to fear. Instead, I organized candlelight vigils for the dead cities. And because I refused to be terrorized, I alone seemed to realize what historians would dutifully tally later: China’s bio-invasion hadn’t worked. Sure, they bombarded American airspace, flying under our missile-shields with millions of lightwing drones – little more than high-tech bottle rockets, carrying payloads designed to overwrite people’s DNA. But aside from a handful of notorious successes, China’s war was the textbook example of how unfeasible targeted bioweapons were. Switching a country to a biowarfare footing is nigh-impossible. Ask your average sweatshop T-shirt maker to create weaponized DNA clusters, and that poor bastard isn’t going to create quality fibrotic nodules. And the payload was a one-shot, no more transmissible than an actual cancer; if you didn’t inhale it, the DNA fragmented after twenty minutes in sunlight. I had charts that showed if the Chinese had gone in with a barrage of nukes to overwhelm our shields, it would have led to far greater loss of life. Sure, when the clone-cancers worked, they were hideous – literal home-grown terrorists with Patient Zero’s hatred and the infected’s home-town knowledge. They were smart enough to destroy Pittsburgh’s unguarded chemical plants, to drive fuel trucks into Laramie’s shop. Yet every success brought a thousand failures. Though the cancer overwrote the infected’s DNA with Patient Zero’s, most lay down and died. Sergio spent hours looking at the photo-blogs devoted to the immobile dead; he’d spammed the links to everyone on his social networks. Each blog was the same, done in somber black, lacking commentary; they didn’t need it. Each showed families piled on their beds, pictures taken by CDC-P epidemiologists before they burned the buildings to cauterize any lingering payloads; a mother’s slack limbs draped protectively around her daughters, her husband fused to her back. Mother, daughter, husband, and son had the same face, their features distorted to match one man: Patient Zero. China never released his name, but America knew his features all too well. They’d seen a thousand corpses stamped with his black eyes. I couldn’t look at the tribute sites. There was something too disturbing about seeing three children with the skin of their faces tugged askew like Saran Wrap, piled up on their Buzz Lightyear bedspread. Their toys were still on the floor, the curtains burning. When people threw rocks at us during the peace rallies, they brandished those photos. Not the furious mutant murderers who’d truck-bombed Laramie - just those tumored, unmoving dead. I tried to tell Sergio that bombs were more efficient; that particular horror was just tried and tested, is all. And despite China raining 18% of its GDP down on America, their biowar killed only a few hundred thousand. “Only,” Sergio said. In the end, thanks to heavy international pressure, America fired only three retaliatory nuclear strikes – “Only,” I said – one for each of our dead cities. We incinerated millions of Chinese, and brought not one American back from the dead. Nobody minded. Because as Sergio’s right-wing blogs loved to remind everyone, we can’t kill China now. As long as there’s an unfound biowarfare cache, forgotten at the bottom of some unnoticed bombing site, at least one Chinaman can always return. He is, as they say, infinitely Patient. I look at my lover, subsumed in our guest bed. The men who did this to him are dead. And still, I want to scoop their ashes from radioactive rivers and breathe life back into them, just so I can slit their throats. He opens his eyes, now droplet black, and the horror of Sergio snaps every nerve in my body to “on.” I clap my hands over my mouth to muffle my screams. Maybe Sergio was right. Maybe nobody who truly felt this could be rational. Or maybe, I think, I just need to fucking start practicing what I’ve preached. “You didn’t know,” I mutter to Sergio’s infection. ”They made you into a weapon. You couldn’t choose not to devour him even if you wanted to. It’s not your fault.” Sergio gives me a cold, curious look: a bird sizing up prey. “I forgive you,” I say. Sergio – Patient Zero – narrows his eyes. Does he understand? He smiles, a tight-lipped mockery of Sergio’s sunny grin, then looks hopelessly confused. It doesn’t matter. This isn’t a real forgiveness; it’s a proof of concept. My hands are still eager to grab the rifle. Yet I promised I would be there to see the last of Sergio, and oh God I’m too weak to forgive. If I really wanted to reassure the thing on the bed, I’d tell it that I lied. Sure, Sergio missed his Thursday check-in – and in the days after Laramie, showing up a week late for a screening might have inspired hysteria. But it’s been eleven years. Somewhere, a bureaucrat at the CDC-P is shooting Sergio another email. They’re threatening him with fines; another week, and they might send a cop out to knock on our door. Our only rescue is locked inside the gun cabinet. # Days pass. I curl up in a nest of sweaty blankets and pee-filled plastic jugs by the doorway, terrified to leave. What if he cries out for the last time and I’m not there? Still, I keep sneaking downstairs to get the rifle from the safe, taking it out and putting it back. It’ll get easier as the end approaches, I think. It must. Because when I glimpse Sergio out of the corner of my eye, I don’t even register him as human; he’s a blistered monkey, a man made from Tinker Toys. The tattoo spirals around his arm like a stripe around a barber’s pole. Then it curls up in the bed, hugging itself, and all I can see is Sergio. There isn’t much left, though. Patient Zero stares out most of the time. It peers at me over and over again, frowning in concentration, as though it hopes to find some clue that will clarify things. “Wi yooz to make luuuuve,” it says in a thick accent, flashing me the disgusted look that Sergio gave me whenever I dragged him to the opera. “Yes,” I whisper. ”We did.” “But yaw a man.” It sniffs in disgust. “Did it matter? You know everything we had. I dare you to tell me it was wrong.” I meet its gaze full-on. It eases back onto the bed. “A man,” it gurgles, staring at the ceiling, chains rattling as it scratches Sergio’s thigh. Sometimes, Sergio emerges in stages, like a cloud blocking the sun. I can always tell because when Sergio arises because he jolts awake, then stares in horror at his spadelike hands. “It’s my fault,” he sobs. ”I should have, have, changed that filter every month – I was cutting costs.” “They were expensive,” I assure him. “It was one fucking filter. The war was over. If I’d known, I would have bought a thousand filters so you wouldn’t have to – to – ” “I’m fine,” I lie. ”Don’t worry about me.” “I’m just so scared, Bruce. Sometimes I wake up and I remember this beautiful girl, and she’s kissing me, and she’s married to me – her skin is all wrong, I don’t like it, but I do. And then I open my eyes, and, and I see you, and I don’t know who you are except that I know you love me. You love me. And I realize that I’m already dead - if I forget you, there’s nothing to live for.” “That’s why I’m here, Sergio. I’ll be here, until, until…” “Kill me.” The room’s temperature drops ten degrees. “What did you say?” “Kill me. Please. I’m just making it worse for you. That’s not – love - just end me. I’ll go. It’s okay. I’ll be – well, I won’t be fine, I’ll be nothing, but maybe that’s better.” “Sergio, if you’re not -” “Don’t draw it out, goddammit!” he yells, rubbing clawlike knuckles against wet cheeks. ”I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but. I want to live. I’m terrified of being nothing, but hurting you is worse than nothing. Just do it while I’m still me.” I go downstairs to the gun cabinet for the last time. My hands are numb. They shake as I load it. I look around; the centaurs still have their hands in the air. But now they’re holding them up in surrender, giving way to the man with the gun. When I return, Sergio has braced himself against the canopy, holding himself in place for an easy shot. “Look at me when you do it,” he pleads. ”Let you. be the last thing I see..” The rifle has the weight of thirty years. At the end of the barrel, Sergio gives me a brave smile that quivers with fear. “It’s all right,” he whispers. ”I love you.” There’s strength in those words. Such strength. I put down the gun. “Bruce – no.” I climb into the bed. He tries to shove me away, but he doesn’t mean it; he could tear me in half if he wanted. Instead, I crawl across the stained blankets to the greatest love of my life, and I bump my head against his shoulder. “I can’t hold him back forever, Bruce – please, shoot me – ” But I slide my arms underneath his, feeling my palms bump over the knurls on his spine, and pull him close. He hugs me back with love, such ineffable love. “Take your time,” I say. I bury my face in the hollows of his throat. Patient Zero’s vinegary stench fills my nostrils – but I nuzzle him closer and smell flannel shirts, New York apartments with broken air conditioners. He rubs my back, foreign hands with a familiar touch. “I can’t,” he apologizes, his grip weakening. ”I can’t hold him.” “I can’t,” he apologizes, his grip weakening. ”I can’t hold him.” “Sssh,” I say, kissing his neck. ”Let go.” He does. # I keep my cheek pressed against Sergio’s forehead, stroking his black hair. His scent is gone. I should call the CDC-P and let the professionals handle this. But I promised I wouldn’t leave. So I will spend my last moments whispering in this thing’s ear in the hopes that Sergio will not spend his last moment in the universe alone. and then Patient Zero will tear me to ribbons. It stirs, an anxious child waking from a nightmare. I tense. I pray he’ll be quick. “It should have been someone else,” Sergio says, his voice thick with a regret that is not Sergio’s at all. Patient Zero clamps me against its chest. “A million times,” it says in accented English, rocking back and forth. ”A million failures. If I’d been stronger, I would have destroyed you all, my wife would be alive.” “I don’t.” But as it drags me back down to the bed, I realize: It’s hugging me. “I knew how bad Americans were,” it says, its thin lips brushing against my ear as it tells me its secret. ”I heard the cries of the starving young in Zhanjiang. Make me a cancer to devour those soulless bastards, I said. Break me into the smallest parts you can; I will eat my way out of them, then feast on their children.” It coughs, spraying out red mist. I can feel its body shutting itself down, just as it sped itself up. “They wanted me to have Sergio’s memories.” Vinegar tears dot alien eyes. “They wanted me to have the combination to his gun safe, his customers’ addresses. But I got you, too. And how could I kill you then? How could I kill anyone? “I saw his memories.” It closes its eyes, sinking into the bed. ”Those families, dying. That’s me, lying down, me in each of them and giving up. I can’t fight all the love in the world, I just can’t.” Patient Zero brings up one hand to claw at his eyes, grimacing in self-hatred – but already, he’s too weak to move. “Go,” he says bitterly, releasing me. I look at what used to be Sergio, and is now something else; a ghost in stolen skin, a hunter doomed to love his prey. A secret the United States burned whole towns to hide. Its resemblance to Sergio is faint, nothing more than an interpretive sketch – but even the parts that aren’t Sergio now seem beautiful. I nestle in to the arms of the man who devoured my husband, offering forgiveness. “I said go,” he barks. Instead, I hug him. He crumples into me. The failed weapon cries, pressing his face to my chest as he laments everything he never was. I hold him until he’s gone. # Later on, I bury Sergio and Zero in the back yard. I’m okay that they share a grave. <<<>>> <<<>>> Escape Pod 331, originally released on February 9, 2012 Download audio Read by Dave Thompson An Escape Pod Original Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author Overclocking by James L. Sutter

They’re waiting for him when he comes out of the tank. Whether plainclothes or just another pair of clockers, he can’t quite tell, but the way they avoid looking in his direction tips him off in a heartbeat. When Ari Marvel walks by, you look. They start drifting idly in his direction, and that clinches things. Reaching down into the lining of his pocket, Ari palms the whole batch and trails his hand over the edge of the bridge railing. The brittle grey modsticks crumble with ease, and by the time the two have dropped their cover and made the sting he’s moved smoothly into position, hands against the brick and legs spread wide. The pigs don’t even thank him for being so efficient. The patdown’s rougher than necessary, but after a minute they throw their hoods back up and move off down the street. Ari runs his hands through his faded blue-green spikes, then takes the stairs down to the tube. A beginner might have lingered at the railing and thought about all the time and money now floating down the culvert, but Ari doesn’t look back. Necessary expenditures. Expected losses. It’s just business, baby. # Back at the pad, Maggie’s waiting by the door. She looks like hell: hair in ratty dreads, shirt stained with god- knows-what. Crust in her eyes. “Hey, Ari,” she says. Ari slides his keycard into the lock, checking first to see if the hair he put over the swipestripe has been moved. Still there. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s been there, of course–just that if they have been, they’re good enough that there’s no point in worrying about it. You win some, you lose some. Inside, it looks like he’s won. Maggie plops down on the couch, worrying a hangnail that’s started to bleed. Her foot taps on the coffee table. “Hey,” she says again. He drops his coat onto the chair and moves into the kitchen to get a soda. She picks up the remote and begins flipping rapidly through the channels, then turns the set off again. Eventually he leaves the can on the counter and comes back into the living room, sitting down on the coffee table across from her and taking her hands. “Maggie, look at me.” She does–or, at least, as well as she’s able to at this point. “I’m only going to say this once. You’re welcome to crash here, but you’re not getting a fix. I won’t have that in my house. You understand?” She nods–those wide doe eyes the color of egg yolk–then goes back to gnawing at her thumb. He stands and leaves her there, entering the bedroom and closing the door. Once it’s locked, he jimmies loose the bottom drawer of the dresser and flips a wad of sweaty bills into the crudely carved hollow. Then he drops fully clothed onto the mattress and covers his eyes with his forearm, blocking out the ruddy afternoon light that still filters in through heavy curtains. Out in the apartment, he can hear her moving about restlessly. He’s doing it again. It doesn’t matter that he knows how it’ll end, that he knows how it _has_ ended more than once. It’s simply a given: she’ll show up. He’ll let her in. Things will proceed accordingly. He bears down with his arm until the muted red of his eyelids turns to black, and then to stars. The worst of it is that even through the filth, he can still see her. Inside the shell of those dreads, her hair is still gold verging on white, so fine as to be almost intangible. Behind the bruises and bags, her eyes would still crinkle upward if she smiled. And if he opened his arms, she might still flow into them like water, sparkling and warm and full of life. Ari is not a stupid man, but Maggie is an exception. Eyes clenched tight, Ari curls up on his side and falls asleep. # Any idiot with a fifth-grade education can get into it. If X is the price you pay for the product and Y is the cash you get from the girl-boys and junkies down on Madison, how many hits do you have to sell to earn one for yourself? Simple algebra. The problem is that so few people get beyond that phase. Buy the goods from a lifer like Mickey or C.T., sell enough to pay for the rest, then get blasted in an alley or flophouse and hope the pigs don’t raid until you come down. That’s the killer, right there–as soon as you stick that junk in your head, your profit margin drops immediately to zero. Do not pass Go. Ari knew better. Where small-time boys like C.T. were just middlemen, Ari cut straight from the source code. Where Mickey would drop his stash and run at the sight of a pig, Ari tied his shoe and made the product disappear, only to have it back in his pocket by the time they rounded the corner. It was an art and a science, but always– _always_–a business. # It’s eight o’clock and she looks better, if one corpse can look better than another. Head back and mouth wide, snores threaten to shake apart her tiny frame. Setting his gear down, Ari gently takes the hand trailing onto the carpet and lays it across her chest, scrawny and thin as a prepubescent boy’s. She doesn’t even stir. He moves past her into the bedroom. Slipping on a pair of thick glasses he’d never be caught dead in on the street, he unfolds the laptop and sets up shop. With the software loading, he spools up the burner and busts out a package of generic modsticks. Cheap, easy, and infinitely upgradable, whatever’s on sale at the pharmacy is usually fine. Tonight it’s anti-flu mods. He checks the make and model, then logs into the company’s network remotely and anonymously, sliding past the firewalls and into the secure servers. Back in the day, this would have been an all-night affair, chugging coffee and stayawakes as crack after crack failed to breach the infrastructure. Now it’s down to a simple login–as long as he never shifts stuff around, the nanoceutical corporations never notice him. A ghost among giants. Once the modstick’s code downloads, he begins the real work: slicing and fusing lines, carefully reprogramming to remove certain safety features and incorporate his own. It’s more than just tripping the right biochemical switches– there are the secondary effects, the sweet afterglow that gives his mods the edge over everyone else’s. For a minute, he forgets about the business and lets himself be carried away by the beauty of it, the purity. Just code. No junkies. No pigs. No cash. Just code. He inserts the first stick and cues the burner. # Cutting was everything. Amidst all the bullshit, the simple act of cutting was the one part of school that Ari truly enjoyed, and it showed. Time and again the teachers would hold up his latest creations and ask why he couldn’t apply the same level of commitment to, say, physics or history. How was he supposed to explain it to them? They might appreciate his code, but that didn’t mean they understood it. When one of them uploaded a bioexe, they saw expediency. Function. Utility. They never saw it in the way that he made it. Codecutting was _art_. Efficiency wasn’t enough–it had to be elegant. He’d been nicked jacking the editing software from the educational consoles, but that was only to be expected. He wasn’t a hacker like the petty script kiddies that filled the labs, joyriding across systems and leaving their graffiti everywhere. For him, hacking was a means to an end, and once he’d hidden the backups he handed over the software and did his time in juvie like a man. At eighteen the smear was wiped from his record, and Ari “Marvel” software and did his time in juvie like a man. At eighteen the smear was wiped from his record, and Ari “Marvel” Magnusson was free from the stigma of youthful indiscretion. God bless America. # It’s not like he was doing anything immoral. The nanoceuticals you bought at the store already ripped you apart and reformatted you according to their programming. He just removed limitations, changed objectives. Where a conventional nanocyte loaded with a bioexe might give you improved defenses against the common cold, his offered voluntary control of adrenal glands and fat storage. The ability to control involuntary muscles and speed up reaction times, to stop smoking or orgasm at will–Ari gave you all of it, and for a reasonable fee. It was amazing what circumventing the FDA made possible. It was the voluntary serotonin reuptake inhibitors that paid the bills, of course. The happy sticks. Cut the brain’s natural ability to reabsorb the right chemicals, and pretty soon your frontal lobes are floating in a euphoria cocktail. Add in the ability to switch the effect on and off at will, and pharmacological drugs start to look as barbaric as leechings and lobotomies. Like all modsticks, bliss hacks were a temporary fix–cells produced that way were invariably mules, incapable of normal reproduction beyond the nanocyte’s activation. Once the program ran its course, half a million years of cell memory took over again and things went back to normal. For the anti-cancer sticks or the athletic performance upgrades, that was usually that. The bliss kids, however, were another story. Use often enough, and your body forgets exactly where it left your natural set point, leaving you with a full-on case of the jones: sweating, shaking, mood swings–the whole nine yards. Addiction, baby, of a purity not seen since the opiate days. By itself, binging and jonesing was mostly harmless–as long as you had another mod headed your way, you could keep going indefinitely. Some of the rich kids–and their parents–did just that, blissing out to a ripe old age. The problem was always the cash. Bio hacks were _expensive_–maybe you started out buying top-grade stuff like Ari’s, but once the need got its claws into you, standards started to shift. You started to take what you could get, and sooner or later a clocker slipped you some bad code. The results could be seen in doorways and gutters up and down Madison or Seventh, when they hadn’t been rounded into a public health van and whisked away to finish festering in a nice quarantine somewhere. The whole thing was beyond stupid. Ari never touched the stuff. # She’s cooking when he wakes up. From the doorway to the bedroom he can smell the eggs blackening, hear them growing crumbly and bitter on the Teflon coating. She smiles, a little shakily, but her eyes are clear and steady. The dreads are clean, and she’s found another shirt somewhere. He drops his coat and wanders into the kitchen. To his surprise, the eggs don’t look as bad as they could–as they would have, once upon a time. A pepper lies minced on the cutting board, waiting to be sacrificed to the flames. “Hey, Ari,” she says, and the smile makes her face a little rounder. She looks like she wants to say something else, but before she can he moves forward and wraps her up from behind. Her head nestles into the gap between his collarbone and neck, and their breathing slows into unison, eyes closed. Her hair smells like his shampoo. He reaches out and turns the burner down. “Thanks,” she whispers. # His first sale had him sweating bullets. What the hell was a nineteen-year-old suburban kid doing out on Madison after dark, lurking in the shadows with the crazies and the whores? The worst were the genuine clockers–leather-clad after dark, lurking in the shadows with the crazies and the whores? The worst were the genuine clockers–leather-clad punks covered in piercings that street superstition said messed with the pigs’ alloy scans. If they had known that the ‘burb rat was trying to clock, not a mark there to make a purchase, they probably would have handed him his ass in a second, but the sweat on his forehead must have convinced them he wasn’t serious competition. Honestly, Ari didn’t think he belonged there either, but cutting equipment kept getting more expensive, and delivering pizza wasn’t going to do the trick. He’d only been there half an hour when he spotted his mark–a kid his own age, in slacks and a sweater, looking even less appropriate than Ari. Sensing a kindred spirit, the boy hustled over. “Hey,” he whispered, “you holding?” Ari leaned back against the rail and did his best to play it cool, hoping the damp patches in his armpits weren’t showing. “Hell no, man,” he spat. “I’m a paperboy. What you need?” The kid thrust a fistful of notes in his direction, whispering the laughable street name of a sexual performance mod. What a lack of imagination these kids had. Ari snatched the bills. “Get out of here,” he growled. “You think I do that trash?” He shoved past the boy, hard enough to knock him over. From the mud, the kid started to protest, only to realize partway through his tirade that his right hand now held a tiny gray stick. Down the street, Ari allowed himself a quick smile. He turned the corner. A stinking mass rose up and slammed him against the wall before he could cry out. Pinned by his shoulders, all Ari could see were yellow teeth and eyes. As his breath returned, so did his focus, enough to make out the pustule- covered face an inch from his own. “Whatcha think you’re doing, boy?” The old black man pinning Ari to the wall twitched with rage and withdrawal. “You think this is fun?” Ari shook himself, and little flecks of the man’s arm came off on his shirt. He fought the urge to vomit. “Please,” he gasped. “It’s not like that. I don’t do that.” The old man pressed harder against him. “Oh, really?” he asked, sliding his diseased cheek against Ari’s, letting him feel its oozing warmth. “You think that kid out there deserves to end up like this?” “No, please, no, I–” This time Ari did retch. “I don’t do that, I’m a good cutter, clean, I wouldn’t let that happen, I- oh-please-I-god…” Tears began to leak down Ari’s face. With a final shake, the old man let him drop, and Ari stumbled forward and past, sprinting to the end of the alley before turning back. The old man sat where he’d collapsed, blood oozing from open sores where his hands had held the soft fabric of Ari’s shirt. He put his head down on his knees and wept like a baby. Ari turned and ran. # She’s not there when he gets home, but he can smell the remains of breakfast in the sink. Setting his coat down on the couch, it takes him almost an entire breath to notice that the door to the bedroom is open. Dishes clatter as his hip slams into the corner of the counter, but he doesn’t feel it, scrambling across the linoleum toward the doorway. She’s on the floor next to the computer chair, limbs twisted at strange angles by contracted muscles. He drops to his knees and puts an ear to her chest, listening for any flutter, but her skin is already cool and the drool on her cheek is a dry white trail. Her eyes are closed, face taut with a pleasure beyond bearing. “Maggie…” He wants to scream, to cry, to explain, but realizes as he opens his mouth that he has nothing to say. Instead he kneels over her bird-thin frame and cradles her head in his hands, rubbing swollen eyes through clean hair and breathing it in with each shuddering breath, as above them the computer hums softly with lines of sloppy code. breathing it in with each shuddering breath, as above them the computer hums softly with lines of sloppy code. # They’re there by the bridge again, still thinking that a jacket and dyed hair can cover up the way they carry themselves, years of pride and academy training. Ari leans back against the rail and casually scratches his groin as they approach through the crowd, feeling the modsticks in his pocket, ready to be palmed, rubbed, and dropped. Choreographed, all of it. Just a flick of his wrist, and he’s free to walk away. Every day, the same dance. He leaves the sticks where they are and moves his hand away. Up against the wall, the pig jerks in surprise at the shapes in Ari’s pocket, then slams Ari’s face against the concrete and reaches for his cuffs. A voice in the background calls it in to the station. From his place on the sidewalk, Ari stares past the railing at the gurgling water in the culvert, endlessly carrying away the grime of the city. He smiles. It’s just business, baby. <<<>>> Escape Pod 332, originally released on February 17, 2012 Download audio Read by Wilson Fowlie First appeared in Apex Magazine Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author Asteroid Monte by Craig DeLancey

“You don’t look like an omnivore.” I was supposed to spend the next several years working side-by-side with this bear monster thing from an unpronounceable planet, and the first words she speaks to me are these. “Excuse me?” “Your teeth are flat,” she hissed. “Like a herbivore’s.” I had been waiting in the tiered square outside the Hall of Harmony, main office of the Galactic police force officially called the Harmonizers, but which everyone really called the Predators. Neelee-ornor is one of those planets that makes me a believer. Cities crowd right into forests as thick as the Amazon, and both somehow thrive with riotous abandon. It proves the Galactic creed really means something. Something worth fighting for. Something that could get me to take this thankless job. So I waited to meet my partner, as I sat on a cool stone bench under a huge branch dripping green saprophytes. The air was damp but smelled, strangely, like California after the rain, when I would leave CalTech and hike into the hills. I almost didn’t want her to show, so I could sit and enjoy it. I really knew only three things about her. She had about two e-years under her belt as a Predator. She was a Sussuratian, a race of fierce bearlike carnivores evolved from predatory pack animals, only a century ahead of humanity in entering Galactic Culture. And she was named Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess. God help me. I rose awkwardly every time a Sussuratian passed, only to sit again after it walked on. Finally I gave up, and then a moment later a Sussuratian bounded out of the passing crowds, and addressed me with this comment about my eating habits. I sprung off the bench and bowed slightly. “I am Tarkos.” We were talking Galactic. But my Galactic is pretty good, really. Better than hers, I was betting. Her name, however, was a Sussuratian name, and in that language a human larynx was hopeless. Well, here goes. “I am honored to meet you Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess.” She was about six feet long, with short dark fur that had black and green and gold patterns in it reminiscent of a boa. She was a quadraped, and walked on all fours, her claws clicking. Now she sat back on her haunches and put her front hands together, threading the seven claws on one hand through the seven on the other. The effect was a Kodiak holding a bouquet of knives. Her four eyes — two large green ones set below two small black ones — fixed on me. “I am called Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess,” she said. I bowed slightly again. “Yes. I apologize for my pronunciation.” I took a deep breath and tried again. “Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess.” “No,” she said, speaking now very slowly. “It’s Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess.” For the life of me her pronunciation sounded exactly like mine. Except with a bunch of hissing involved in all the S’s. “Can I just call you Bria?” Her small black eyes closed. I knew that expressed something – impatience? Disgust? Chagrin? I couldn’t remember. It’s hard to learn emotional expressions from a crash video course. “This assignment is of great importance and could be perilous,” she said. “I told them I didn’t want to work with a human.” “Well, thanks for your honesty.” She ran her long, dark-red tongue over fangs longer than my fingers. Maybe she understood human sarcasm, because this 300-kilo carnivore then offered an explanation: “You’re dangerous. I fear you.” I nodded. “Yeah. I hear that a lot.” # I didn’t ask for the job. Almost an e-year before, I sat in a Kirt station, in the long, low room that passed for a bar on the orbiting platform. As I nursed a water, and waited to hitch a ship back to Earth where I was scheduled to be court martialed, a human in a gray suit walked over to my table. “Amir Tarkos?” I almost cringed. I knew this couldn’t be good. I’d just returned from a very messy assignment on Purgatorio, a hellish gas giant in the ass-end of nowhere, and then an assignment on Verrt, a different gas giant on the other cheek of nowhere. The crew on my ship had managed to become notorious three times over in the space of a 14-month assignment. And I was responsible for two of those incidents. “I’m Conor McDonough,” he said. And he did indeed have a good solid Irish brogue. “May I sit?” “If you can find something that a human can sit on.” He punched at his PDA and a chair rose out of the floor. “You recognize my uniform?” he asked me. I nodded. It was the first time I’d seen it on a human, but the grey of the cloth, and the three-triangle insignia on the front of the suit, were known to everyone. “You’re a Predator. I mean, a Harmonizer.” “One of only eighteen humans in the corp.” “Look,” I said. “I know I’m in a world of trouble. I know I’m facing a court martial. I know I’m an embarrassment and so on and so forth. But I also know I did not commit any lifecode violations.” He fixed me with disconcerting blue eyes. “Aye. That you did not. I’m not here to arrest you. This is a social call.” “A social call?” “I’m a recruiter. I’m here to ask if you would try out for the Predators.” I thought about that a long time. I considered telling him this wasn’t funny. I considered asking, what’s the catch? I considered backing up slowly. I considered backing up quickly. And all the while, my mouth worked away, as if trying to remember how to form words. Finally, I managed, “do you know who I am?” “Amir Tarkos. Born on the West Bank –” “Born in Palestine,” I said. He nodded. “So it is. Fair enough. Born in Palestine. Moved to Turkey when you were five. Studied engineering at CalTech on a scholarship. Joined the –” “I mean, do you know what just happened to me? On Verrt?” “You took some liberties with the Kirtpau ship that you commanded.” I liked that. “Liberties?” “Yes. Liberties. And I know that you’ve had some… troubles back on Earth.” “And you’re talking to me because?” He sighed. “On Verrt, now, you did things that are enough to get you kicked on out of the military. But our concerns are different.” He turned in his seat and pointed around the room. “Tell me, Amir, what do you see here?”

Two Kirt stood by a feeding bar piled with some kind of salad, like two crabs before seaweed on a beach. One Kirt had an exoskeleton venerably dark with age, and the other was a red adolescent that reached out one of its ten legs and tapped rhythmically on its elder’s carapace: a sign of care and love. In the other corner, two Neelee, six-legged deer-like creatures, huddled with a brood of birdlike aliens I did not recognize. One held a globe that emitted beautiful light and faint, rarified music. Near them, by the observation windows, a shimmering gaggle of Brights floated and glowed. “Galactics,” I said. “Civilized, advanced, successful Galactics.” He smiled and nodded. “Just so, now. And, tell me, what do you think a beloved Kirt diplomat, or a Neelee artist, or a Bright philosopher would up and do if it saw a lifecode violation happenin’?” “Report it.” “Aye, might. But these creatures live in cities so civilized, so peaceful and calm, that if they spot a crime, they’re more likely to think they misunderstood. They’re likely to reckon they can’t trust their eyes. And if they do reason they saw a crime, they’re as likely to assume someone else is taking care of it as they are to call it out. A crime would seem so outrageous to them, they’d consider it plain to the whole universe. And you know what? Most times they’d be right.” I suddenly didn’t like where this was going. “You’re saying it takes a thief to catch a thief.” “Oh, no, lad. Don’t be an eejit. I am saying there’s an advantage to having been exposed to crime. To wickedness. It means you know better than to assume the best is already being done.” He nodded and watched the Brights shimmer for a moment. They were beautiful, hining but translucent. You could see the stars right through them. “But I’m saying something more than that, I am. To hunt crime in a Galaxy as good and grand as this here Galaxy, you have to be willing to take liberties. You have to be the kind of lad who knows there isn’t going to be help at his back, nor a fix to the problem unless you fix it yerself, quick and dirty and on the fly. And that’s what you did on Verrt.” “Tell my commanding officer that.” “You join the Predators, and I will.” I had to smile at that. “Tell me something. Is it true the Predators are all recruited from the new races?” “Mostly,” he said. “Because we’re thought to be expendable?” He shook his head slowly. “No, lad. No. It’s because we’re closer to the sheet. We’re just closer to all the bad that happened in our ugly, hard pasts. And so we understand.” I looked back over at the Brights, twinkling before the window of stars. What this Conor McDonough said sounded right. In heaven, what angel would take it upon himself to stare at hell? McDonough leaned forward. “But, now, there is one other thing.” He couldn’t resist a smirk. “We’re scary, lad. It scares the hell out of a Galactic to see a savage human, terror of the disaster planet, in a gray suit walking straight on at it. They expects you to beat ‘em to death with a club and then eat ‘em raw.” I laughed. In that moment, I was sold. # Bria and I hitched a ride on a Neelee ship. I couldn’t walk ten meters down its shining glass corridors without getting lost. I kept direction protocol software running all the time. The Neelee bowed but did not talk to me. Bria hid in her room. Because I was the new Predator — a mere cub — I didn’t get the briefing before we left. And Bria wouldn’t tell me anything until the Neelee ship dropped back into space; shot us, nestled in our cruiser, out into the vacuum with a puff of wasted air; and then accelerated away. A distant sun shone, not much more than a bright prick of green light. Fifteen AU out. Our cruiser was a gorgeous ship, shaped and colored like a shark. Sitting in our snug cabin, in two very different chairs mounted side-by-side before the viewer, I reviewed the NAV data. What I saw made me catch my breath in awe. “We’re at the Green Disk.” “You know it?” Bria hissed. “Everyone knows it.” The Green Disk was one of the greatest mysteries of known space. The star was a tad more massive and bright than sol. From here, it looked green because great clouds of black and green matter lay between us and its flaming surface. The system had about the mass of our solar system, but there were no planets. Instead, a disk of asteroids stretched from near orbit of the star out to a good twenty AU, with 90% of the mass in the sweet spot, between 0.8 and 1.8 AUs. Bria tapped at the controls, setting a plot for downsystem and turning on one of the twin inertial suppressors. “What’s our mission?” I asked, fighting the weird nausea the inertia-suppression fields caused as they started up. “You are aware of the importance of this system?” “Sure,” I told her. “The Green Disk is home to the Symbionts, the only known self-reproducing non-intelligent machine-organic hybridization.” “This is a great treasure, but also a danger. No one knows what would happen if the Symbionts were seeded in a different system.” I could see that. There was significant evidence for the theory that the Green Disk had been made, that planets had been busted up to create this special ecosystem. The Symbionts seemed mindless, some kind of remnant of a civilization from hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years lost — but you don’t want to mess with that kind of power when we understood them so little. It would be ugly if the mindless Symbionts themselves turned out to be capable of planet busting, and they were seeded in other solar systems and then set about doing it. “Any reason to think that’s going to happen?” “Yes.” Bria tapped the console, and we screamed off at three gees. # A Galactic base perched on a big asteroid about 1.1 AU out from the star. We slingshot braked around the sun and then, as we decelerated at 1 gee to dock with the base, Bria gave me the briefing. “A Galactic agent on the Fringe found this.” A noisy hologram of a barrel shaped asteroid stuttered in the air above us. The view zoomed in, and on its dark metal surface gray and green shapes like strange fungi stood. Their peaks thrust up out of a shimmering, translucent surface, like a plastic sheeting that stretched over the rock. Small machines moved beneath the membrane, purposefully hurrying about at some task. “Those are Green Disk Symbionts?” I asked. “This has been confirmed,” Bria said. “Who took them?” “This group appears to be Rineret.” The Fringe was a collection of species that didn’t want to join Galactic civilization, along with millions of drop outs from the species that had. The Rineret were in the former group, centipede-like beings that had centuries been resentful of the Galactic civilization’s rules. Bria added with disgust, centipede-like beings that had centuries been resentful of the Galactic civilization’s rules. Bria added with disgust, “Rineret are herbivores.” “OK,” I said, watching the film loop now. “I see the problem. These things might be dangerous. But this isn’t Lifecrime. The sample they’ve taken is too small, by the looks of it, to threaten any of the genotypes of the Green Disk. And it appears they’re experimenting far from any ecosystem. You haven’t shown me anything that’s an imminent threat to another ecosystem or species. Executive should handle this.” “They asked us to help.” That surprised me. Executive, the general police and warfare force of Galactic Civilization, was very defensive of its purview. They resented the prestige afforded Predators. “Why?” “The Green Disk is a big asteroid belt to go searching. The Rineret are stealing seeds.” The Symbionts launched seeds between the asteroids. “The Executive discovered that?” “Yes. Executive ships followed new seed launches, but many seeds were gone by the time they caught up with them.” Now I understood why we were here, and why the Executive had asked the Predators onto their turf, and why we were all stretching the rules a little bit. “So the Rineret have some kind of very fast, very quiet ship out here. But a Predator Cruiser, with twin inertial suppression, accelerates faster than anything in the known Galaxy.” Bria opened her mouth wide and drew her lips over white teeth, exposing a slick, dark red tongue. A Sussuratian smile, predatory and sly. “Yessss. This ship is fast.” # The plan was simple. The seed launches were uncommon, and the Galactic station here had probes all over the system to identify when they happened. We would move around and chase each seed that launched in our vicinity, relying upon station data to plot the trajectory. The goal was to surprise a ship as it matched vector with and grabbed a seed. We didn’t have to wait long. We nearly matched orbit with the Galactic base when they transmitted that a seed had just launched, and within range: fifty thousand klicks. Bria turned on the twin inertial suppressors. The point of having two was so you could tune an inner field to greater damping, but use the outer field to only slightly dampen the outer hull’s inertia. This was necessary to keep our heat signature low. We took off at five gees, feeling only about one and a half inside. We pinged the seed with focused radar when just a few thousand klicks out. The Symbiont seeds have a carbon metal shell, between one and three meters in diameter, containing a dense package of organics and self-replicating nanotech. This was something unique in the known galaxy: an ecosystem seed, not just a phenotype but a whole collection of very loosely related organisms cooperating for reproduction. There had been an intellectual fashion to think this might be the next step in evolution: portions of ecosystems, instead of organisms, as the unit of selection. But we were in the only known ecosystem that had such a reproduction system. “It’s about to pass behind that asteroid,” I told Bria. The Sussurtian only blinked. She was not trying to match the trajectory of the seed directly, but rather to keep us in radar contact with it as much as possible. But, eventually, it passed behind the asteroid, relative to our approach. The radar ping came suddenly loud: we were picking up the now-intervening asteroid, a big spindle-shaped iron rock. Bria took us over it, so that its pitted black and gray surface shot by below in a blink, and then we were past it, flipping over to deaccelerate and turn into the seed’s vector. “I lost it.” “Scan!” Bria demanded. The ship’s AI began a wide radar scan of the whole area. We got nothing but the nearby iron rock, and then the ping The ship’s AI began a wide radar scan of the whole area. We got nothing but the nearby iron rock, and then the ping of more distant asteroids. Nothing else. Nothing the size or mass of the seed. Bria matched the last trajectory of the seed, and we coasted. “It can’t be that there is a ship out here faster than us,” I said. “We would have seen it.” We scanned the area, did deep radar scans of the asteroid, and found no other object within a thousand klicks, and not a thing a degree Kelvin above the background radiation. “How?” I asked. “How in the hell did they do that?” # The Galactic Station crouched like a spider on a boulder: a dome of pale colors standing on bent legs on one end of a big nickel-iron rock. This asteroid was pitted all over with deep circular indentations, not like craters so much as like broken bubbles. Like a lava rock. Some of these were covered over with the membranes that formed the Symbiont covers, faded now to white with neglect and age. In the station’s narrow reception hall, Bria talked with the dark-furred Neelee in charge, and they bounced off together to review radar logs. I made excuses and headed in the opposite direction. The station roster listed one human aboard. Not many humans were out in the galaxy, and common courtesy meant making an introduction, but I also wanted to learn more about the Symbionts from someone I could skip the ever-so-slow Galactic courtesies with. Crossing the station proved frustrating. The weak gravity made little appreciable difference in my motion. I pushed off the floor, and immediately found myself pushing off the ceiling. I have spent a lot of time in microgravity, but here the halls were narrow, smoothly bereft of handholds, and crowded with neelee. I followed directions right down one leg of the station to the terminus: a lab with a window looking out into one of the covered pits we’d viewed on our descent. Dr. Prima Rajiv proved to be an Indian woman with a heavy Australian accent. An ecologist, she had big eyes, a ready smile, but a calculating squint when she considered a question. She stopped and stared when she saw me: a human in Predator uniform. “Now I’ve seen everything,” she said. “Oh, not till you’ve seen me standing next to my partner you haven’t.” I introduced myself, we bantered and discovered we’d shared a university teacher who had moved from Cal Tech to Melbourne, and then we bemoaned the galaxy’s lack of chips — or French fries, as I called them. “I’m sorry to change the course of conversation abruptly,” I told her. “But I need some help.” “I assumed you did. We’ve been told, you know, about the thefts.” “Yeah. So what can you tell me about these seeds?” “What do you know already?” “Next to nothing. The Symbionts thrive through a tight bond between self-reproducing machines and a diversity of small organisms. The machines created small encapsulated environments on the asteroids for the organisms, and transport the organisms between asteroids. The organisms provide the machines with proteins that they use for all of their non-metallic parts.” “Close enough,” she said. “OK. So, the symbionts are, by our count, actually about five thousand organic species, most of them under a centimeter in size. There are instead only a few hundred kinds of self-replicating machines there. Most are dedicated to building the webbing, like this.” She pointed out the window. “A translucent protein sheath that allows them to create a small pocket of atmosphere underneath. On active asteroids, the sheath is pale green with photosynthesizers clinging to the underside, and covers the rock, leaving about two or three centimeters of space below. It makes for a thin little atmosphere for the Symbionts to work in. Some other machines build the canons, those big poles you see out there.” They were like the stalks of mushrooms, rising straight up out of the low webbing. “Those fire seeds. An asteroid like this one can be home to the Symbionts for a few hundred thousand years. Then the organisms start to be overwhelmed by their chemical wastes. The machines create seeds – pocket systems where the organisms can dwell. They load them into the canons, and fire them. Pretty much at random. A few make it to other asteroids, and start new colonies.” “The machines stay behind?” I asked. “After an asteroid goes fallow?” “Those that aren’t launched in seeds do, yes. They actually keep making seeds, but they’re duds, and they rarely launch. That’s what we’re studying here. This is a fallow asteroid. You can tell because the sheathing is white, not green. And because it’s smooth, and has lots of holes in it. But, in the next few hundred thousand years, a seed should land here, and start a new symbiont colony. Some of the machines will merge with the ones still working here.” “Any reason why someone would steal a seed instead of landing and taking a sample?” She shrugged. “Sure. A seed is like a ready-made sample. A representative cross-section of the whole ecosystem, all you need to start to a viable Symbiont colony. It’d save a lot of work to steal one of those.” “I see.” I went closer to the window. In the crater beyond, some Neelee were moving about in suits among the seed canons. One prodded at one of the canons, and it suddenly spasmed. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing. “What?” “That Neelee, it touched the canon, and it looked like… it contracted.” “It tried to fire. We’re studying the cannons right now. They are, like I said, on autopilot. The canons naturally build up pressure inside, and then when it reaches a threshold they fire and shoot a seed. But, if you press on them, and compress the gas inside, you sometimes make them fire prematurely by squeezing the internal pressure higher. And some do contain sterile seeds. That would have launched one if we hadn’t been prodding it all week.” “What’s in a sterile seed?” “Nothing. It’s just the machines, no organics. It’s like a metallic foam. Mostly empty space.” “Yeah. Thanks.” “Sure. Come see me again if you have any questions.” “I will.” I smiled at her. “I don’t mean to be abrupt. It’s just… you’ve given me an idea. There are logs somewhere, of the seed launches?” She gave me instructions on how to find the files. I thanked her, we made plans for dinner — I was looking forward to showing off Bria to my fellow human — and then I went to do a little data mining. # But I didn’t have enough time to consider what I’d learned. Bria called me while I was pacing the hall, thinking through the puzzle of the disappearing seed. “Another seed has launched. Come.” We suited and got into the ship fast — it was a thing we had trained to do. Within a few minutes we were kicking off the asteroid. Then Bria set course as I got a radar fix on the seed pod. “Wait. Wait Bria. Listen to me. I think….” But Bria was on the hunt. She leaned over the console, not listening. “I think we should head in the opposite direction. We should follow the trajectory of the seed back to the asteroid it launched from.” She finally looked at me. “Why? The last seed was intercepted.” “No, no, I don’t think it was.” She closed her black eyes. That expression again. The trajectory we were on was eerily similar to the last one we were on: the seed was heading for a near miss on the other side of a big asteroid. In less than a minute it would be out of view behind the rock, for at least a few seconds. I didn’t have time to explain. I punched into the virtual controls, locked sights on the seed — “Human what are you doing?” Bria started to ask — and I hit it with our laser. It faded from radar. Bria looked at me, all four eyes wide. “What is this behavior, human?” she howled in a rush. “Look!” I said. I punched at the controls and called up a spectrograph. If I wasn’t right about my hunch, I was going to be really, really sorry. Bria growled. “We do not destroy organisms in order to prevent their accumulation. The Rineret ship we seek will be retreating in flight now. I will report that you are not suitable for weapon’s access. Not suitable for pursuit. I will request that you –” “Look!” I said again. I pointed at the data, and to my relief my hunch had been right. “Look at the spectrograph. There are no organics in the debris. Only vaporized iron and nickel. And trace metals.” Bria blinked. “The seed was sterile,” she said. “You knew that?” “I thought it was, but that’s not the point, really. We’re being….” And I couldn’t think of a Galactic word for duped. I sighed. If I couldn’t use the term I could tell a story. “Look, please. Just listen to me. Listen. On my world, there’s a game. A gambling game. When I was a very young child, in Palestine, walking to school, I would pass each day a man playing it.” Most days I never made it to school, but rather waited in an interminable line at a check point until it was time to walk home. But every day I walked past the three-card monte. I envied the older boys who had some money to play and bet on the game. “The man had three… cards. Like this.” I pulled three data tabs from the console. They were roughly about the size and shape of playing cards. “See, the challenge was, you pick one of the cards, and then this man would mix it with the others, and you had to try to determine which one it was after he shuffled. Say, this card.” I held up one memory tab, showing her the symbol on its underside. Then, on the narrow platform between our seats, I did a very poor three-card-monte shuffle in the half- gee acceleration we were holding. “You are a confused child,” Bria said. “I am reporting you to our superiors.” “Just tell me which tablet it is.” “It is the second tablet,” Bria said, disgusted. “Have you checked the monitor?” Bria looked at the console. I shuffled. She turned back quickly. “Which card is it?” I asked again. “You have cheated. You distracted me and moved the cards while I looked away.” “Indeed I have.” Bria blinked each eye in turn, moving counterclockwise. I remembered this expression from my Meet The Sussuratian! training vids: it meant surprise and realization. Sussuratian! training vids: it meant surprise and realization. “They have distracted us,” she whispered. “Yes. They get us to look away, and then they shuffle the cards. Somehow they’re launching the sterile seeds, but aimed on a trajectory that will get them behind an asteroid from the perspective of the base. They burn the seed when it’s out of sight. We assume it was picked up, and look all around in the wrong place. Most likely, they got a ship on the other side of the sun, slipping out of system right now. They probably do a fake seed launch every time it does a maneuver that might be noticeable, in order to distract us. Tightbeam the Execs.” Bria leaned over the console intently, eager now to be on the hunt. She sent the message via laser to the Executives waiting high over the pole of the sun. The message would take an hour to get to them, but if there were a ship on the other side of the system it would likely need more time than that to get up speed for a jump point. Bria hit the console with a fist, slamming both inertial suppression engines on. “We must enter full coolrunning. We must track the false seed to its origin.” I fought the nausea and strapped in. # Bria slipped past the asteroid where the seed had launched. I judged it to be recently fallow: no green on its surface, but the low membranes that so resembled spider webs in the sunlight covered huge unbroken swathes of the black surface. Seed cannons rose up out of these fields like thorns. Bria dove within a klick of the asteroid, and then rotated us so that our nose faced the center of it as we passed. She blasted the engines hard after we skipped a few klicks beyond it, decelerating without showing engine signature. The result was a very tenuous orbit. We upped the magnification on the screens and stabilized the image. “There,” Bria said. She extended a single claw and touched part of the image. “A ship.” We zoomed in. It was a spidery framework of black foil walls and thin tubular beams. It would have likely been invisible but for the white background of symbiont membrane setting it out in sharp relief. “An ultralight ship,” she added. “Good for moving stealthily short distances, since little thrust is needed.” “I don’t see any Rineret, or any other suited figures.” “It could be robotic. Or else, the Rineret are all in the ship.” Bria nudged us forward. “Where are you going?” I asked. “We will land, and tag their ship with spy probes. This way we can trace them back to their system command centers. We need to capture their interstellar ship.” “That’s crazy,” I said. “A ship is most vulnerable when set down.” “And we’ll be set down too!” “We are the predators, they the prey.” # Walking in the station had been bad but walking on an asteroid is a nightmare, let me tell you. It isn’t walking, really. It’s leaping about as cautiously as you can. No ceiling above to push against if you step too hard. None of that nice bouncing ease you get on, say, Earth’s moon. Get too enthusiastic here and you would jump right off the rock and into low orbit. We parked the cruiser, grappled it down, suited up, and walked out onto the surface. There was no atmosphere under We parked the cruiser, grappled it down, suited up, and walked out onto the surface. There was no atmosphere under the dead Symbiont webbing, so it didn’t feel spongy, but it did feel slippery under our hard boots. A trickle of ambient light fell from some nearby big asteroids with high albedo. It would have been pitch dark to my eyes, but the suit could compensate. Our suits set up a short range microwave network so we could talk without broadcasting too much noise. “Magnetize your boots,” Bria said. I did it, and felt myself get a slightly better grip on the asteroid. There was just enough iron in the rock to pull at the field in the suit’s soles. We had two kilometers to cross. We tried to do it in measured leaps. We picked a “mountain” on the horizon that we knew was just this side of the ultralight ship’s landing field. I was relieved that Bria quickly became as tired as me: her breath like mine started to come in deep gasps by the time we had bounded near our target feature. The stone peak proved to be not a mountain but an irregular edge of a crater. We scaled to its edge, and then looked down on the uneven field beyond, a large flat-bottomed bowl prickly with Symbiont cannons. The ship was not in sight. “What now?” I asked Bria. She pointed at a cluster of rocks in the center of the bowl. “It must be behind those rocks.” I nodded, a useless gesture in my helmet. I didn’t want to call the ship to get the data to check, but I did recall the Rineret ultralight had been parked next to an outcropping of dark stone. It took us only a few minutes to stalk up behind the stones. Peeking around them, we discovered only another expanse of Symbiont membrane, encircled by a thick field of seed canons. “The ship is gone,” Bria said. I looked up, suddenly afraid. I couldn’t see anything: we were facing away from the sun. But then, a line of stars winked out in the periphery of my vision. I turned to face it. It took me only a moment to realize that a square of black was cut out of the stars. “They’re right above us!” I shouted. The black outline of the ship loomed hugely: it must still be low. “Move!” Bria shouted. She dove toward the seed cannons. I turned off my boot magnets and did the same. Wisps of white rose up around me. I realized with cold fear that lasers cut at the ground up behind us. The Symbiont membranes shredded into sheets that twisted and turned into the space around us like some kind of drifting, bleached kelp. I dove for a seed canon and then changed trajectory by pushing off it when I arrived, hoping to set an unpredictable course. But I had no control. I was very likely to leap off the asteroid if I got moving any faster, and adrift in near orbit I would be the easiest target imaginable. The seed cannon I bounced off popped open behind me like a silent balloon explosion, lased just after I passed. Then it struck me. “Bria!” I called. “Bria, hit the base of the seed cannons!” We had light thrusters on our suits and I turned mine on full blast and aimed myself at the nearest seed canon, fists out, flying Superman style. I hit the base and the whole thing convulsed in a coughing motion as I bounced off of it. It shot a seed up, so fast I saw only a blur over of the rim of its barrel. I looked up but couldn’t follow the trajectory. So I dove for the next canon. And the next. Bria followed my lead, several times sailing by me, feet extended, like a polar bear diving feet first. In a few seconds we had launch a dozen sterile seeds. A flash lit up the landscape, casting sharp shadows of seed canons. I looked up, squinting. Light leaked from a gash in the ship, revealing shreds of foil that flapped in escaping gas. A direct hit. The seeds, launched at high speeds, had easily penetrated the ultralight hull. easily penetrated the ultralight hull. Bria bounded past and rammed another canon. It fired. I stared at the ship, mesmerized. After a second, it jerked, and started to spin. A direct hit. The ship tumbled away, venting now from two long breaches. As we watched, it cracked, nearly breaking in two. Long worm-like figures twisted in the gap: suited Rineret, attempting desperate repairs. “Back to the cruiser,” Bria called. # We radioed the Executive fleet, then followed the Rineret ship at a respectful distance until an Exec Enforcer ship matched trajectory with us, opened the great maw on its bay, and swallowed the damaged craft whole. The Executives had not found the larger ship that we predicted was on the other side of the system, but the Green Disk is large, and this capture would be a good lead to help them find it. Since we had discovered that the Rineret were not using a super-fast ship to hunt seeds, there was no need for two Predators with a cruiser to stay in system. I sent a message of regrets to Dr. Rajiv, and we set course for another Exec ship waiting outside the belt, to hitch a ride out of the system. “Bria, tell me something.” I looked over at her. Tiny reflections of the drive control displays were echoed, four times, in her dark eyes. “What is this thing you have about herbivores?” “You do not know the hunter theory?” I shook my head, then realized the gesture might signify nothing to her. So I added, “no, what’s that?” “Eleven fourteenths of the species in the Galactic Civilization are pack carnivores. Three fourteenths are omnivores, like the Neelee or the Kirt.” “Or me,” I said. “Or humans. But few are like the Treven, herbivores.” “So?” “Carnivores evolved with weapons — their teeth and claws. So they evolved the ability to hold back their power, they evolved awareness of how to show mercy and relent.” I had seen how wolves lay on their back, if they were willing to submit during a fight, exposing their throats to the alpha male. The alpha male would immediately break off attack at the sight. I nodded. “I see.” “Herbivores have no such heritage,” Bria continued, “so they do not know how to relent. They are dangerous, and foolish, given weapons. And merciless.” I thought of the Rineret shooting at us on the asteroid surface. Really I’d be hard pressed to imagine what they thought they could gain from killing us: it was downright spiteful, and our suits would transmit all our data if we died, so our ships would report and then the Rineret biopirates would have had a very angry Predator force hunting them in retaliation. “Well,” I said, “I’ll try to reach down and commune with my inner predator.” “Good.” The console chimed. Bria looked over at a hologram rising in the air above the ship controls. “New orders. An illegal colonization, on Kirtpauan Nine, fallow planet four. Refugees.” “I know something about refugees,” I told her. “I continue to be the leader of this pack unit.” “Sure, Bria. Whatever you say.” She punched the engines. <<<>>> Escape Pod 333, originally released on February 23, 2012 Download audio Read by Rajan Khanna Originally appeared in Analog Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author The Eckener Alternative by James L. Cambias

The Hindenburg swung gently on the mast at Lakehurst as the sky over New Jersey turned to purple twilight. All the passengers, the reporters, the newsreel men were gone. A couple of sailors stood guard beneath the big ship to enforce the no-smoking rule. John Cavalli waited until the watchman below had turned away, then slid down the stern rope to the ground. He hunkered down next to the big rolling anchor weight for a couple of minutes, then hurried off into the darkness beyond the floodlights. Once he was clear, Cavalli stopped to peel off the Russian army arctic commando suit he’d been wearing ever since the Zeppelin had lifted off from Frankfurt-am-Main. It had kept him warm as he hid among the gas cells with his IR goggles and fire extinguisher, but now in the warmth of a spring evening it was stifling. He hit the RETURN button on his wristband and disappeared. # “You can’t make big changes,” said the instructor the first day of Temporal Studies class. He was a very laid-back physicist recruited from California in 2020s. “That’s the most important rule. The folks we work for are the result of a particular set of historical events. Change history too much and their probability level drops below 50 percent. If that happens, all this” — his gesture encompassed the Time Center — goes away and we’re out of a job. If we even exist anymore.” A student in the row ahead of Cavalli raised his hand. “What about making little changes?” “Little changes are fine. We make little changes all the time. Most of them are things like making long-term investments, buying up art treasures for safekeeping, keeping species from going extinct, that kind of thing. You’re going to learn all about gauging the effect of changes, avoiding heterodynes and chaotic points, and when it’s okay to step on butterflies.” Cavalli was listening, but in the margin of his notebook he was doodling airships. # The timegate stage was dark and the control room was empty, just as he’d left it. The Coke can was still on the console. Was it maybe a little further to the left than he remembered? He stepped off the stage and took a drink. Still tasted the same. It would take a pretty big timeshift to change the flavor of Coca-Cola. Cavalli locked the door behind him with his purloined master key (the Time Center used mechanical locks because they were a bit more resistant to minor time-shifts) and headed for the library. He found a book about Zeppelins he didn’t remember and skimmed the pages. Hindenburg served safely until 1939; scrapped when WWII broke out. No postwar Zeppelins. The usual “return of the airship” speculations. Damn. It hadn’t worked. He had hoped erasing the vivid image of the Hindenburg fire would have been enough to keep passenger airships alive, but the war still marked the end of their era. # “So why don’t we stop things like the Holocaust or the firebombing of Dresden?” It was a relatively quiet dorm room party with half a dozen trainees blowing off steam after the first written exam. Cavalli didn’t see who asked the question, but he sounded drunk. Anna Kyle, the third-year trainee, answered. “Too big. The models predict major shifts in the 21st Century if there’s no Holocaust. You lose the Cold War and the whole Jihad era. We just stay away from World War II if we can help no Holocaust. You lose the Cold War and the whole Jihad era. We just stay away from World War II if we can help it. Rescue a few things from museums before they get flattened, take some videos for historians, that’s all.” “Why not stop the whole war?” “Kill Hitler in 1918? Everybody from the 20th and 21st wants to do that, or maybe kidnap him as an infant and leave him with a nice family of Buddhists in Tibet. The answer is, forget it. Removing the biggest conflict in human history makes the bosses go poof, not to mention just about everyone else born after 1950 or so. Frankly, we don’t know what history would look like if you change something that big.” # Cavalli was waiting outside the Houses of Parliament when Lord Thomson came out, trailing a crowd of aides and hangers-on. The monocle in Cavalli’s eye displayed a targeting circle and he swung the umbrella up until the bright circle was centered on the side of the Air Minister’s neck. He squeezed the handle and the umbrella fired off a smart dart loaded with pneumonia bacilli. Thomson was pretty healthy; he’d get over it in a few months. Plenty of time for the Cardington team to get the R.101 really airworthy. # There was a candy bar next to his Coke when he returned. He didn’t remember getting one from the snack bar. It was a Heath bar, his favorite brand. He ate it on the way to the library. The British Imperial Airship Service had a rocky start, but by 1935 there were direct routes to Canada, India, South Africa, and Australia. Plans to extend the service to New Zealand were put on hold in 1936 and abandoned when war broke out. The airships served as fleet scouts for the Royal Navy during the first years of the war. The Japanese shot down R.100 and R.103, and R.101 was scrapped in 1940. R.102 was used to evacuate some key people from Singapore as the Japanese approached, made an epic flight home to England via Africa and the Azores, and spent the rest of the war in a hangar at Cardington before being donated to the Royal Air Museum. In his room he watched a movie on videodisk about the last flight of R.102, with Michael York as the heroic captain. # At lunch one day Anna asked the Big Question. “So if you could change one thing, what would it be?” The other trainees gave the usual answers — save Jesus, kill Hitler, stop Cortez, save Lincoln, give machineguns to Lee. Cavalli shrugged. “Find some way to save the airships, I guess.” A couple of people who knew him just rolled their eyes, but Anna looked curious. “How come?” “I just think they’re cool.” # He clung to the fabric covering of the Akron as she cruised out over the New Jersey coast. It was a lot harder to stow away aboard a Navy airship than a passenger craft. His first two attempts had ended in quick aborts when he ran into sailors inspecting the gas cells, so finally he moved the focus to a point just above the ship and hoped nobody was watching. Keeping a careful hold he pulled out the radio handset and began tapping out the Morse code message he had written on the sleeve of his commando suit. It had all the proper authentications and ordered the Akron to return to base at once. By the time they straightened out the “hoax” the line squall would be long past. # The Coke was in a bottle when he stepped off the stage. He finished it as he leaved through a big glossy coffee-table book about Navy airships in World War II. There was an exciting picture of Akron going down amid a swarm of Zeroes at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and some photos of Macon on U-boat patrol over the Atlantic. The last page of the book was a fund-raising appeal from the U.S.S. Macon Association, hoping to finish the restoration project and get her airborne again in time for the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The book noted in passing that the luxury passenger airship never recovered after 1945. passenger airship never recovered after 1945. # Cavalli started going to bed as soon as classes ended, sleeping through dinner and waking after midnight to use the projector. He made up the lost meals at breakfast. In 1917 he disabled the radio of the Zeppelin L-59 long enough for the ship to miss the recall message and reach its destination in German East Africa. As a result during 1930s the Graf Zeppelin made a couple of voyages to Cape Town, but inevitably the war ended all that. Cavalli did get a nice Art Deco poster showing a Zeppelin over the pyramids to put on his dorm room wall. He tried going back to San Francisco in 1864 and giving Frederick Marriott a couple of uncut diamonds and a printout of suggestions to improve his Avitor airship. The result was that in the 1930s America purchased four big Navy airships instead of only two. The three that survived Pearl Harbor were scrapped. He gave the German Navy’s airship commandant Peter Strasser a bad case of pneumonia in 1915, so that Zeppelins were used as reconnaissance platforms and fleet scouts rather than strategic bombers. More ships and skilled airshipmen survived the war and the Graf Zeppelin was filled with American helium. All nine passenger airships were scrapped in 1939. He stood among the sand dunes on the North Carolina coast with the dart gun umbrella in his hand, but went home again. He did manage to ride from Rio to Friedrichshafen aboard the Graf Zeppelin, and even exchanged a few pleasantries with Hugo Eckener. Dr. Eckener was convinced the airship could maintain its position despite the growing competition from airplanes. He gestured around the comfortable lounge. “Who would not trade a cramped seat in a noisy box for this?” Cavalli agreed. # Anna tapped on the door of his dorm room. “I know what you’ve been doing after hours. The projector keeps a record of every time it’s used.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Good reaction. But I checked the times and places. Friedrichshafen, Lakehurst, San Diego. The London trip had me puzzled until I found out the Air Minister came down with pneumonia the next day.” “He insisted on going to India early and the R.101 crashed.” “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t tell Temporal Integrity about you.” “I’ve been careful. I haven’t made any major changes. None of these are butterfly points.” “Glad to hear that they’re certified safe by a first-year trainee.” “Look, I’m not hurting anyone. It’s just a little side project. A hobby.” “John, it’s not going to work. Airships had their day from 1900 to World War II. The war changed everything too much — they couldn’t survive as military craft and they couldn’t make money as passenger liners. Airplanes just got too good.” “I thought of maybe stopping the Wright Brothers.” “What?!” “– but I changed my mind. Too big a butterfly.” He looked at her. “I still don’t understand something. Why don’t we do more? Why don’t we change things? We’ve got the power.” “Major changes would erase us.” “So what? It would be a better world for everyone else. Maybe time travel would get invented sooner.” “You can’t know it would be better. Stop World War II and you could cause something worse. Maybe a nuclear war.” “Better the devil we know, eh?” He looked at her. “I take it you want my master key, too?” “If you don’t give it up I have to call in Temporal Integrity.” He sighed and dug in a pocket. “Here. I got it from Dr. Stirling’s office when he made me help move his plants.” She took the key and turned to go. “Now be sure you don’t try any history editing yourself,” he said. # He wasn’t sure how long he had. She might try to use the key herself, or Dr. Stirling might, and then they’d realize it was just the key to his dorm room. No time for much preparation. He checked a date in the library, let himself into the supply room, and hid in an unused classroom until dinnertime. The stage was just warming up when somebody started pounding on the door. Cavalli leaped onto the platform just as the frosted glass smashed and a Temporal Integrity agent reached inside to undo the deadbolt. The last thing he saw of Time Center was Anna’s face. She was shouting something, but it was drowned out by the hum of the field projector. # He hoped he’d been clever, setting the controls for Berlin in early 1932. Maybe the TI agents would assume he was going for Hitler, and concentrate on guarding his apartment and Nazi Party headquarters. But Cavalli spent as little time in Berlin as possible; an hour after arriving he was having dinner aboard the express to Munich. At midnight he got a room in a cheap but tidy hotel in Friedrichshafen. # “Doctor Eckener?” This particular morning Hugo Eckener looked tired and a little irritable. Running an airship line in the depths of the Depression would do that. “Yes, good morning. My secretary says you have come from America with a business proposal?” “Actually, no. I just told her that to get in here.” Eckener scowled. “I do not have time for sight-seers.” “Oh, no. It’s about politics. The Central Party and the Social Democrats have invited you to run for President.” “Ah, a reporter. And a very good one, too. That was all discussed in strictest confidence. I am afraid I can say nothing.” “You must accept the offer.” “I cannot. Hindenburg is a hero. He is the only thing keeping Germany from falling into anarchy right now.” “But he’s going to give the Chancellorship to Hitler!” “That little fraud? Impossible. The President is not a fool.” “The Nazis are the biggest party, and they’re in favor of rearming Germany. Field-Marshal Hindenburg approves of that.” “This is all speculation. Besides, my Zeppelins keep me too busy to enter politics.” Cavalli hesitated for a split second, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his computer. “Watch this,” he said, and called up the encyclopedia entry on Hitler. Eckener raised his eyebrows when he saw the little glowing screen in the young stranger’s hand, but then he began to actually watch the newsreel shots and read the text. “Another war?” “Worse than the first. By the end of it, Germany was in ruins, thirty million people were dead — and Zeppelins were gone forever.” “How — ” Eckener stopped and composed himself. “Never mind. You have travelled in time, like the man in Mr. Wells’s story, or possibly you are an angel, like the one sent to Lot. But I am afraid it is still impossible. Even if I ran, the Nazis would oppose me. They know I loathe them.” Cavalli took out the package he’d stolen from Mission Supply, and poured a heap of diamonds onto the table. “These are worth about ten million pounds,” he said. “You can blanket the country with ads, rent stadiums for campaign rallies, and hire guards to keep the Brownshirts away.” Eckener picked up one diamond and scratched a vase with it, then quickly put it down again, as if it was hot to the touch. He was silent for a while. “I do not think I am qualified to be President of Germany,” he said at last. “You’re an economist by training, and you’ve kept the Zeppelin company going through war and revolution and economic collapse. You’re a national hero. And from everything I’ve read about you, you seem like a decent man. Germany needs a decent man now, Dr. Eckener. The world needs one.” Eckener looked at him out of those pouchy basset-hound eyes. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?” Cavalli was about to give him another spiel about the need to stop Hitler, but then he stopped and shrugged. “I guess I just like Zeppelins,” he said. “I figure with you as President there will be lots of Zeppelins.” # Nine months later Cavalli was in the lounge of the Graf Zeppelin over the Atlantic. The window was open and he was holding his shift bracelet. If he hit RETURN now what would happen? Would he snap forward to Time Center or whatever occupied the site in the no-Hitler future? Would he just pop out of existence? He watched it fall to the blue water below, then went to the bar to refresh his drink. The Zeppelin droned on into the unknown. <<<>>> Escape Pod 333, originally released on March 1, 2012 Download audio Read by Mur Lafferty Originally appeared in All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author

The Water Man by Ursula Pflug

The water man came today. I waited all morning, and then all afternoon, painting plastic soldiers to pass the time. Red paint too in the sky when he finally showed; I turned the outside lights on for him and held the door while he carried the big bottles in. He set them all in a row just inside the storm door; there wasn’t any other place to put them. When he was done he stood catching his breath, stamping his big boots to warm his feet. Melting snow made little muddy lakes on the linoleum. I dug in my jeans for money to tip him with, knowing I wouldn’t find any. Finally I just offered him water. We drank together. It was cool and clean and good, running down our throats in the dimness of the store. It made me feel wide and quiet, and I watched his big eyes poke around Synapses, checking us out, and while they did, mine me feel wide and quiet, and I watched his big eyes poke around Synapses, checking us out, and while they did, mine snuck a peek at him. He was big and round, and all his layers of puffy clothes made him seem rounder still, like a black version of the Michelin man. He unzipped his parka and I could see a name, Gary, stitched in red over the pocket of his blue coverall. I still didn’t have a light on; usually I work in the dark, save the light bill for Deb. But I switched it on when he coughed and he smiled at that, like we’d shared a joke. He had a way of not looking right at you or saying much, but somehow you still knew what he was thinking. Like I knew that he liked secrets, and talking without making sounds. It was neat. Seemed to me it was looking water–a weird thought out of nowhere–unless it came from him. He seemed to generate them; like he could stand in the middle of a room and in everyone’s minds, all around him, weird little thoughts would start cropping up–like that one. My tummy sloshing I looked too, and seemed to see through his eyes and not just mine. Through his I wasn’t sure how to take it: a big dim room haunted by dinosaurs. All the junk of this century comes to rest at Synapses; it gets piled to the ceilings and covered with dust. If it’s lucky it makes a Head; weird Heads are going to be the thing for Carnival this year, just as they were last, and Debbie’s are the best. Her finished products are grotesque, but if you call that beautiful then they are; the one she just finished dangles phone cords like Medusa’s hair, gears like jangling medals. Shelves of visors glint under the ceiling fixture; inlaid with chips and broken bits of circuitry, they hum like artifacts from some Byzantium that isn’t yet. Two faced Janus masks, their round doll eyes removed; you can wear them either way, male or female, to look in or out. Gary was staring at them, a strange expression on his face. Like he wanted to throw up. “Do you think they’re good?” I asked, to stop him looking like that. “Good enough,” he said, “if you like dinosaurs.” “I like them. They are strange and wonderful.” “But dinosaurs all the same,” he said, his eyes glinting like the mosaic visors. I looked for the source of light on his face but couldn’t find it. Maybe he was one of the crazy water men. You hear things, like that’s the way they get sometimes; it comes from handling their merchandise too much. Fish-heads, people call them. After the deep ones, the ones that generate their own light. “Whose water you gettin’ now?” “I never called a water man before today.” “What do you drink?” “Town water. But I just couldn’t do it any more.” “Yeah.” It was sad, the way he said it. “Only cold. For hot we have pots on the stove.” “Uh-huh. Baths down the street at the pool, am I right?” “Showers, mostly. They don’t clean the tubs out too often.” “I guess not.” “I heard your water was the best,” I said, threading through the junk to the desk where I keep my checkbook. I am a little proud of them, my checks. My buddy and I designed them and he printed them up for me. They’re real pretty, with phoenixes and watermelons. I had to clean his kitchen for a week in trade, but it was worth it. Gary looked interested, his pop-eyes studying the tracery. “What do I owe you for this fabulous water, Gare?” I asked, punctuating my signature. He moved his tongue around in his mouth so that his face bulged. A bulge here, a bulge there: his cheek a rolling ball. “That is some way out bank you belong to, miss. What did you say it was called?” “It doesn’t have a name. It’s my own personal bank. Very secure. These checks are not affected by the stock market.” “And a good thing, too,” he nodded, agreeing with me. But he had his doubts. “I tell you what, miss. First delivery’s usually free. You see how you like the water, you let me know. But the deposit on the bottles, I got to have that.” He glared at me, wanting cash. I hemmed and hawed, took him on a tour of the premises. Thing was, we had no cash. Well, we had a little, but Deb took it this morning to get her hair done. Half a dozen places in town would rather do your hair on account, and Deb has to pick one that only takes jazz. She can be a prima donna that way. But then, she is the Artiste. The store is a kind of a hodgepodge. I think she must have a call for the garbage, like a dog whistle; a supersonic whine that only it can hear. Because she cares about it. Garbage is her job; Deb rebirths obsolete appliances, toys, anything thrown away, nonorganic. The ones that don’t biodegrade, not quickly. It’s recycling, only more so; this way they get an extra life on their slow way back to Earth. She makes it into art: sculptures; costumes for Carnival; Heads, mostly. She takes hockey helmets, the domes from those old-style hair dryers, hats, headbands. Anything to Heads, mostly. She takes hockey helmets, the domes from those old-style hair dryers, hats, headbands. Anything to go around a head. Hot glue gun, solder, she glues things to them: taken apart washing machines; orphan computers; microwave ovens. The grunts love it. Come February, they buzz in here like flies, picking up a couple of Heads apiece. Grunts have to wear something new every night of Carnival. A good thing, too: jazz. When it first comes in, I just like to do nothing, holding it all morning. It makes my skin happy. Deb doesn’t like it; I don’t do any work. She comes home, I’m sitting on the floor, playing with the money. She yells, sends me out to the co-op for a year of rice and beans. Gare and I passed a rack of toys. Thirty years of Christmas, stacked up to the ceiling lights. Between the caved in Atari monitors and the bins full of busted GoBots, almost like an anachronism, was a shoe box of those little plastic domes where the snow is always falling. Gary stopped and picked one out, held it up to the light; a striped yellow fish danced among ferns. Once there had been a thread holding it suspended, but now it floated on its side: gills up, dead. He turned it over and over, like if he just waited long enough, and prayed hard enough, that fish would leap to life. “It’s nice,” I said, my feet betraying me, shifting me from one to the other. “I don’t think I ever noticed it before.” “Nice? It’s amazing! You don’t know how long I’ve been looking for something like this! Look, here’s the slot for the battery. It’s got a light bulb–this one lights up in the dark!” “So it does.” His enthusiasm made me edgy. I waved the check like a slow flag, hoping he’d change his mind about my watermelons. But he didn’t. “Look, miss. I’ll take this fish for the deposit. But from now on it’s got to be jazz. If you want to keep getting the water.” “Hmm. Maybe town water’s not so bad.” He laughed. “It’s your funeral.” “I’ll give you a call, Gare.” “Sure. If you can find me.” I’d gotten off easy and he was mad. It was just his luck I’d had something he wanted. “Thank-you for coming so soon after I called,” I said, trying to placate him. “It’s very rare,” he grumped. “Collector’s material. I can sell it for a week of jazz uptown.” But you won’t. “No problem. I didn’t even know we had it.” “No kidding.” It was that look again, only in his voice; his hand wrapped around the toy, like he was saving it from something. From me. What did I care. He was almost out the door and then he stopped, staring at the shelves of Heads again. “You make those?” “I put them together. But my partner, she’s the designer.” “She a healer, right?” “Uh-huh.” “It shows.” He nodded at the Heads, looked down at his opened hand, at the fish. He chuckled. It made me look at him, his handsome face, a big grin cutting it in two. You wanted to like him when he grinned. And his hands knocked me out. The brown backs opening to velvet palms, soft and shocking baby pink. Yeesh. I wished I could have hands like that. He did his other voice, cradling the fish like a baby. “I is going to fix this fish,” he crooned. “This is a poor sick fish and needs mending.” The guy was not for real. But his water. “You a fish doctor too, Gare?,” I asked, only half sarcastic. He turned on like a light bulb when I said that. “That’s very good, dear. Very, very good.” He laughed, a happy laugh from deep down, and for once he didn’t look like I made him sick. I was even afraid he wanted to give me a hug; his huge padded arms windmilling towards me like that. I backed away into the warmth; it was freezing, standing there in the opened door. “It’s a kind of a side- line, my fish doctoring,” he explained. “Like a fiddle. You know what a fiddle is?” “Yeah, yeah,” I said, “Economics 101.” I slammed the door while I had a chance. He grinned, turning to cross the road; his feet leaving boat sized holes in the slush. In the middle he stopped to turn and wave again. He was still chuckling when he gunned the van, his big head rolling like it was on bearings. “Pure spring,” read the hand-lettered sign on the side. “A drink for sore throats.” Weird. Like “a sight for sore eyes.” # Three weeks to go. Deb sleeps at the studio, brings me the new designs in the morning. Flavour of the week is headbands; I’ve been stringing plastic soldiers onto lengths of ribbon cable. You know the stuff: rows of tiny coloured wires all stuck together, for connecting computers and all. When they’re strung each soldier is painted to match a different strand of wire. “Rainbow Warrior,” Deb calls ‘em. match a different strand of wire. “Rainbow Warrior,” Deb calls ‘em. Two grunts came in this morning and bought Heads. Red Heads, blue Heads; colour is big this year. One also bought a box of old electronic parts, said he wanted to make his own. An arty grunt, yet. He was pale and like his friend wore a grey knee length wool coat. They both looked young. But lately it seems like all the grunts look young: young and spooked. They made half scared google eyes, told me it was their first time in a place like this: strictly non grunt. Said they worked for banks. Tellers, must be: coats too thin for managers. It almost doesn’t rate as a grunt job, being a bank teller. Too servile. Seems like it takes less and less to be a grunt these days. How sad. “You mean there still is banks?” I asked, doodling on my creative check book. I know there is still banks; I just wanted to make them nervous. I’m bad when it comes to young grunts. But jobs. For money. Geez. # The secret life of grunts. I do wonder what they think about. They must be on town water. I can’t imagine ordering it in and still being a grunt. I can’t remember ever even wanting to be a grunt, but I guess grunts want to be grunts. They must. Or else why would they? It’s not like you have to be a wage slave. There are other ways. Another one came in this morning: a creepy older one. He bought my window. It’s something I do to relax, when I’m on break from Deb. I climb into the display window and arrange the junk into scenes, make a little Chaos out of the Order. Or is it the other way around? I forget which. Anyway, this time I’d found a plastic Doberman and hot glued its mouth to Barbie’s crotch. I know there are worse things on this Earth than a little dog cunnilingus, but even Deb thought it was maybe a little much. The grunt, however, loved it, asked me if I did gift wrap. I did: ripping a strip of red off the velvet curtains left over from Synapses’ previous incarnation I tied it around the dog’s neck. He loved it, he told me, in that creepy voice; he loved the store and he loved me. “Sure,” I said, but I had to get a glass of water right after he left just to get over his face. Maybe that’s how it happens to grunts; they get old when the inside faces out too long, when instead of being scared they’re scary. And to think I cater to that market. Yeeagh. # I used to think all water was the same. It was what you drank for breakfast, had a little coffee to stir in if you were lucky. It was a grunt drink. From Gary I learned otherwise. This morning I brought a quart up to the kitchen where I was working. I heated it up on the stove, and sort of meditated, tried to think how Gary would think it if he was doing the thinking. While I was waiting I amused myself pushing the eyes into a couple of old dolls. I sliced the faces off, attached them one to another with bands of elastic. One male doll, one female, the way you’re supposed to do them. A type of Janus. It’s not a big seller, but it’s lasted; every year we do a few. When the water was warm I put the mask on and drank, using a straw. I’d pierced the lips for straw holes–grunts won’t buy anything they can’t drink in. The water went down, warm and wet, and I felt like there were revolving doors inside me, turning, and all of a sudden I could go out the other way. And then I could see the whole deal: how we lived; how we did up our place; what we wore and what we ate: it was all because of drinking the town water. And this thing about getting your own water, it really worked. I could see how tacky it was: Synapses, Deb’s and my life. A cheesy, no-class deal, except for some of the Heads. Like the Janus Head. It was clean, a nice idea made flesh. I kept it on, poking around the place, looking out the eyes of Gary’s water. It was fun. I saw things I hadn’t seen before, like which things fit together and how come. I poked around in shoe boxes all afternoon, looking at junk. Every day they bring more in. I wonder where it all comes from. Junk out of plastic, junk out of metal. They don’t make so much junk as they used to, but boy, when they did, was it ever a going concern. It must have employed thousands of people, the junk industry. I wonder where they got the raw materials from. I mean, what is that cheap-o plastic made of, anyway? What natural substance has been humiliated in its service? I kind of got lost in the beauty of it, the beautiful ugliness of the cheap plastic objects I was handling. It occurred to me then they were beautiful precisely because they were ugly, and I even know a few people like that. And the more my thoughts headed off in that direction the gladder I became I work for Deb. Because, you know, I used to feel sorry for them. We’d be shopping for clothes at Thrift Villa or wherever, and there’d be shelves full of broken down toasters and waffle irons, and I’d think how nobody cared about them, not even my Mom. Everyone always wanting the new one: clean ones, without any scratches or deformities, in good working order and with high IQ’s. That is why I love Deb so much. She was the first person to see that all that old stuff wanted to still be used; it wanted so badly to have a purpose for us. So Deb thought and thought of how to use it, and finally she came up with the whole style of wearing garbage to Carnival, and now everyone does it, us and all the grunts. # Things have been different lately, I don’t know why. Funny thoughts come to me while I work. That we are like fish in an aquarium, looking out at the world. I think it’s since Gary came that it’s been different. I never did any of that computing but my buddy Danny, the one who does the checks, he told me it is like that. Programming. It is like that computing but my buddy Danny, the one who does the checks, he told me it is like that. Programming. It is like going into inner space. And I think maybe Gary’s water is like that too, like going into space. To think I never knew. No wonder he was looking at me like that. # Two weeks. Carnival soon. I’ve started a new window. I work on it during breaks. TV sets done up like aquariums. Somehow they look the same: a clear glass box. I have a milk crate full of plastic fish; I string them from the inside of the TVs so they look like they’re swimming. Take the picture tubes out, of course. And one real aquarium. A glass fish bowl I found upstairs that fits perfectly into one of the smaller TVs. I went down to the store and bought live fish for it. I paid for them with some of the grunt money. The dog grunt money, to be precise. I lied to Deb, told her Danny gave them to me, that I washed his floors for him. She doesn’t like me doing anything that costs money. Also she doesn’t understand I have to make my own art sometimes. The windows. That’s my art. That and the thoughts, the weird water ones. # Out of water. Once you get the new water, it’s hard to go back to the old. I haven’t thought so much in years. Even Deb likes me better, gives me time off in the afternoons to work on the window. It’s very beautiful, now, almost finished. I wonder how I ever did dogs and dolls. I could never go back to that now. Phoned Gary but there was no answer. Shit. Town water sucks. # Don’t forget to dream. To bring in the new world. Otherwise the old one just keeps rolling on. Death as predecessor to rebirth. The seed, sleeping in the earth. The purpose of winter. Subtle changes taking place, deep in the darkness underground. Winter, Carnival, bringing back the sun. New windows. Fish televisions? But what is the death? The underworld. Being fish. What will we be, when we’re not fish? # First day of Carnival. The grunts pour into the street, displaying their wares. Who will buy, and who will be bought? The one time of year they get to ease up. Bread and circus. For two weeks they live what is ours the whole year through. I felt so still, so empty inside. Deb was out, being photographed for something. I sat in the window, watching the grunts parading, wearing their garbage regalia. They were beautiful: moving in slow motion, with dream smiles on their faces. They looked happy. I recognized some of their Heads as ones we’d done. They smiled and waved at me, sitting among my fish TVs. Who is looking in and who is looking out? It is like the Janus mask. Tomorrow I will wear it. # I feel so still. In Carnival they act it out, the death and rebirth. But this year it’s like it’s real: Janus eyes in the back of my head. Gary came. He grinned and gesticulated, stamping his feet on the other side of the glass. He waved his hands. I wanted to see it, his beautiful skin, but he was wearing mitts. He brought the water. He carried it into the window where I was sitting, and we each had some. It was cool and clean and good, running down our throats in the cold morning. When we weren’t thirsty any more he made me come outside, showed me how Synapses’ window was like a television too, or an aquarium, and I the fish in it. I knew where there was a big box of grease crayons in the back, and we drew it onto the glass: the outline of the screen and the control panel. I even found a fish costume in a drawer of stuff Deb did before there were Heads. # He sat beside me for a long time, and we looked out the window, part of the display. A big quiet black man and a thin white girl dressed up as a fish. The Carnival faces passed us, a white dressed throng, wearing Heads made of all their old stuff, and I was content as I’ve ever been. Finally understanding it, the meaning of Carnival. The old flesh dying to the new. They passed with the skeleton then, an effigy held high above their heads. “Whose death is it this time, Gare?” I asked. He put his big mitten out, covering my knee. “It is the death of Death.” “And the birth of Life?” “Yes.” “That’s what I thought. I’m glad I’m here to see this one.” “It is an interesting time.” He rose stiffly in his great padded knees, wearing a parka and thick quilted pants like always. “I will be going then.” “I’m glad I know you, Gary.” “I, too. I will be coming by from time to time, to see how you are doing.” “Goodbye, Gary, goodbye.” “Goodbye, Gary, goodbye.” # Roses. It will be the next window. Flowers will bloom out of all the televisions there are. In the meantime it snows. Soft white snow falling like it does in a plastic bubble of fish, its string repaired. It sits on top of one of the televisions, where Gary left it for me to discover. Its light bulb glows softly in the darkening day. <<<>>> Escape Pod 335, originally released on March 8, 2012 Download audio Read by Christiana Ellis Originally appeared in Anthology Series: Tesseracts # 3 Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author The Speed of Time by Jay Lake

“Light goes by at the speed of time,” Marlys once told me. That was a joke, of course. Light can be slowed to a standstill in a photon trap, travel on going nowhere at all forever in the blueing distance of an event horizon, or blaze through hard vacuum as fast as information itself moves through the universe. Time is relentless, the tide which measures the perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2 GHz hum of creation counts the measure of our lives as surely as any heartbeat. There is no t in e=mc2. I’d argued with her then, missing her point back when understanding her might have mattered. Now, well, nothing much at all mattered. Time has caught up with us all. # Let me tell you a story about Sameera Glasshouse. She’d been an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. Habitat chemistry tech, certifications from several middle-tier authorities, bouncing from contract to contract in trans-Belt space. Ten thousand women, men and inters just like her out there during the Last Boom. We didn’t call it that then, no one knew the expansion curve the solar economy had been riding was the last of anything. The Last Boom didn’t really have a name when it was underway, except maybe to economists. Sameera had been pair-bonded to a Jewish kid from Zion Luna, and kept the surname long after she’d dropped Roz from her life. For one thing, “Glasshouse” scandalized her Lebanese grandmother, which was a reward in itself. She was working a double ticket on the Enceladus Project master depot, in low orbit around that particular iceball. That meant pulling shift-on-shift week after week, but Sameera got an expanded housing allocation and a fatter pay packet for her trouble. The E.P. got to schlep one less body to push green inside their habitat scrubbers. Everybody won. Her spare time was spent wiring together Big Ears, to listen for the chatter that flooded bandwidth all over the solar system. Human beings are — were — noisy. Launch control, wayfinding, birthday greetings, telemetry, banking queries, loneliness, porn. It was all out there, multiplied and ramified beyond comprehension by the combination of lightspeed lag, language barriers and sheer, overwhelming complexity. Some folks back then claimed there were emergent structures in the bandwidth, properties of the sum of all that chatter which could not be accounted for by analysis of the components. This sort of thinking had been going around since the dawn of information theory — call it information fantasy. The same hardwired pareidolia that made human beings see the hand of God in the empirical universe also made us hear Him in the electronic shrieking of our tribe. Sameera never really believed any of it, but she’d heard some very weird things listening in. In space, it was always midnight, and ghosts never stopped playing in the bandwidth. When she’d picked up a crying child on a leaky sideband squirt out of a nominally empty vector, she’d just kept hopping frequencies. When she’d tuned on the irregular regularity of a coded data feed that seemed to originate from deep within Saturn’s atmosphere, she’d just kept hopping frequencies. But one day God had called Sameera by name. Her voice crackled out of the rising fountain of energy from an extragalactic gamma ray burst, whispering the three syllables over and over and over in a voice which resonated down inside the soft tissues of Sameera’s body, made her joints ache, jellied the very resolve of the soul that she had not known she possessed until that exact moment. Sameera Glasshouse shut down her Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks, dumped the memory, then made her way down Sameera Glasshouse shut down her Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks, dumped the memory, then made her way down to the master depot’s tiny sacramentarium. Most people who worked out in the Deep Dark were very mystical but not the least bit religious. The sort of spiritual uncertainty that required revelation for comfort didn’t mix well with the brain-numbing distances and profound realities of life in hard vacuum. Nonetheless, by something between convention and force of habit, any decent sized installation found space for a sacramentarium. A few hardy missionaries worked their trades on the E.P. just like everyone else, then spent their off-shifts talking about Allah or Hubbard or Jesus or the Ninefold Path. It was as good a way as any to pass the time. Terrified that she’d gotten hold of some true sliver of the Divine, or worse, that the Divine had gotten hold of some true sliver of her, Sameera sought to pray in the manner of her childhood. She was pretty sure the sacramentarium had a Meccascope, to point toward the center of world and mark the times for the five daily prayers. She ached to abase herself before the God of her childhood, safely distant, largely abstract, living mostly in books and the minds of the adults around her. A God who spoke from the radio was far too close. Slipping through the sacramentarium’s hatch amid the storage spaces of corridor Orange-F-2, Sameera bumped into a man she’d never seen before. He was dark skinned, in that strangely American way, and wore a long linen thawb with lacing embroidered around the neck. He also wore the small, round cap of an al-Hajji. In one hand he carried a leatherbound book — actual paper, with gilt edges, worn through long handling. A Quran, she realized. A real one, like her grandmother’s. The man said something in a language she did not understand, then added, “My pardons” in the broken-toned Mandarin pidgin so commonly spoken in the Deep Dark. “My mistake,” Sameera muttered in the same language. “You have come to pray. In search of God?” “No, no.” She was moved to an uncharacteristic fit of openness. (Her time as Mrs. Glasshouse had left her with an opaque veneer she’d not since bothered to shed.) “I’ve found God, and now I’ve come to pray.” His expression was somewhere on the bridge between predatory and delighted. “You don’t understand,” Sameera told him. “She spoke to me, out of the Deep Dark.” Another crazy, his face said, but then he hadn’t felt the buzzing in his bones. # It doesn’t matter what happened next. All that matters was that she told the imam. Revelation is like that. Put a drop of ink in a bowl of water, in a moment all the water takes on that color. The ink is gone, but the water is irreversibly changed. That was the beginning of the end. Or, for a little while, the end of the beginning. Marlys found it funny, at any rate. Another thing she used to tell me was that we are all time travelers, moving forward at a speed of one second per second. The secret to time travel was that everyone already does it. The equations balance themselves. Time has to be more than an experiential matrix — otherwise entropy makes no sense — but there’s nothing inherently inescapable about the rate at which it passes. If human thoughts moved with the pace of bristlecone pines, we would never have invented the waterwheel, because rivers flash like steam in that frame of reference. Likewise if we were mayflies — flowing water would be glacial. So much for the experiential aspect of time. As for the actual pace, well, life goes by at the speed of time. I don’t think Marlys was looking for a way to adjust that, it was just one of those things she said, but her words have always stayed with me. # In 1988 the Soviet Union spent a considerable and extremely secret sum of money on a boson rifle. Only the Nazis rivaled the Soviets for crackpot schemes and politically-filtered science. America under the Republicans was in its way crazier, but all they truly wanted was to go back to the fifties when middle-aged white men were safely in charge. The Soviets really did believe in the future, some friable concrete-lined version of it where the eternally- withering State continued to lead the workers toward a paradise of empty shelves and dusty bread. Their boson rifle was pointed at the United States, of course. Figuratively speaking. The actual device was buried in a tunnel in Siberia. More accurately, it was a tunnel in Siberia, a very special kind of linear accelerator running through kilometer after kilometer of carefully-maintained hard vacuum hundreds of meters beneath the blighted taiga. A casual misreading of quantum mechanics, combined with Politburo desperation for a way out of the stifling mediocrity that had overcome solid Marxist-Leninist thought, had led to it. An insane amount of rubles went down that hole, along with a large quantity of hard currency, not to mention the lives of hundreds of laborers and the careers of dozens of physicists. In the end, they calibrated it to secretly attack the USS Fond du Lac on patrol in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the boson rifle’s firing plan, the submarine should have roughly tripled in mass, immediately sunk with a loss of all hands, and no culpability pointing back to Moscow. Nothing happened, of course, except a terrific hum, several dozen cases of very fast moving cancer among the scientists and technicians who were too close to the primary accelerator grids, and the plug being pulled on the universe. Though we didn’t know that last bit for almost a hundred years. # Inventory of the sample bag recovered from the suit of the deceased taikonaut Radogast Yuang on his return from the First Kuiper Belt Expedition (1KBE). See specification sheet attached for precise measurement and analysis.

Three (3) narrow bolts approximately seven centimeters long, with pentagonal heads, bright metallic finish, pitted surfaces One (1) narrow bolt approximately two centimeters long, damaged end, dull metallic finish, heavily corroded One (1) flexible tab approximately eleven centimeters long, plastic-like substance, pale blue under normal lighting, pitted

It is to be noted that these finds do not correspond in materials or specification to any known components of the TKS Nanjing or any of the 1KBE’s equipment and supplies. It is also to be noted that the China National Space Administration never officially acknowledged these finds. # Lies go by at the speed of time. The truth bumbles along far behind, still looking for its first cup of coffee, while the whole world hears some other story. All revelation is a lie. It must be. The divine is an incommunicable disease, too large and splintered to fit within the confines of a primate brain. Our minds evolved to compete for fruit and pick carrion, not to comb through the parasites that drop from the clouds of God’s dreaming. But just as an equation asymptotically approaches the solution, so revelation can asymptotically approach the truth about the underlying nature of the universe. The lie narrows to the width of the whisker of a quantum cat, while the truth, poking slowly along behind, finally merges Siamese twinned to its precursor. That’s what we who remain tell ourselves. Why would I deny it? There has been a neutron bomb of the soul, cleansing the solar system, and thus the universe, of the stain that was the human race. Some of us remain, befuddled by the curse of our survival. No corpses surround us. We survivors don’t swim amid the billion-body charnel house of our species. They are gone, living on only in the dying power systems and cold-stored files and empty pairs of boots which can be found on every station, the deck of every ship, in the dusty huts and moldering marble halls on Earth and Luna and Mars. The lie that was revelation became truth, and the speed of time simply stopped for almost everyone except the few of us too soul-deaf to hear the fading rhythm of the universe. Sometimes I am thankful that Marlys could hear the music that called her up. Sometimes I curse her name for leaving me behind. My greatest fear, the one that keeps me awake most often, is that it is we survivors who vanished. Everyone else is there, moving forward at one second per second, but only our time has stopped, an infection that will make us see a glacier as fit driver for a water wheel, and even the dying of the sun as a flickering afternoon’s inconvenience. I keep waiting for the stars to slow down, their light to pool listlessly before my eyes. And you? What are you waiting for? There are answers in the Kuiper Belt debris, on the frequencies Sameera Glasshouse tapped, in the trajectory of that old Soviet weapon. All you have to do is follow them, and find the crack in the world where everything went. One of these days, that’s where I’ll go, too. <<<>>> Escape Pod 336, originally released on March 15, 2012 Download audio Read by Josh Roseman Originally appeared in Tor.com Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author

Counting Cracks By George R. Galuschak

Four of us, jammed into my sister’s Ford Festiva, going to kill the monster. Sylvia drives. The Hum has left her untouched, so she’s the only one left in town who can drive. My sister licks the palm of her hand, touches it to her nose and bumps her forehead against the steering wheel. Then she does it again. “Today would be nice, sis.” I say. I’m in the back seat with June, a twelve-year old girl clutching a teddy bear to her chest. “I’m going as fast as I can,” she tells me. “It’s bad today.” “The Shop-Rite has three hundred and fifty-seven ceiling tiles,” Michael tells me. He’s a little kid, nine years old, sitting up front with Sylvia. “I counted them.” “Inpatient oranges creep handsome banisters,” June says, rolling her eyes. “Good for you,” I say. My left leg hurts, which I guess is a good sign. My left arm feels like dead weight except for the tips of my fingers, which are tingly. “Do you count tiles, Mr. Bruschi?” Michael asks. “No. I counted cracks on the sidewalk. When I was a kid.” A sparrow collides with the windshield. It bounces off and skitters to the pavement, where it thrashes. I haven’t seen a living bird in days. It must have flown into the Hum. “Swill,” June says, pointing at the bird. “Maraschino cherries. Skittles. Cocktail weenies.” “All right. I’m ready.” Sylvia twists the key, and the car starts. We back out of the driveway. “The streets are so empty,” she says. “That’s because everyone is dead,” Michael tells her. “They listened to the Hum and went into their houses and “That’s because everyone is dead,” Michael tells her. “They listened to the Hum and went into their houses and pulled the covers over their heads and died. I had a hamster that died, once. It got real old, so it made a little nest, and then it laid down in it and died.” “We’re not dead,” I say. “Not yet,” Michael corrects me. “Give it time.” # It started a week ago. Tuesday morning, hot day, storm clouds gathering like bad thoughts. I walked out to my car. I was going to work, the way normal people do. I’m not normal, but I’ve gotten good at pretending. I saw a robin fluttering its wings on the sidewalk. At first I thought its back was broken, but when I came closer it squawked and ran onto the lawn. It gave a little hop, flapping its wings, and then hopped again. I put my hands to my temples. My head hurt. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and I could feel the beginnings of a migraine forming. I looked at the robin, hopping and flapping its wings on my lawn. It didn’t look injured; it looked like it had forgotten how to fly. I shrugged and walked away. The bird’s behavior was strange, but I needed to get to work. So I went. When I drove home that evening the sidewalks and streets were covered with birds, all squawking and flapping their wings. The bird story made the nightly news. The newswoman stood in Buehler Park surrounded by a flock of distressed pigeons. She talked too loud and stumbled over her words. Her voice sounded a bit slurred, like she was drunk. “Put something else on,” my wife said. We were eating dinner in front of the TV, the way we did when things were good between us. “All right.” I shrugged and switched the channel. We watched a movie, and I forgot all about the birds. The next morning my wife went blind. # We pull into Shop-Rite’s parking lot. Normally it’s jam-packed. They average three fender-benders a week, because the designers of the lot made the lanes too small, the spaces too tight. But today we drive right in. “This is far enough,” Sylvia says, and stops the car next to an overturned garbage can. “You can walk the rest of the way.” “You can go a bit closer, I think.” I turn to Michael, our expert. “How close can we get?” “The spygers’ kill zone is ten parking spaces out,” he says, pointing. “You can see they cleared the area of shopping carts and everything.” But Sylvia is shaking her head. “If you want to commit suicide, Jimmy, I can’t stop you. But I’m not going to have you kill the rest of us.” “Here they come,” Michael says. The spygers gallop out of the supermarket. They’re the size of ponies, with insectile bodies: head, thorax, abdomen. They skitter towards us on six legs. Their heads are blunt like hammers, their bodies covered with a fine brown fur dappled with black stripes. The spygers stop about twenty feet away and form a semi-circle. I look at Sylvia, face pale, breathing harsh, hands never leaving the steering wheel. Her knuckles are white. “Sing, sing.” June shouts, hugging the teddy bear to her chest. “See, I told you.” Michael says. From the tone of his voice you’d think we were discussing the weather. “I watched the spygers last Tuesday. I got hungry, so I went to the supermarket because that’s where you get food. I didn’t get anything to eat, but I saw how the spygers work. One of them stands guard, the rest stay in the supermarket. When somebody comes they all run out, but they won’t cross the line. As long as you don’t cross the line, it’s safe.” “What are they doing?” Sylvia asks. “They’re guarding it,” I tell her. “Whatever’s making the Hum.” “It’s symbiosis,” Michael says. “A relationship between two different species. Ants harvest aphids for the honey. Wasps use moth eggs to hatch their young. I saw it on a Discovery Channel special.” “Those things might be bugs but they don’t look like they eat honey,” I say. “The spygers aren’t bugs,” he tells me. “They look like bugs to me.” “Arthropods can’t grow that big. They don’t have skeletons.” “Let’s not argue,” Sylvia says. “Sorry.” That’s me, arguing with a kid. It wouldn’t be so bad, except I’m losing. # # “James. James.” I heard my wife calling my name. “Wake up, James.” “What’s wrong?” I opened my eyes and saw sunlight streaming through the curtains. I peeled away the covers and sat up. The left side of my body felt numb. My fingers tingled, and my teeth hurt. I heard a low monotonous drone in the background, like a dial tone. “I can’t see,” my wife said. She sat up in bed, blinking, her face and neck slick with sweat. “I’m blind.” “Jesus.” I waved my hand in front of her face and she didn’t react. “Hold on.” I limped to the living room and searched my desk drawers for a pocket flashlight. “James, where are you?” Her voice rose. “Don’t leave me.” “I’m coming.” When I stumbled back into our bedroom my wife’s face was slick with tears. I put an arm around her waist and pulled her closer. My chest tightened, my throat closed up, I felt like running; and then the panic attack passed, the way it always did. My wife pressed the side of her head against my shoulder, and for a moment I thought that it was going to be all right. “Hold on.” When I shone the pocket flashlight into her eyes the pupils constricted. “Your eyes are responding to the light,” I told her. “I’m telling you I can’t see,” my wife said. She laughed, a harsh barking sound. “And you don’t believe me.” “All right. It’s all right.” I touched her shoulder, and she brushed my hand away. “I’ll call 9-1-1.” “Don’t leave me, James.” “I left my cell phone in the kitchen. I’ll be right back.” She didn’t answer, just sank back into bed. My cell phone, fully charged, sat on the kitchen table. But when I brought it to my ear it didn’t work. There was no dial tone, nothing. “What’s happening?” my wife shouted. “James, what’s happening?” “I don’t know,” I told her. “Hang on. I’ll drive you to the hospital.” The spasms hit in the living room. I fell to the floor. I couldn’t move. I heard my wife’s screams, louder and louder, turning to sobs; I heard her stumbling about, colliding with walls; and then the sounds faded, and all I heard was the Hum. # The spygers crouch in a semi-circle, facing the car. “What are we going to do now, Mr. Bruschi?” Michael asks. “You don’t know?” I say. “I thought you knew everything.” June puts her hand over her mouth and giggles. So someone else finds Michael annoying. Sylvia twists in the seat and glares at me. “I’m sorry, Michael.” I say. “That was mean.” “That’s all right,” he tells me. But his eyes are too bright, and his lower lip quivers. I wish we didn’t have to bring Michael and June, but they get hysterical if we leave them alone. I guess I’d feel the same way if I was a kid. “Just get on with it, James.” Sylvia says. She only calls me James when she’s pissed. “All right.” I press the button and the window rolls down. The spygers don’t move, don’t rush forward to drag me out of the window and gobble me up. A cool autumn breeze blows in, crisp and clean, but I smell something else, a cross between rotten bananas and road kill. “Smell that?” Michael asks. “I bet it’s using pheromones to control the spygers.” “Could be,” I say. Or it could be all the decaying produce in the supermarket, but I don’t want another argument. I reach into the cooler sitting at my feet. Feel raw, wet meat against my fingers. The hamburger is rolled into neat spheres the size of baseballs. I toss one out the window and it drops to the ground at the lead spyger’s feet. Plop. “What are you doing?” Michael asks. “Wait and see,” I say, leaning back on the seat. The spyger pokes the meat with a claw. It lifts a chunk to its hammerhead and sniffs, a loud snuffling sound. Then it gobbles it down. The others watch, keeping a respectable distance as the spyger shovels the rest of the hamburger down its maw. It doesn’t take long. The spyger begins to sway, reeling about like a drunk. It collides with an upturned shopping cart and collapses in a heap, its legs twitching, its body convulsing, vomiting foul-smelling chunks onto the pavement. “You poisoned it,” Michael says. His eyes are huge. “You put poison in its meat and it ate it and it’s going to die.” June laughs, a loud horsey sound. Her eyes are shining. “I want my muh-mother,” Michael says, and starts to bawl. Sylvia puts her arm around his shoulder. I know it’s hard for her, because she doesn’t like being touched. Neither of us do. I don’t remember Mom touching either one of hard for her, because she doesn’t like being touched. Neither of us do. I don’t remember Mom touching either one of us. Touching wasn’t a Mom thing. Michael throws his arms around Sylvia’s neck and jams his head against her shoulder and really lets loose. Sylvia makes a face, but she doesn’t let him go, and I think about Michael’s mother, a nice woman who always smiled, always said hello. Michael won’t say what happened to her. “Get on with it,” Sylvia whispers. “I don’t want him to see this.” “All right,” I say, but June is ahead of me. She wrenches open the cooler cover and flings chunks of raw hamburger meat out the window. The spygers fall on them, greedy. “Beans! Blowtorches!” June shrieks. “Bologna sandwiches!” Her teddy bear lies on the seat, forgotten. # I woke to the feeling of someone pinching my nose. My mouth opened. A series of grunts came out. Lying on the floor, my ears ringing, I felt my body constricting, drawing into itself. When I opened my eyes I saw my sister bent over me. She wore her Wednesday outfit, stonewashed jeans and a lime-green blouse. I saw her bra strap, a lighter shade of green, poking against her shoulder. She’d been wearing the same Wednesday clothes, bra included, for years. “Listen to me, Jimmy. You need to fight it. Fight, okay?” I moaned. My body was paralyzed. I could move my head back and forth, and that was about it. “Remember when we were kids?” she went on. “Remember when you counted cracks? Do that again. Count cracks. It’s the only way.” So I looked at the floor and I counted cracks. I started by counting tiles. My living room had four hundred and eighty tiles, a nice even number. Each tile-side counted as a crack, which meant one tile equaled four cracks, a row of twenty-four tiles equaled ninety-six cracks, and twenty rows of twenty-four tiles equaled 1,920 cracks. 1,920 cracks counted twenty-four times equaled 46,080 cracks. I counted cracks for hours, my mind falling back on the old patterns, calculating, and by the end of the day I could move my right arm. Sylvia stayed with me. She fed me, she cleaned me, she talked to me, just like she had done for Mom. After three days I could move. My left side didn’t work too well anymore, but if I took it slow I could manage. I was alive. But my wife was dead, along with the rest of the town. # “I’m going in,” I say. It’s been five minutes since the last sypger keeled over. “Go then,” Sylvia tells me. Michael sprawls against the passenger seat, mouth wide open, sleeping. “We’ll wait for you.” “Don’t wait too long.” I struggle with the door handle, my fingers clumsy. June reaches over and opens it for me. “Thanks.” “Snausages,” she says. “We’ll wait for you.” Sylvia repeats the words. My left leg is bad today, so it takes forever to get out of the car. Sylvia doesn’t help. She stares straight ahead, face set, arms folded to her chest. When I finally make it out I lean against the Festiva’s side, panting and sweating. June hands me the shotgun, which I tuck under my right arm. And then she gives me my cane. “Let’s just get out of here,” Sylvia says. “We can drive away. Get help.” “If you have to go, go.” I say. “We spent hours arguing about this last night, sis. I’m all argued out.” “There might be more spygers in the supermarket,” she says. “If that’s true, I’m dead.” When I try to grasp the cane in my left hand it clatters to the ground. “Do you have to go, Jimmy? Do you have to do it?” “I’m going to kill it, Sylvia. Whatever it is.” “You always did have a nasty streak,” she says. I shrug. Kneel, very slowly, and retrieve my cane. “I love you,” she tells me. I start the long walk to the supermarket. And then I hear the car door open, and June runs up. She slides her arm under mine, propping me up. “June, go back.” I tell her. “It’s not safe.” “Toasters,” she says. “Go back to the car,” I say, but June shakes her head. If she wants to follow me, I’m in no shape to stop her. There’s nothing I can do. Well, I could turn around and head for the car. She wouldn’t go in to the market by herself. But I’m not turning back. Better that we stick together, then. “Stay with me,” I say. “Don’t leave my side.” June nods. “Why would you want to come with me?” I ask, giving it one last try. “We’ll probably die in there.” June grins, a slow hot grin that shows lots of teeth. She rears back and kicks a spyger in the head. “Don’t do that,” I tell her, looking down at the spyger’s body. The top of its hammerhead is smooth and unmarred. “They don’t have eyes,” I say. June shrugs, a so-what? gesture. “They’re blind,” I tell her. “So we’ve got to be quiet. You understand? Be quiet. In case there’s any more in the supermarket.” “Baby shampoo,” June says. She nods, just to let me know she gets it. The entrance to the Shop-Rite is open, the electronic doors torn from their hinges. We walk in. Shattered glass crunches under our feet. The lights are still on. Someone must have turned on the back-up generator. Canned goods litter the ground, and the stench of rotting vegetables fills the air. June gasps. Then she puts her hand over her mouth. I look down the aisle. See the spyger, bigger than a horse, galloping towards us. # I looked down at my wife, lying on the bed. She wore her baby blue bathrobe, the one I’d given her for her birthday. A slipper hung from her right foot. She’d knocked the comforter to the floor. She was curled up into a ball, hands over her ears, mouth stretched open in a silent scream. “I’m sorry, Jimmy.” Sylvia said. “I couldn’t help her. When I got here she was already gone.” “That’s all right,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I cleared my throat. “How are your cats doing?” Sylvia had three of them, all large and well-fed. “Socks died this morning. He stopped eating.” Sylvia said, her eyes filling up. “Pumpkin curled up into a ball and died. Munchkin started grooming herself and wouldn’t stop. She bit chunks out of herself until she bled to death.” “I’m sorry, sis.” I put a hand on her shoulder and watched her cry. I envied her, being able to cry. My wife was dead, and I couldn’t cry. The grief was locked down so deep I couldn’t even feel it. I wish I could say it was because of the Hum, that the Hum had shut me down emotionally as well as physically. But it wasn’t the Hum. That part was all me. And that’s when I knew I was going to kill the Hum, whatever it was. “Sorry.” Sylvia wiped her eyes. “Every time I think I’m all cried out, it starts up again.” “Did the Hum kill everyone in town?” I asked. “Not everyone. There’s Michael Johnson. He’s nine years old. He comes into the library with his mother and takes out fifty books at a time.” She grimaces. “Or he used to.” “And that’s it?” “No. There’s also June Dorringer. She’s twelve years old. Her family lives down the block from me. I heard June crying, so I went in. Her family is dead, but June is all right. Except the Hum impaired her.” “What do you mean?” “She can’t talk. She can think all right, but the words that come out are gibberish. Michael and I seem to be the only people who are immune. I guess the voices in our heads are louder than the Hum.” She laughed, a bit too loud. “Anyway, they’re downstairs in your den, watching old episodes of Cheers. I brought my DVDs with me.” I picked up the comforter and threw it over my wife’s body. Smoothed it over. “What about the rest of the world?” “I have no idea,” Sylvia said. “I haven’t seen a car or a plane in days. The TV and radio don’t work. So I don’t know if it’s just here, or if the rest of the world’s been affected.” “What do you think happened?” I ask. “Was it a military experiment? An alien invasion? Some kind of nerve gas?” “Who knows?” Sylvia said, shrugging. “Does it really matter?” “Of course it matters.” “Things don’t always make sense. There isn’t always a reason.” She sighed. “There may be other people alive in town. But they’re in their houses, hiding.” “Why would they hide?” “Why would they hide?” “Because they’re scared,” Sylvia said. “Scared, and ashamed.” And her voice cracked a little bit. # I toss the shotgun over the spyger’s head. It hits the ground with a clatter. The spyger slides to a halt at the top of the aisle, confused, swiveling its head back and forth. June and I stand, frozen, less than two feet away. If I reached out I could touch it. We should be dead. The spyger can’t see us, but it has other senses. Smell, probably, and it can hear just fine. I look at June. Her eyes are huge, like saucers. Tears trickle down her cheeks. But she keeps both hands over her mouth and doesn’t make a sound. The spyger sneezes, a loud explosive belch. It wheels suddenly, colliding with a shelf, and I realize why we aren’t dead. The spyger is sick. It reeks of road-kill and rotten bananas. Drool spills from its open mouth. The Hum is killing it, also. My fingers curl around a can of Chunky Tomato Soup. I throw the can as hard as I can, and it hits the far wall, and the spyger gallops after it, hissing like an enraged steam kettle. Its head hits the wall with a crack. It bounces back and tumbles to the floor. I almost laugh. Instead I wait until the spyger has regained its feet, and then I throw another can. The spyger chases it straight into the aisle divider. Cans of baked beans tumble onto its head. It rises, shaky. June and I throw cans at the walls for almost a half-hour. We watch as the spyger kills itself, slowly, in the grips of a compulsion it can’t control. Leaping, colliding, falling, getting up, again and again and again. # I counted cracks when I was a kid. My sister touched things. We were a pair, the two of us. My mother used to say we’d fallen out of our cribs as babies. It was a joke, I guess, but I was just a kid and I didn’t know that, so one day I asked her how come she’d let us fall out of our cribs. I still remember the look on her face. Autumn was a bad time for both of us. Sylvia tried to touch each and every leaf on the way to school. I pushed them back and forth with my feet, and tried to count them. Leaves weren’t cracks, but they covered the cracks, and so they counted as cracks, and I counted them. That was my reasoning, anyway. And then it stopped. I woke one morning in October, and the urge to count cracks was gone. It was like an alarm clock went off in my head. I was cured. That’s what I thought, anyway, at the time. But Sylvia was as bad as ever. When we walked to school together she still touched things, iron railings, mailboxes, trees. One day I got tired of waiting. Sylvia was licking the palm of her hand and touching a telephone pole and I just kept walking. Sylvia watched me go. I saw her face, the way it sort of crumpled. But she didn’t call out, or tell me to stop. I wouldn’t have stopped, anyway. # “I’ll get the—” I say, and then the Hum gets louder, like someone’s turned a radio dial and kicked up the volume. June screams and presses her hands against her head. I topple to the floor. My left side is dead, my ears are ringing, my body is constricting. But the floor of the Shop-Rite is scuffed, and scuffs count as cracks. I count twenty- seven cracks seven times, and then I feel pins and needles in my leg, and I can get up. Barely. If I fall again I don’t think I’ll be getting up. I see June, hands over her head, curled up into a little ball like a dead bug. I feel a burning in the pit of my belly. She’s twelve years old, and I’ve killed her. She’s dead. I’m sure she’s dead, she has to be dead, because I can’t deal with her right now, my strength is fading, and I need to kill the monster. I have to walk away. The way I walked away from my wife. The way I walked away from my sister, years ago. The way I walked away from every single goddamn thing in my life I couldn’t deal with. Something in my chest gives. I limp over to June. Shake her shoulder. When she doesn’t respond I pinch her arm, hard. She uncurls. Her eyes fix on mine. She opens her mouth, but all that comes out is a harsh croak. “June. Get up,” I say. “Come on. You can do it.” I hold out my hand. She takes it. After the third try she makes it to her feet. “It’s all right,” I tell her. “It’s going to be okay. When we kill it everything will be all right. Things will go back to normal. You’ll be able to talk again.” June points at her throat. Makes a croaking sound. “I know. I’m sorry. I count cracks, and that makes it better for me. I don’t know what you do, if you count or touch things or whatever. If you have a ritual, use it. It’s the only thing that can fight the Hum.” touch things or whatever. If you have a ritual, use it. It’s the only thing that can fight the Hum.” June’s eyes widen. In recognition? I don’t know. I’ve never been very good with people, at reading them, their wants and fears. She hugs me, and then she’s off, running down the aisle. I turn to the spyger, lying on its back, its legs twitching. It has a backbone. I know because I heard it snap after its last collision with the wall. June runs up holding the shotgun in her arms. “I soaped the herring,” she says, handing it to me. “You snowshoed it.” “Thanks,” I say, taking it from her. “Prime numbers. I glork them. Up here.” She taps her head. “Didn’t know. Would have bicycled it sooner.” “I’m sorry, June. I should have told you.” “That’s spaghetti,” she says, touching my arm. We walk towards the spyger. It hears us coming. It tries to rise, but it can’t. It doesn’t want to fight. Not anymore. It’s trying to run away. “Turn away,” I tell June. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I want to see.” I jam the shotgun into the spyger’s mouth. Its jaws snap shut and it gnaws at the shotgun, feeble, like a baby sucking its mother’s tit. They fucked up. They’re stronger than us. They’re faster than us. Doesn’t matter. They’re bugs. I don’t care what Michael says. They’re bugs. And we’ve been squashing bugs for ten thousand years. I pull the trigger. # My sister graduated high school. She never went to college, even though her grades were good enough. Instead she got a job at the local library shelving books. She would walk down the aisles, lightly touching the books, rearranging the ones that were misshelved. It was a job she liked, I guess. I never asked her because I was too busy going through the motions, college, job, marriage, getting older. Sylvia moved into her own place, a little one-bedroom apartment above a laundromat that she shared with three cats. She went to the movies every Friday, no matter what was playing. She wore the same clothes, according to the day of the week. People talked about her, they called her the Licking Lady, but she didn’t seem to care. She even seemed happy. I hope she was happy. And then Mom had her stroke, and Sylvia moved back into our old house and spent five years taking care of her, and that’s when I re-entered my sister’s life. I started visiting. I bought groceries. I helped her clean. I ate over three times a week, always the same food, and on nights when things were bad with my wife, I slept in my old room. Sylvia tolerated me. She even seemed glad to see me. # I throw down the shotgun. Suddenly I’m exhausted. “Keep going,” June says, tugging at my arm. “We’ve got to keep going, Mr. Bruschi.” She slides her arm under my shoulder, propping me up. We walk to the back of the store, where the Hum is stronger. We pass containers of purple meat, putrefying fish rotting on bare white slabs, the ice cubes melted away. I don’t see any bugs; the Hum must have killed them, too. The back room is brightly lit and full of sharp objects, rows of glittering knives, gleaming machines, slicers and dicers. I see the meat locker, the door closed and bolted. That’s where it lives. Must be. So it needs cold air. The Hum rises a notch. My left eye droops shut like a drawn curtain. My left fingers curve into a claw. I fumble at the lock with my right hand. June pushes my hand away and unlatches the door. It swings open. I hear her scream. The grayish lump covers the far wall, like a wasp’s nest or a tumor. It has eyes, a pair of them, huge eyes, no lashes, opening and closing, blinking lazily. Kitten eyes. The Hum becomes a scream in my head. # “Sylvia.” It was my mother speaking. She sat on her favorite chair, a quilt curled around her knees, a purring cat “Sylvia.” It was my mother speaking. She sat on her favorite chair, a quilt curled around her knees, a purring cat on her lap. We’d just finished eating dinner, pot roast with green beans and mashed potatoes. Which meant it was Thursday. “What is it, Mom?” My sister was watching an old episode of Cheers. “I know I haven’t been a perfect mother,” she said, clearing her throat. “I know it. But I love you. I just wanted you to know.” “That’s nice.” Sylvia didn’t look away from the TV. “I love you too, Mom.” “There are treatments. For your problem.” Mom tapped her head. “You can get treatment.” Sylvia froze. Her left cheek twitched, and then smoothed over. “Good idea,” she said. “I’ll get treatment. And while I’m at it I’ll pay for someone to watch you so I can go to college. My job at the library will pay for it, right? And then I’ll fall in love and have kids. After all, I’m only thirty- nine years old. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, right?” “Sylvia—” “Don’t do this to me, Mom.” Sylvia said. “If you do love me. Don’t.” Mom nodded. Ten minutes later she was asleep, her mouth wide open, snoring. Sylvia went to bed early. I didn’t sleep over. I went home and slept on the couch. And that was the last time anyone in our family ever said anything. # I topple to the floor. Something tears at my head, its breath wet and hungry. And then I hear June. “2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13,” she shrieks, leaping over me. I see a butcher knife in her right hand. “17, 19, 23, 29, 31.” She plunges the knife into the kitten eyes, over and over. The Hum wavers, and then dies. I struggle to my feet. June is chopping the gray lump into pieces, spitting out numbers. When the butcher knife falls out of her hands she starts beating at it with her fists. “June, stop it. Stop it.” My voice is hoarse. I hold out my arms. June turns away from the gray lump and runs to me. She puts her arms around my waist and squeezes so hard it feels like my spine is about to break. I hug her back. The top of her head pokes against my chin, and I can smell her shampoo, the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo she’s washed her hair with. I look over her head, at the gray lump, already starting to disintegrate. It’s dead. The Hum is gone. # Yesterday Michael saw an airplane, trailing white spume, streaking across the sky like an angry hornet. We all agree it’s a sign. There are twenty-seven of us now. I spent the last week walking up and down the streets, looking for survivors. And I found survivors, twenty-three children, half-starved, huddled in closets and basements, hiding. The Hum killed the rest of the adults. Once you get past a certain age, you set. You aren’t flexible enough. Today is the day. We’re going. We’ll load everyone onto the school bus. Sylvia will drive. My left side still doesn’t work too well, and I don’t think it ever will. We’ll leave town and drive until we come to a border. We’ll say, here we are. We’re not going away. And then we’ll go to work the way we do, without pretending. <<<>>> Escape Pod 333, originally released on March 22, 2012 Download audio Read by Mat Weller Originally appeared in Strange Horizons Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author Book Review: “Out of Oz” by Gregory Maguire

The following review contains spoilers for the first three “Wicked Years” novels. # I’ve never seen the stage version of Wicked, but when I saw the book in the bookstore, I bought it and read it. I’ve always enjoyed Oz, from the original film to the original Baum books to the newer retellings (Tin Man, The Wiz, etc). And I enjoyed Wicked. I didn’t really care for Son of a Witch, and I thought A Lion Among Men was pretty blah, but since Out of Oz was supposed to be the conclusion of the Gregory Maguire “Wicked Years” series, I figured it was worth taking a look. Perhaps I should’ve just learned my lesson.

All of the Maguire Oz books start slow — very slow — and take many years, if not decades, to complete. They get good toward the end, but getting there is a long, sometimes arduous journey. Out of Oz was no different. It begins with a very long Dorothy story, sending her back to Oz so she, along with pretty much everyone else we’ve known along the way, can be in the book. Maguire included dozens of Oz characters — many in passing mention only — that readers of the Baum novels might recognize, including Jellia Jamb, Jack Pumpkinhead, and even the Woggle- Bug. But for the most part, this book focuses on Rain, granddaughter of Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) and daughter of Liir (the son of a witch) and Candle (a Quadling with the power to see the present). The beginning of the novel, to me, was quite off-putting — it jumped from Rain’s long-lost memories to the Time Dragon to Glinda and back again until, finally, the plot got on track. It turns out that, sometime between the end of Wicked and the end of A Lion Among Men, Munchkinland seceded from Oz and took with it the nation’s largest source of fresh water, a lake mostly in Munchkinland territory called Restwater. The first act of the book takes place in and around Glinda’s country home — she is now the Lady Chuffrey and a former Throne Minister (president) of Oz. Soldiers usurp her home and lands in their attempt to take Restwater back for Oz, and it is at this point we meet Rain, who is a young girl sweeping the floors. We don’t know why Rain is important; we just know that she is. Eventually Rain departs Glinda’s home with the Time Dragon — a machine important to the three previous books, run by a dwarf named Mr. Boss. With the Dragon we find Brrr (the Cowardly Lion), his wife Ilianora (daughter of Elphaba’s baby-daddy Fiyero), and the Grimmerie (a magic book that Elphaba once owned, now locked safely away in the Dragon). The travelers end up in Quadling Country (the south of Oz) and spend a year there* before finally meeting up with Liir and Candle, where Rain gets the whole story of her life. The second act of the book focuses mostly on Rain, with detours into Dorothy’s trial for murder (she did, after all, kill two women the last time she was in Oz), and also introduces the character Tip, a boy about Rain’s age (maybe kill two women the last time she was in Oz), and also introduces the character Tip, a boy about Rain’s age (maybe slightly older). I think you know what will happen between the two of them, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it except to say that, if you’ve read the Baum books… well… what happens to Tip is pretty similar when you compare the Baum books to the Maguire ones. Act three is the grand finale. I can’t tell you much about it, except to say that after the climax the book goes on for another 100 pages** before ending in what, to me, was a rather unsatisfying fashion. I don’t need a happy ending, but I want to be satisfied. As with the previous Oz books, Maguire does a masterful job tying his own interpretation of Oz into the Baum version. As someone who’s read about twenty of the original Oz books***, I appreciated the inclusion of events and characters from the original stories. I wasn’t surprised by what happens to Tip because I’d read it before, although I was waiting throughout most of the book for it to occur, so that was interesting. His worldbuilding is excellent, as is his characterization, and never once did I feel that I had learned either too much or too little about a place or a character. It’s also very funny in places — especially the parts with Daffy and Mr. Boss. I think my biggest problem with the book was its time-scale. I realize that makes me somewhat of a hypocrite, given that my favorite book takes place over about the same scale (ten or so years) and its sequels occur almost twenty years after that, but there was just something about the way Maguire cavalierly tossed off “a year passed” or “a year later” that turned me off to the story. It took away from its urgency, and in a book that takes place against the backdrop of a nation at war, that is problematic for me. Also, as I said, I found the coda (the part after the climax) unsatisfying. All in all, I found Out of Oz to be a good book, mostly enjoyable and mostly interesting, although it definitely wasn’t as good as Wicked — which, admittedly, suffered from many of the same problems. If you’ve read the other three Wicked Years books, you’ll probably like it just as much as you liked those. However, if you’ve only read Wicked and haven’t really wanted to pick up the others before now… I’m afraid I’ll have to suggest that you pass on them. # Note to Parents: I would rate this book a hard PG-13 or soft R. It contains lots of bad language, some violence, prurient humor, and a few sex scenes. There are mentions of self-inflicted mutilation, but it’s not actually shown, only discussed. I think teens could handle it, because none of those things are pervasive. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children. # * There’s a fascinating treatise in the book about how time is measured in Oz, but even if you consider a year to be “four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter”, that’s a long time to do absolutely nothing germane to the plot. ** I have the font set pretty large on my Kindle app, and according to it, the book was 1002 pages. The actual printed novel is 592, so if I do some math, that tells me it’s actually closer to 50 additional pages. Most of it contains whining on the part of Rain, sadly. *** Admittedly, I read them about 20 years ago, so my memory might be muddled, but I did read them. <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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. Three Dragons, Three Tattoos: a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Part 1 of 2)

The following article contains spoilers for both the novel and filmed versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It contains discussions of adult material contained in both. Reader discretion is advised. This is the first part of a two-part article. # I’m not quite sure how it happened, but Stieg Larsson’s novel of murder, intrigue, history, and hacking, Men Who Hate Women (published in the U.S. as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), became a nationwide best-seller. Well, okay, I know how it happened. It’s a good, interesting book. But compared to other popular American authors — Grisham, Roberts, Connelly, Reichs, and so on — Larsson’s style of writing doesn’t really fit. The first hundred pages are a combination of dry-as-dust infodumps about Swedish financial journalism interspersed with a somewhat- clinical account of an intelligent young woman trapped in the Swedish social work system. Readers have to deal with dozens of characters, many with names they’re not used to reading. The setting is probably unfamiliar. The characters’ motivations are often unexpected. Still, for whatever reason, Dragon Tattoo became a sensation in the U.S. It was only a matter of time until someone made a film of it.

The thing is, someone already did. And that someone is Niels Arden Oplev, a Swedish director. [NB: He's actually Danish. Sorry about the mix-up.] The cast? Swedish. The setting? Sweden. The language? You guessed it: Swedish. I first saw this film in 2011, after I first read Dragon Tattoo and its sequels (I’ve since seen all three Swedish Millennium movies*). I thought it was pretty darn good, and that it was a decent interpretation of the novel. And then it was announced that David Fincher, an American director probably best known for Fight Club and Se7en, would be helming an English-language version of the film. Now that I’ve seen both versions of the film, I can actually say that they’re both good adaptations, although both have their downfalls. The Script** Let’s start by comparing the American film to the novel, because the movie is an adaptation of the book, not of the Swedish film. And, just in case you didn’t catch it before, here there be spoilers.

I think, for starters, my biggest problem is the way Lisbeth was characterized in the movie. I just finished reading the book for the second time, right after I saw both versions of the film, and in the American version of the film I was quite surprised at just how heavily they played up a throwaway line in the book, about how Blomkvist muses that Salander might have some form of Asperger’s syndrome. Maybe she does; maybe she doesn’t. But in the book, after the climax — Salander saving Blomkvist from Martin — there’s another hundred pages or so of the two of them getting closer. They spend several weeks together piecing together Wennerstrom’s evildoings — the stuff Vanger just hands over to Mikael in the film is actually pretty well-researched by Lisbeth in the book — and it’s clear that Lisbeth cares for him. In fact, she actually admits to herself that she thinks she’s in love with him. Other than that, there wasn’t a ton left out from the book, and anything that was wasn’t necessary. The film starts after Blomkvist has been convicted and sentenced — in the book, he has a three-month jail sentence, but I didn’t mind so much missing that, especially since we would’ve needed an infodump on the Swedish criminal justice system (which we’re going to get anyway in the third film, should it be made). Some shortcuts were taken in the film vis a vis Greger Vanger, and Mikael’s relationship with Cecilia wasn’t included but it also wasn’t truly necessary except to cement Mikael’s position as a ladies man. Also, the book spends much more time on hacking, and how important Plague is to Lisbeth’s activities as the hacker “Wasp”, but I can understand why that was left out of the film — too complicated.

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander Oh, one other interesting small note: in the book, it’s noted that Lisbeth is a redhead with dyed-black hair. In the American film, we can see Lisbeth’s light eyebrows — the actress has light hair, so it works. (In the Swedish film, the actress has dark hair, and I guess it wasn’t important enough to lighten her eyebrows. Or anything else.) The ending was substantially changed, as I’ll discuss again when I compare and contrast the two Harriet Vangers. I wasn’t unhappy about it, and it did make sense. Now, to compare the two films; that’s a horse of a different color. A lot of it is contained in characterization and writing, but I’ll be saving the characterization for later. The most notable differences (other than the scene, which I’ll talk about at the end of the article) include:

The broken laptop — In the Swedish film, Lisbeth is so self-absorbed that she bumps into the guy who leads his friends in beating her up in the subway station. However, in the American version, she’s simply robbed and fights back. Both have the same outcome, however. Interestingly, in the Swedish version, Bjurman only gives her 7,000 kronor, which he says is “enough” to buy a decent computer; in the American one, he gives her everything she asked for. Mikael’s family — In the Swedish version, Mikael is made more human by spending time with his family. However, later in the film he doesn’t meet up with his daughter (which happens in both the book and the American film). Instead, in the Swedish film, Lisbeth figures out that the numbers in Harriet’s diary are Bible quotes and e-mails the information to Mikael. Mikael (Daniel Craig) confronts Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) in her apartment. He brings her breakfast and coffee as well. The confrontation between Lisbeth and Mikael — I think this is handled best in the book, the way Mikael just barges into her apartment and offers her breakfast. In both films, Mimmi is present, having just spent the night with Lisbeth; however, in the films Mikael is more severe about confronting her. The American film is more accurate in that he finds her out by way of an unpublished press release, while the Swedish one is related to the Biblical revelation. I think the Swedish film handled it a bit ham-handedly, though it was consistent with the Mikael character that had been established to that point. Lisbeth and Mikael’s road trip — Until I reread the book, I’d forgotten that the road trip in the Swedish version of the film wasn’t actually there. They did go somewhere (I forget where at the moment), but it wasn’t a journey around Sweden to learn more about the murders noted in Harriet’s diary. The American film shows Lisbeth doing the investigating on her own. Sex in the cabin — The American film used Mikael’s being grazed by the bullet to build the rapport between him and Lisbeth, and also to get Mikael out of his clothes. Lisbeth seems particularly Asperger-like in the scene where she undresses in front of him. In the Swedish version, she’s simply forward — not at all detached. She also sleeps with him more than once, and we see Mikael becoming more interested in her past and actually starting to care. Who’s on top? — I don’t remember the sexual mechanics of Mikael and Lisbeth’s first time together as recorded in the book, but the two films handled it a bit differently. The Swedish one lets Lisbeth stay on top the entire time, lets her stay in control; I believe this was done to further cement her need to be in control of every aspect of her life (underscoring what was taken away from her by Bjurman). In the American film, Daniel Craig does “the move”, the one seen in so many films but so rarely in actual bedrooms — the “pick up the girl and turn her over without losing the connection” move. It looks romantic and sexy… but even if Lisbeth trusts Mikael enough at that point to sleep with him, she’s still close to what happened with Bjurman and I don’t know if I believe that her character would’ve allowed Mikael to do that move. I do think some of this is related to the time aspect in the book — between the Bjurman scene and Lisbeth sleeping with Mikael, Mikael spends three months in jail. The Swedish film puts the jail term at the end, but it’s still clear that at least some time has passed. The American one compresses time even further — not really a problem overall, but in this case, it made the Lisbeth character behave in a less-believable way. Sex in London — This happens in the book and the American film, but not in the Swedish film. The American film plays it off really amusingly (Mara delivers the “just a minute” line brilliantly), but at that point I’m not sure why they were having sex at all. By that point in the book, Lisbeth and Mikael were comfortable enough together to have sex when the mood took them, but in the American film there just wasn’t enough for me to believe it happened organically. Lisbeth’s mother — I think it was a foregone conclusion that there would be three Swedish films, which is why we spent so much time on Lisbeth’s mother and father. As I said, in the book her mother dies at the end, but in the Swedish film she’s still alive. She’s not even mentioned in the American version, which really skims over Lisbeth’s past — far too much, I think.

I do want to go back to the bit about Mimmi: in the book, enough explanation is provided for us to understand that Lisbeth isn’t gay, although in both films the fact that she’s with Mimmi so relatively-soon after the Bjurman atrocity Lisbeth isn’t gay, although in both films the fact that she’s with Mimmi so relatively-soon after the Bjurman atrocity makes the viewer think she is, thereby making viewers even more sympathetic. However, in the book the situation is clearly explained and also sets the stage for future books by establishing Lisbeth’s friendship with a group of like- minded rocker girls. It also makes her night spent with Mimmi much more sensible; in the Swedish film, she just slept with a girl, no explanation, and in the American one we see her hit a club but we have no idea that she has any history with this person. In short, what was a well-established scene becomes nothing more than shock value. Finally, the ending: in the book, Martin simply crashes his car into a logging truck and is killed on impact. Unfortunately for filmed audiences, this wasn’t enough. In the Swedish film, Lisbeth sees Martin’s car go over an embankment and then she watches as it catches fire. She later admits she would’ve been able to save him, but chose not to. The American version, though, I think suffered from the need for American audiences to have a hero who kills the bad guy. After Martin runs, Lisbeth takes his gun and chases him. He crashes his car in front of the convenience store in Hedestad, and that’s where Lisbeth finds him. She cocks the gun, is ready to shoot… and then the car catches fire and explodes. Lisbeth, therefore, doesn’t actually get to do it, although she does witness it (as with the Swedish film). Before she takes the gun, though, she asks Mikael’s permission to kill him. Clearly he deserves it — he’s a multiple murderer — but the line felt kind of lame to me, as if we needed to have a quip to lighten the mood. The mood didn’t deserve what was done to it. Music If you’ve been reading the EP blog for a while, you know I notice music in films. The Swedish film had pretty much just incidental music — nothing really special — but for the American version the producers hired Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and they did not disappoint. A combination of traditional and modern soundtracks, both hard rock and symphonic. I was a little surprised by the remake of the Bryan Ferry song “Is Your Love Strong Enough?”, which I first heard in the Threesome soundtrack (one of my all-time favorites), playing over the credits, but I guess it made sense given the ending. Location Clearly Fincher had a lot more money to work with than Oplev, and he put it to use. Although both films take place in Sweden, and both were filmed at least partially there, the Fincher version is darker, grittier, and more realistic. It had a Fight Club vibe to it. The Swedish version, to me, felt more like a movie than an actual place, even though I’m fairly certain that Oplev did a lot more location shooting simply because he is from the region (he happens to be from Denmark). IMDB indicates that, with the exception of the ending sequence, all of the Swedish version was filmed in that country, while the U.S. version was filmed primarily in Sweden but also partly in the U.S. The most obvious use of non-location shooting I observed was the scene in which Frode talks to Blomkvist in the cabin; if you look carefully at the wall behind Frode (I believe the refrigerator is to his left, our right), it moves in an odd way, suggesting to me that it wasn’t really there. Perhaps the cabin was at a movie studio in Sweden, but it wasn’t a real cabin. The Dragon Tattoo The film — and translated book — is named The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for a reason: Lisbeth Salander has a dragon tattoo. In the book, it definitely plays a part; in the Swedish film, it’s a massive thing on her back that goes all the way down one leg and we see it every time we see her with her clothes off. Noomi Rapace's dragon tattoo But where is it in the American film? When Lisbeth was in the shower, or having sex with Mikael, I can barely remember seeing it. It’s the name of the movie; shouldn’t we get a good look at the thing? And when we did, it seemed so much smaller than it should have been.

Rooney Mara's dragon tattoo I think, perhaps, that was what most disappointed me about the American version — it was more about the core idea of the book (Men Who Hate Women, its original Swedish title) than the tattoo itself. However, no one would’ve understood if the film was called Men Who Hate Women; the book phenom is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so calling the movie something different would’ve been an epic failure to capitalize on its popularity — something definitely necessary, given how hard it is for R-rated films to make as much money as PG-13 ones. # Part two will cover casting, characterization, and the scene. You know the one. # Note to Parents: These films — and the book — contain graphic violence, explicit language, explicit sex, and rape. I usually say you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children, but I hope that, in this case, I don’t have to. # * Millennium is the name of the magazine where the main character, Blomkvist, is a writer. The entire series is sometimes referred to as the “Millennium Trilogy”. ** Since I wrote the various parts of the article out-of-order, I apologize in advance if some of it seems a bit repetitive later on. <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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. Three Dragons, Three Tattoos: a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Part 2 of 2)

The following article contains spoilers for both the novel and filmed versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It contains discussions of adult material contained in both. Reader discretion is advised. This is the second part of a two-part article. # Casting and Characterization The two main characters in the film are Mikael Blomkvist, a 40-something disgraced journalist convicted of slandering a major financier, and Lisbeth Salander, a 24-year-old genius with a dark history and a major problem relating to people.

In the Swedish version, Mikael is played very seriously by Michael Nyqvist. He really looks like a journalist — he’s not glamorous and he doesn’t dress well. He exercises, he cooks with his nieces, and he has some genuinely amusing lines in the film. To me, he seems a full, well-rounded character. In the American version, Daniel Craig — best known to American audiences as James Bond — portrays Blomkvist. Because Craig is… well, let’s be honest here… pretty darn studly, it’s up to both the actor and the director to make him appear more like the Blomkvist of the novels. As such, Craig affects mannerisms that Nyqvist didn’t have to — he wears his glasses around one ear when not using them, and he rather ostentatiously uses what looks like a Moleskine notebook. I’d have to give the edge to Nyqvist in the case of Mikael’s character — because he gets the look down, he doesn’t have to affect mannerisms. Also, when he celebrates, he looks much happier about it than Craig; I don’t think I’ve ever really seen Daniel Craig look happy when he’s acting. As for the other main character, Noomi Rapace (Swedish version) runs away with it. Rapace is small, skinny-but- muscular, and very expressive. Even when her face is shut down to emotion, it’s still quite clear what Lisbeth Salander is feeling. In all ways I found her more believable than Rooney Mara. Mara, who was until this film probably best known as the sister of Kate Mara (American Horror Story), gets the look down pretty well, although a lot of that has to do with costuming and makeup. I think, unfortunately, Mara’s portrayal of Lisbeth suffers from writing and directorial issues. In the novel, Lisbeth has had a tough life, but she still has emotions; in the American film, Lisbeth only has anger and diffidence (and, at the end, sadness). I think the biggest difference in their characters is the way they play the “holy crap, Martin’s the killer” scene: Mara’s Salander does rush to save Mikael, but Rapace’s really makes me think she cares about him. Again, writing and direction — even during the sex scene, Mara seems disconnected, whereas it’s very clear (via acting) that Rapace’s Salander enjoys the hell out of sex. (Mara does have a great line late in the American version during another sex scene, but even then it’s more like she’s using Blomkvist than they’re sharing something.) One portrayal I want to also pay additional attention to is that of the adult Harriet Vanger (hey, I told you the articles had spoilers). Although in both cases she only had a limited amount of screen time, the reveals the actresses had to… um… reveal… made it important that a talented actress was cast. And, because of changes made to the ending in the American version, they had to look vastly different as well. In the Swedish version, Ewa Froling had to look like she’d lived for forty years in the Australian outback, and she did — she was still blond, but her face was weathered and tanned. Because of that appearance, I’m sad to say that I couldn’t get over how silly she looked even as she discussed being abused by her father and brother. This is the actual ending from the novel, by the way. Joely Richardson, portraying Harriet in the American version, was more convincing to me as Harriet. First shown as pretending to be Anita Vanger after the real Anita’s death, Harriet was revealed to be a financier living in London. She looked more like the girl who played 16-year-old Harriet than Froling did in the Swedish version. Again it comes down to writing — and probably the need to not marginalize the role for a well-known actress like Richardson, as well as avoiding expensive location shooting in Australia (or somewhere that looks like it). Other important actors and characters in the film: Erika Berger — Mikael’s on-again-off-again lover, played by Lena Endre (Swedish) and Robin Wright (US). My biggest problem with the American version here is that Berger is not supposed to be glamorous — and Wright plays her just as well as Endre did. The issue is with the casting of Craig; he seems too glamorous for the likes of Wright, who is made up to look like your average 45-year-old woman who’s worked all her life at a difficult job (journalism is hard; trust me). I believed Nyqvist and Endre more than Craig and Wright. Henrik Vanger — Here I give the nod to Christopher Plummer (General Chang in Star Trek VI) over the Swedish actor Sven-Bertil Taube. Plummer simply emoted better than Taube, especially at the ending; Taube’s acting occasionally seemed forced. I will give Taube a slight edge in the beginning because, instead of appealing to Blomkvist’s journalistic instincts, he appealed to his memories: in the book, both occur, but only in the Swedish film is as much attention paid to his connection with the Vangers (as a boy, Harriet and her cousin Anita used to babysit Mikael). Martin Vanger — This one is pretty much down to the writing and usage of the character. In the novel, Martin was relatively low-key until it was revealed that he’s a killer. The Swedish version (Peter Haber) was more faithful to the book in the build-up, whereas in the American one I think more foreshadowing of Martin’s activities gave Stellan Skarsgard more to do. Also, Skarsgard simply got to be more evil in the final sequence than Haber — again, writing. Advantage: Skarsgard. Beyond those four, I had occasional issues with some of the characters, but overall everyone else was in the background. Christer Malm, Dirch Frode, Cecilia Vanger, and Plague weren’t too big on the stage. It was nice to see background. Christer Malm, Dirch Frode, Cecilia Vanger, and Plague weren’t too big on the stage. It was nice to see Goran Visnjic as Armansky, despite the small role — he’ll have more to do in the sequels. There is, however, one more character worth noting, and I think you know who I’m talking about. THE Scene. You know the one I mean. Trigger warning: I am about to discuss the scenes in which Lisbeth Salander is raped. If you wish to skip this part, click here. In order to really understand why Lisbeth was put in a situation where she could be raped by someone in direct authority over her, people who haven’t read the book need to know the following: when Lisbeth was twelve, she tried to kill her abusive father by lighting him on fire. This led to her being institutionalized, and her mother also ended up in a facility (I believe she had some sort of catatonic disorder). After her release, Lisbeth responded to bullying and violence at school with violence of her own. As a teenager, she committed small crimes and was also seen in the company of older men. She was already under guardianship because she wasn’t an adult, but she remained in that situation even into adulthood because, in Sweden, that’s how the social system is. Once a person has a guardian, that person is legally charged with assisting their ward in whatever way he or she needs. In the case of Lisbeth, her guardian had been Holger Palmgren — in the American version, this is the person Lisbeth plays chess with, and who she finds on the floor having suffered a stroke. Palmgren, as Bjurman states in his moment of exposition, had let Lisbeth have free reign over her life and her finances (in the novel, it’s explained how Palmgren formed a positive relationship with Lisbeth and that she cares for him… at least as much as she cares for anyone). Bjurman, however, believed that Palmgren had not had Lisbeth — someone whose records indicated a mentally- disturbed and extremely violent individual — on a short enough leash. So far, Bjurman has not done anything wrong, per se — again, as Lisbeth’s legal guardian, he has to do what he believes is best for her.

Bjurman menaces Salander in the Swedish film The three Bjurmans are very different, though. In the novel, after being forced to perform oral sex, Lisbeth investigates Bjurman and finds that, other than what he did to her, there’s no dirt to dig up. In the Swedish film, Bjurman (Peter Andersson) is a little older, but both Bjurmans are portrayed as good-looking single men. In the American version, since being fat automatically equals being evil, a heavier actor (Yorick van Wageningen) was cast. Also, in the American version, Bjurman has children, whereas in the other two he does not. All three behave the same way once they decide to take advantage of Lisbeth, though, and the oral sex scene is pretty much the same in all three. When I went to see the film, my friend Will said he’d heard the second rape (the one in Bjurman’s apartment) was more brutal than it was in the Swedish film. I wasn’t quite sure how that could be pulled off, since in both films Lisbeth is beaten, bound, and raped. (I noted with somewhat-clinical distraction that both Mara and Rapace scream more or less the same way.) The novel indicates that Bjurman engages in anal sex with Lisbeth, something not explicitly discussed in the Swedish film (although afterward Lisbeth does limp home — which occurs in all three versions). The American version makes it particularly explicit by having Bjurman actually say what he’s doing. Yorick van Wageningen as Bjurman in the American film Lisbeth’s “recovery” from the rape is different when comparing the book and the two films. The book is very clinical — in it, Lisbeth retreats into herself, staying in and taking painkillers and sleeping until she feels capable of fighting back. The Swedish film is similar — the limp home, the pills, the cigarettes. The American film is more explicit, showing Lisbeth breaking down in the shower, washing away the blood from the attack. While more powerful, the final scene shows something we never see Lisbeth do anywhere else in the film, and to me that makes it less consistent with the character — especially given the Asperger’s tendencies Mara (and the writer and director) gave the character. I’m more likely to believe Lisbeth turning inward than expressing her pain via tears. The revenge scene is also similar across all three presentations, although the kicking of the dildo doesn’t occur directly in the book — she kicks him, but not there. It’s much more threatening in the American version than the Swedish, being metal instead of plastic or whatever as well as much larger. In all three she shows him the video; in all three she makes her threats; in all three she tattoos him. The threatening scene in the elevator, by the way, is exclusive to the American version. (If you skipped the discussion of the rape scenes, here’s where the article continues.) Final Analysis Should you go see the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? I’d say yes: it’s a well-made film with decent acting and a coherent mystery plot. But I think that, to really get the full impact, you need to sit down and read the novel first (or, failing that, right after). The novel is tough to read — it’s very clinical and dry in many places, but it’s not boring. At least, not after the first hundred pages or so. I also think you should see the Swedish version of the film, if for no other reason than Noomi Rapace’s excellent portrayal of Lisbeth. Once you see the Swedish film, you’ll probably want to watch the second and third ones, and read the second and third books in the series as well. (For my money, the second book is probably the best of them, only slightly edging out Dragon Tattoo.)

Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist Given how much money the American Dragon Tattoo made ($76 million — the budget was $90 mil, and I expect it to hit that number soon enough), and (more importantly) how much buzz it received, I’d be extremely surprised if there aren’t adaptations of The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet’s Nest in the next year or three. I just hope they’re a little more faithful to Lisbeth’s character in future adaptations. With the American version of the film, Fincher, Zaillian (the screenwriter), and Mara have pretty much locked us into a certain portrayal of our hero. Unfortunately, that portrayal isn’t quite as accurate as what Stieg Larsson intended when he wrote the book. He didn’t want Lisbeth to be an emotionless machine who sometimes gets angry; he wanted her to be a fully-rounded character. In the Swedish film, she is so much more than what Mara played her to be. Maybe we’ll get that the next character. In the Swedish film, she is so much more than what Mara played her to be. Maybe we’ll get that the next time out. # Note to Parents: These films — and the book — contain graphic violence, explicit language, explicit sex, and rape. I usually say you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children, but I hope that, in this case, I don’t have to. <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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. Film Review: “The Hunger Games”

The following review contains moderate spoilers for both the novel and film versions of The Hunger Games. # As of this writing, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series has made her the best-selling Kindle author of all time. That’s quite an accomplishment. But even before that happened, it was inevitable that the Hunger Games phenomenon would become a film. After all, with the end of both Harry Potter and Twilight on the horizon, studios were looking for their next big book-to-movie hit. Well, they found it, and on March 23, The Hunger Games was released to American audiences.

The Hunger Games is the story of Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the coal-mining District 12 of a future America where technology isn’t ubiquitous and there are definite haves and have-nots. Katniss and her friend Gale hunt outside the District’s no-longer-electrified electric fence to supplement their limited food supply, as both have families to support — Gale has several siblings, while Katniss has her mother and younger sister Primrose. As the film begins, the 74th Annual Hunger Games is about to begin — every year, two children from each district, aged 12 through 18, are selected at random to compete in a fight to the death. The tributes, as they are called, are wined, dined, trained, clothed, and then dropped into a massive arena where they must kill each other. Only one tribute survives. Katniss goes to the Reaping — where the tributes are chosen — and, when Prim is selected, Katniss volunteers to go in her place (which is allowed, but has never happened in District 12). Along with Peeta Mellark, a baker’s son, Katniss goes to the Capitol to begin her training. Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen Once the preliminaries are complete, Katniss is dropped into the arena, where she must fight for her life. After seeing twelve tributes die in the first few minutes, she realizes the only way to survive is to use her skills to stay ahead of the others — including Peeta, who has joined up with the tributes from Districts 1 and 2 to take her out, since she’s one of the biggest threats in the arena.

But it’s not just the other tributes who have it out for Katniss, and in the end, she has to decide just what it’s worth to her to try and win the Hunger Games. My only major problem with the film was some of the cinematography and direction. I realize the director, Gary Ross (who wrote and directed Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, and also wrote the screenplay for The Hunger Games), was trying to get the audience to experience things in a close-up confusing fashion so that they’d be feeling what Katniss felt, but I didn’t feel it worked. It was mostly annoying. Otherwise, I thought the film was a pretty good adaptation of the novel (which I have also read). A few things were taken out, and the District 12 scenes were heavily abridged, but I didn’t miss them. That is, except for the Gale- Katniss friendship, which there just wasn’t enough time for. The whole Team Peeta/Team Gale thing was pushed by marketers trying to capitalize on the Twilight craze, but the film was really all about Katniss and, to a lesser extent, Peeta. All the moviegoing audience knew about Gale was that he was Katniss’s friend and probably had a crush on her. The subtext of their relationship, which was explored in the novel, just couldn’t be squeezed into the film. The casting of the film was really stolen by Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman, the emcee of the Hunger Games. With his blue hair and flamboyant suits, and the way Tucci was able to make all his smiles convey different emotions, I have to say he was a surprisingly good choice. Donald Sutherland played President Snow, and all I can say about him is that as he ages he looks more and more like his son. Woody Harrelson was Haymitch Abernathy, the only surviving District 12 resident to ever win the Hunger Games, and the film made him substantially more likable than in the book. I guess I was okay with that. Wes Bentley (American Beauty) was Seneca Crane, the designer of the arena, and Elizabeth Banks (Zach and Miri Make a Porno) was Effie Trinket, the heavily made-up representative from District 12 who always seemed just a little too on-edge. Finally, Liam Hemsworth (brother of Chris Hemsworth, who played both Thor and George Kirk) was suitably dark and brooding as Gale; as with Taylor Lautner in the first Twilight film, we didn’t get a lot of Gale, but he becomes important later. As for the tributes, Josh Hutcherson (Zathura) played Peeta and Jennifer Lawrence (X-Men: First Class and The Bill Engvall Show) starred in the film as Katniss. Mostly I found Peeta too short and Katniss too exotic, although they both acted fine. If either had a flaw, it was Lawrence, who had to play a standoffish and angry young woman while still being a sympathetic character to the audience. In a book, writers can use internal monologues to get the job done, but in a film it’s all in the way the actor acts. I’m sure Lawrence did the best she could, but something about her irked me just a bit. The other tributes included Amandia Stenberg as Rue (who got very short shrift in the film), Alexander Ludwig as Cato, and Jacqueline Emerson as “Fox Face”, the District Five tribute who survived mostly on cunning. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention Lenny Kravitz as Cinna, Katniss’s stylist and her first real ally in the Capitol. He really did an excellent job with the role. The film was scored by James Newton Howard, and it was adequate. Not a soundtrack I’m going to buy. I heard echoes of Firefly in a few scenes, but for the most part it was a pretty average soundtrack. The real shining technical moments of the film occurred in the Capitol character and set design. In the novel, Collins tried to make the Capitol as ostentatious and showy as possible, and the scenery reflected that, as did the costuming. It was almost too much, but I think that was the point — to underscore the differences between the Capitol and District 12. Speaking of the Capitol, one thing I do want to mention is the Tribute parade. When I read the novel, I thought it was more like a Mardi Gras or Disney Main Street parade, with a lot of people. In the film, though, it was just the tributes, in pairs, carried on Ben Hur-like chariots. The minimalism of it did not help with the iconic “catching fire” scene, which wasn’t nearly as showy as I think the audience deserved. I was actually kind of disappointed that Peeta and which wasn’t nearly as showy as I think the audience deserved. I was actually kind of disappointed that Peeta and Katniss weren’t as fiery as they were in the book. Plus, Cinna didn’t have enough screen time to explain why District 12 was on fire.

Katniss salutes the camera, and the people of the downtrodden Districts, after doing something a Tribute is not supposed to do: care. Once we got to the Games, though, things moved very well, with good pacing and enough action to make up for any slowness in the beginning of the film. The audience I saw the movie with was surprised and sickened by the massacre at the Cornucopia, and the scenes with the tributes from District 11* were excellently done, as was Katniss’s fight with the girl tribute from District 2.

Overall, I thought The Hunger Games was a pretty good book — not a great one, but an enjoyable read. The film gave me about the same feeling — it had its issues, but in the end it was a good movie with a little something for everyone. I didn’t care for the final scene — it didn’t give us quite the sequel hook we needed, nor the closure of the President Snow storyline that we should have had — but otherwise I’d say the movie did justice to the novel, and really, that’s all we can ask for these days. # Note to Parents: Although it’s only rated PG-13, this is a very violent film. Teenagers are seen killing, reveling in the kill, and also being seriously injured. The violence isn’t always graphic, but it is intense. I think most teens could handle the film, and I’m sure most pre-teens and tweens have already seen worse. Of course, you should use your own best judgment when it comes to your children. # * I can’t be any more specific without totally spoiling the movie. <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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. Film Review: “The Secret World of Arrietty”

The following review contains minor spoilers for The Secret World of Arrietty and the novel The Borrowers. Also, although the names are somewhat different in the original Japanese, since I saw this as an English dub, I’m going to use the English names. # My daughter loves Miyazaki films. Her favorite movie is Ponyo, and she loves My Neighbor Totoro as well. On Friday*, Miyazaki’s latest presentation to American audiences hit theaters. It’s The Secret World of Arrietty, based on the Mary Norton novel The Borrowers. Arrietty was released in Japan in 2010 and grossed the U.S. equivalent of $23 million. It runs 94 minutes; there is no coda once the video behind the credits fades to black.

I’ve never read The Borrowers, although I think I may have seen the 1973 Hallmark Hall of Fame version. Still, I knew the gist of the story: tiny people that live in the crawlspaces and under the floorboards borrow things that humans won’t miss, and if they are seen by humans, bad things happen. The Studio Ghibli adaptation of the novel, written by Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, remains relatively faithful to the novel: a young man named Shawn visits the country home where his parents grew up; he’s there because he’s soon to have heart surgery, and he needs to rest. While there, he catches a glimpse of a tiny girl being chased by the family cat, Nina. The tiny girl is Arrietty, a borrower just on the cusp of maturity (fourteen). Arrietty goes on her first borrowing with her father, Pod, but just before she can borrow a tissue, Shawn wakes up and sees her (but not her father). She escapes, and while her father doesn’t hold it against her, Shawn’s curiosity is piqued and he continues to try and see Arrietty again. As with Totoro and Ponyo, Miyazaki’s writing is most definitely age-appropriate: Shawn and Arrietty say the kinds of things kids their age would say, and they behave in the correct fashions. This particular film is set in a contemporary Japan, as evidenced by the delivery-man using a cellphone and the exterminator (I believe) using a tablet PC**. However, the country home belonging to Hara is definitely old-world — the appliances are serviceable, but probably belong in the latter half of the 20th century (especially the refrigerator, made by the S M E G corporation), even if there’s some Corn Soup that looks an awful lot like Campbell’s. It’s interesting to me that, if the setting is contemporary, why doesn’t Shawn have a mobile phone, but perhaps it’s part of his family’s “get back to nature and rest before your surgery” strategy. Shawn seems content to lie in bed and read, or relax out in the meadow with the cat. The setting is wonderfully detailed, from the “if you’ve seen any anime, you’ve seen and heard this” kind of meadow to the items cluttering up Hara’s house. Plus, the world of the borrowers is fully-imagined, with all sorts of stairs and walkways in the inner walls and floorboard areas of the house. Arrietty’s home is full of the kind of things you’d walkways in the inner walls and floorboard areas of the house. Arrietty’s home is full of the kind of things you’d expect a home owned by tiny people to have, and they’ve even hung photos of the seaside outside the windows to make the place look more attractive. Arrietty’s bedroom is full of greenery, which is an interesting choice but doesn’t get called back as the character progresses — it’s more like “oh, she likes green stuff”, not “she has a special relationship with nature”. Character design was pretty much “standard Miyazaki” — Shawn looked like Sasuke from Ponyo, Arrietty looked like the princess in Mononoke, Spiller looked like Mei from Totoro, and so on. My daughter kept trying to reconcile the appearances of Shawn and Sasuke, actually making up stories about Sasuke being grown up and hiding from someone or something. I was less impressed with the music in this film than I’ve heard in other Miyazaki endeavors. Joe Hisaishi isn’t the composer; instead, it’s French composer Cecile Corbel. Corbel sings throughout the film, although Bridgit Mendler (the actress who plays Arrietty in the dub) performs one of the songs. The music didn’t stick with me, and didn’t seem to have a major hook to it in the same way that Totoro and Princess Mononoke did. The voice acting was average for a dubbed Miyazaki film. Mendler and David Henrie (as Shawn) did a fine job in their roles, although Henrie had less to do because he really could only emote a few different ways. He had to sound tired and weak all the time, which can limit the emotion in a performance. Amy Poehler and Will Arnett play Arrietty’s parents, Homily and Pod (respectively), and again the female in the pair got the lion’s share of the work. Poehler was better than Tina Fey was in Ponyo, while Arnett mostly just had to grunt and speak in a soft and fatherly fashion. Carol Burnett was the “venerable actor” cast in the film — think Pat Carroll in Totoro or Betty White in Ponyo — but her character, Hara (Haru in the Japanese script), is very much a caricature, overblown and excitable, and while I heard traces of Miss Hannigan, I didn’t hear anything special out of Burnett. When it comes to the plot, the only place I felt the film really stumbled was when Shawn and Arrietty discuss death: Shawn has come to terms with the fact that his heart condition could kill him, while Arrietty is afraid of the death of the borrowers as a whole. I kept wondering when the scene was going to end. It was well-written, and a good exploration of how children deal with the foreknowledge and reality of death, but it was very slow and didn’t work amid the rest of the film. Overall, I found The Secret World of Arrietty to be a good film for kids. It’s not too violent, there’s no on-screen death, the subject matter is age-appropriate, and the good guys win (mostly because there really aren’t any bad guys of note other than Hara, and she’s not too malicious). The ending is a little sad, and I felt like it could use a little more than what we got, but my daughter was fine with it. She told me afterward that she enjoyed the film, and wanted me to get it on Netflix. So, y’know, if the word of a five-and-a-half-year-old is good enough to make you go see a movie, there you are. But if you’re an adult who likes anime, I’d wait on this one; it’s not worth the cost of a movie ticket, not these days. From an adult perspective, it was just too average to wow me. # Note to Parents: This film is rated G. There is nothing objectionable, other than the existence of tiny people living in the walls of an old house. So, if magic and/or homunculi are your hot-button issues, you’ll probably want to skip the movie. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children. # * The film was released to US audiences on 2/17/12, and I’m writing this on 2/18/12. ** It may have simply been a clipboard; it was only on screen for a few seconds, and rarely were those seconds consecutive. <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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. Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Buffy Retrospective (part 1 of 3)

This is part one of a three-part fifteenth-anniversary retrospective of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It contains spoilers for the entire run of the show. # Fifteen years ago this week, television as we know it was changed forever by… Okay. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn’t “change television as we know it”. At least, not in the beginning. In 1992, the filmed version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was released to a fair, but not great, reception (it only has a 32 percent rating on the Tomatometer). That was twenty years ago. About five years later, give or take, screenwriter Joss Whedon’s televised incarnation of Buffy Summers launched on the WB Network (now the CW). Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as the title character, and also featuring Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Charisma Carpenter, and Anthony Stewart Head, the show quickly gained popularity among… well, honestly, I don’t know who it was popular with, except to say that my college friends were really into it, going so far as to organize little viewing parties in the Honors Lounge. They invited me every time, but I declined.

Last year, for lack of anything better to do on my lunch breaks, I decided to see what this Buffy thing was all about. And I was hooked. Okay, not at first — every show has its growing pains in the first ten or so episodes — but the show quickly gained momentum thanks mostly to Joss Whedon’s writing talent and the way he oversaw the show. He didn’t write every episode, but as the showrunner he had control over the main story arcs, and he most definitely did not disappoint. Buffy ran for seven seasons — six and a half, actually, since the first season was only twelve episodes — and launched a five-season spin-off (Angel). It’s one of the most fanfic-laden intellectual properties out there (trust me; I looked), and even now the story still continues in an official, canon sense with Whedon overseeing the Buffy comic book series. How was Buffy different from other vampire stories? For starters, it wasn’t really, when it came to the vampires: they can be killed by sunlight and stakes through the heart; silver and crucifixes hurt them; they drink blood; they make more of themselves by having humans drink their blood; they’re faster and stronger than normal humans. But Buffy more of themselves by having humans drink their blood; they’re faster and stronger than normal humans. But Buffy took it a step further, actually explaining how a vampire is made: when a person is killed by a vampire, their soul moves on to the next world and a demon takes up residence in the person’s body. Apparently all of these demons know martial arts, too, because right when they come out of the grave they’re pretty good fighters. So some folks many thousands of years ago imbued mystical powers into a girl — the Slayer — who was called upon to fight vampires (and anything else that falls into the general category of “evil”). She, like the vampires, is faster and stronger than normal people, and heals faster, too. She’s supported by a Watcher, a human member of a secret society whose job it is to keep an eye on “potentials”* — girls who might become the next Slayer after the current one is killed. They die young; fighting evil does that to you. The Slayer fights alone, one girl against the forces of darkness.

The stars of Buffy Season 1: Nicholas Brendon (Xander), Anthony Head (Giles), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy), Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia), Alyson Hannigan (Willow) But Buffy said no to that. She has friends — Willow, a geek who becomes a witch; Xander, a nice guy with a crush on Buffy; and even Cordelia, the queen of the popular kids who can always be counted on to say the wrong thing. And she falls in love with a vampire — again, nothing new here, but unlike a lot of other vampire fiction of the time, said vampire has renounced his old ways and is trying to help in the fight against evil.

And that’s where the strength of the show really is: not “Buffy kills a lot of vampires using ninja moves and wooden stakes”, but the interpersonal relationships between the characters. It means a lot more to viewers when they care about the people they’re watching. Will Buffy’s mom ever find out about the slaying? How will she react? What will Willow do when she realizes her boyfriend is a werewolf? Is Xander’s home life really so bad that he’d rather fight evil than see his parents? And what’s behind that well-constructed British facade Giles shows the rest of the world? Whedon didn’t just do this with his heroes, either; even the villains got their due — Spike, the Big Bad of season two, is forced to make hard choices when Angel turns evil; the Mayor of Sunnydale, a relentless pragmatist, truly loves Faith, who knows he’s evil but loves him right back; even the Trio, the villains of season six, have their redeeming qualities despite their leader murdering one of the show’s most beloved characters. Joss Whedon, the man who gave us Buffy, Angel, Echo, Captain Tightpants, and so much more. It’s that — not the vampires, not the demons, not the pretty girls or the handsome guys — that made Buffy the Vampire Slayer worth watching all those years. We watched to see how Buffy would save Angel, how Spike would be redeemed, how Riley would escape Adam, how Dawn would react when Glory threatened to kill her… and yes, how Buffy would defeat the most evil thing to ever be born of humanity’s desire to do bad. Through it all, we cared about these characters, from the stars of the show to the villains — reformed and not — and even as far as the occasional comic relief**. In the Whedonverse, every character matters, and that’s what makes the show special.

March 10, 1997: the day that changed television for a lot of people. And continues to draw in new viewers all the time. The fashions may not hold up; the slang and pop-culture references might be dated; the effects in the early seasons are definitely iffy. But the storytelling will make this show worth watching even twenty, thirty, or fifty years later. I’d stake a vampire on it.

I found this on the internet and thought it was apropos. # Parts Two and Three will cover the top 25 Buffy episodes. Note to Parents: Although BtVS is only rated TV-PG at its “worst”, the show does contain violence, sexual Note to Parents: Although BtVS is only rated TV-PG at its “worst”, the show does contain violence, sexual situations, adult language, and intense action and emotional sequences. I’d say it’s safe for middle-schoolers on up. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children. # * I just realized I used this same idea in a story I recently wrote — although mine was about Santa Claus, not vampires. So, Joss, if you’re reading this… please don’t sue me. ** Come on, now; who didn’t just adore Clem? <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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. Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Buffy Retrospective (part 2 of 3)

This is part two of a three-part fifteenth-anniversary retrospective of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It contains spoilers for the entire run of the show. # How do you review an entire seven-year run of a television series? How about by picking the top twenty percent of episodes? Let’s see… 20 percent of 144… 28.8. Let’s go ahead and round that down to the top 25. So, here you go: the top 25 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At least, in my opinion. Big thanks to everyone who edited the Wikipedia pages for these episodes, because that’s where I got the summaries and cast lists. # 25: Wild at Heart (Season 4, Episode 6) Willow – “How come you didn’t tell me I look like a crazy birthday cake in this shirt?” Buffy – “I thought that was the point.” Synopsis: Spike is captured by The Initiative. Oz meets another werewolf, Veruca, who seduces him to the dark side of werewolf-dom (to this point, he has been locking himself up during the three days when he is prone to change, to keep everyone safe). She also sleeps with him. This understandably upsets Willow, Oz’s girlfriend. Willow plans a revenge spell but doesn’t go through with it; Veruca catches her at it, but Oz rescues her. The episode ends with Oz leaving Sunnydale. Notable Guest Stars: Seth Green as Oz, in his final appearance as a regular; James Marsters as Spike, in his final appearance as a guest star (before becoming a regular). It Made The List Because: Throughout the series, and despite her witchcraft, Willow sort of represents the everygeek, even more than Xander. She’s hyperintelligent (and pretty hyper), and has trouble integrating socially in a way that Xander really never did. But she’s grown by this point, and has found love, and she and Oz have overcome that… or so she thought. I picked this episode because it’s a pivotal change in Willow’s character: she’s known love, knows what it feels like, and it makes it that much more special for her when she finds it again. # 24: Lie to Me (Season 2, Episode 7) Buffy – “Does it ever get easy?” Giles – “You mean life?” Buffy – “Yeah. Does it get easy?” Giles – “What do you want me to say?” Buffy – “Lie to me.” Giles – “Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after. Buffy – “Liar.” Synopsis: In addition to building up Spike and Drusilla as the season two Big Bads, this episode focuses on Buffy and her relationship with her old friend Ford. It’s later revealed that Ford has a disease which will kill him, and in return for handing over the Slayer, Spike will turn Ford and his friends into vampires so they can live forever. After a fight which Spike escapes from, Buffy goes to Ford’s grave and stakes him as he rises. fight which Spike escapes from, Buffy goes to Ford’s grave and stakes him as he rises. Notable Guest Stars: Juliet Landau as Drusilla the insane vampire; Jason Behr (Roswell) as Ford. It Made The List Because: This is the first time in the series where someone has a good reason for wanting to become a vampire. If you’re going to die, wouldn’t you want to do anything possible to keep on living? Is it so bad to have to drink blood if it means you don’t die of a debilitating disease? Also, it showed that Buffy doesn’t always want to slay the vampires, even though she has to, and it worked toward building the father/daughter relationship between Buffy and Giles. # 23: Buffy vs Dracula (Season 5, Episode 1) Dracula – “You are strange and off-putting. Go now.” Synopsis: Buffy and the Scooby gang face Dracula. Xander becomes Renfield, Giles becomes Jonathan Harker, and Buffy becomes a combination of Lucy and Mina. Eventually Buffy defeats Dracula and admits to Giles that she really doesn’t want him to leave. Notable Guest Stars: Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn, her first appearance on the series. It Made The List Because: Last night, someone linked me to a hilarious fanfic story where Buffy and the Scoobies take on Anita Blake and her harem. This episode is somewhat similar, in that Buffy is taking on another well-known vampire icon, and really, who doesn’t want their favorite character taking on someone famous… and winning? Also, this episode introduces Dawn. # 22: Faith, Hope, and Trick (Season 3, Episode 3) Oz – “I’m wondering about your position on werewolves.” Willow – “Oz is a werewolf.” Buffy – “It’s a long story.” Oz – “I got bit.” Buffy – “Apparently not that long.” Synopsis: A new vampire slayer, Faith, arrives in Sunnydale, having been activated after Kendra was killed by Drusilla. She brought with her Kakistos, an evil vampire with a bone to pick with her. There’s some conflict between Buffy and Faith before the big showdown, in which Faith freezes up and Buffy fights the vampire before Faith kills him with a very large wooden pole. Mr. Trick escapes — he becomes important later in the season — and, at the very end, Angel returns from Hell. Notable Guest Stars: Eliza Dushku as Faith and K. Todd Freeman as Mr. Trick, both of whom recur through the season. It Made The List Because: The first appearance of Faith cannot be ignored. Nor can Angel’s return from Hell, which leads directly to a major conflict through the season. And Mr. Trick is a delightful sidekick to the Mayor. # 21: The Harvest (Season 1, Episode 2) Willow – “Maybe you could blow something up. They’re really strict about that.” Synopsis: Willow and Xander learn about vampires and such. The Master (season one’s Big Bad) gains power. Xander accidentally slays his friend Jesse when Jesse is turned into a vampire. Buffy kills Luke, one of the Master’s top lieutenants. Notable Guest Stars: Mark Metcalf as The Master; Brian Thompson as Luke; Eric Balfour (Haven) as Jesse. It Made The List Because: Pretty much for the scene when Buffy kicks Luke through a window, Luke thinks it’s It Made The List Because: Pretty much for the scene when Buffy kicks Luke through a window, Luke thinks it’s daylight (even though it isn’t), and then Buffy kills him. Overall the pilot two-parter was pretty standard fare for a genre TV show, but that line was hilarious. # 20: Dirty Girls (Season 7, Episode 18) Faith – “Damn. I never knew you were that cool.” Buffy – “Well, you always were a little slow.” Synopsis: Faith returns from Los Angeles. Caleb, an evil preacher imbued by the power of the First Evil, arrives in Sunnydale. After a whole lot of talking, Buffy and the potential slayers take on Caleb, only to find out that he is more powerful than Buffy. Caleb kills two of the girls and gouges out one of Xander’s eyes, but Spike stops him before he can do anything more. Everyone still alive manages to escape. Notable Guest Stars: Nathan Fillion as Caleb; D.B. Woodside as Robin Wood; Rachel Bilson as Colleen. It Made The List Because: By this point, we’ve learned that Joss Whedon is not averse to killing off major characters — he did, after all, allow Tara to die, and Buffy herself died twice on the show. Angel died once too. So in the fight with Caleb, I was expecting a major character to die. I’d read somewhere that Xander ended the show with only one eye, but I wasn’t expecting something quite as gruesome and graphic as what was shown on-screen. This episode hammered home the fact that the good guys might not actually win this one, and even if they did, they wouldn’t come out unscathed. # 19: Normal Again (Season 6, Episode 17) Spike – “Oh, balls! You didn’t say it was a Glarghk Guhl Kashmas’nik.” Xander – “‘Cause I can’t say Glarba …” Synopsis: Throughout the whole run of the show, Buffy has merely been creating a fantasy world inside her head where she’s the hero and has to save the world. But what’s actually been happening is that she’s been locked in an insane asylum since she burned down her old high school gym in Los Angeles (the climax of the BtVS film). Inside the fantasy world, a demon has made her hallucinate being in an asylum, and the only way out is to kill her support system — her friends. She eventually fights it off, but then the episode ends with Buffy locked away again, back in the asylum. Notable Guest Stars: Dean Butler as Hank, Buffy’s dad; Kirsten Nelson (Psych) as Lorraine, Buffy’s boss at the Doublemeat Palace. It Made The List Because: Which reality is the real reality? Is Buffy dreaming up all of this, or is the asylum just the place where her mind retreated to try and defend itself from the demon’s hallucinogenic drug? Through the entire episode, I knew that, at the end, Buffy would be in the “real” world — Sunnydale, with her friends — but the way the episode was written left a lot of room for doubt. I was a fair bit shellshocked afterward. # 18: Entropy (Season 6, Episode 18) Tara – “There’s so much to work through. Trust has to build again, on both sides … you have to learn if you’re even the same people you were, if you can fit in each other’s lives, it’s a long and important process and… can we just skip it? Can you just be kissing me now?” Tara (Amber Benson) and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) Synopsis: A lot of plot movement in this episode — the Trio grows closer to their ultimate goal, Dawn shows remorse for her kleptomania, Spike and Anya go to each other for comfort (Buffy left Spike, Xander left Anya), Willow discovers that the Trio has been spying on everyone, Spike reveals that Buffy used to be his lover, and Willow and Tara reconcile after a long breakup.

Notable Guest Stars: Kali Rocha as Halfrek; Danny Strong, Tom Lenk, and Adam Busch as the Trio. It Made The List Because: After the emotional roller-coaster of last week’s episode, it was time to advance the plot. Finally, we see that Spike and Buffy used to have a relationship, but more importantly, we see Willow and Tara get back together. No matter what parts you have or who you prefer to sleep with, I guarantee your heart warmed to see them move past their troubles. Unfortunately, it would be short-lived. # 17: Seeing Red (Season 6, Episode 19) Andrew – “I can’t wait to get my hands on his orbs.” Synopsis: Warren (leader of the Trio) uses a powerful relic to become super-strong and nigh-invulnerable. Buffy, injured from an earlier patrol, just wants to relax and take a bath but Spike, furious with himself and with her, breaks into her bathroom and attempts to rape her. Later, Buffy fights Warren, destroying the relic; Warren escapes, but Jonathan and Andrew (his henchmen/partners) are apprehended. At the end, just as Buffy and Xander reconcile (Xander was quite angry about Buffy sleeping with Spike), Warren surprises them in the backyard and shoots Buffy. One of the shots goes wild, breaking a window and killing Tara. Notable Guest Stars: No one new, but this is the first and only episode in which we see Amber Benson in the opening credits. It Made The List Because: I thought the worst thing I would see in this episode is Spike’s attempted rape of Buffy. I was wrong. I finished watching this episode, closed my iPad, and actually found myself near tears. This is what I was talking about in the first part of this retrospective: Joss Whedon makes you care about his characters… and then he kills them. Also, Spike leaves for his journey of redemption, which leads to an important story arc in the next season. But still… Tara, man… *shakes head* # 16: Showtime (Season 7, Episode 11) Kennedy – “How’s evil taste?” Willow – “A little chalky.” Synopsis: The Potential Slayers are feeling pretty down because the uber-vampire Turok-Han is taking them down with ease. Buffy realizes that she has to do something about this, so she arranges a fight where all the Potentials can see her defeat it, one-on-one. Also, we learn that Buffy’s resurrection made it possible for the First to carry out its plan, and in the end, Buffy rescues Spike from the First, who had been using the Turok-Han to torture him. Notable Guest Stars: Felicia Day as Vi; Iyari Limon as Kennedy, who would go on to become Willow’s lover. It Made The List Because: There was a hell of a lot of speechifying in season seven, but it was all right, because most of it was good. The episode had Buffy showing the Potentials that they could be powerful enough to win, and it also had Spike’s first major redemptive moment in his reunion with Buffy. It was the end of the first major arc of the season as well. # 15: Restless (Season 4, Episode 22) Cheese Man – “I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.” Synopsis: After defeating Adam and the Initiative, the core Scoobies (Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles) take an evening off at Buffy’s house. One by one, their dreams are invaded by the spirit of the First Slayer. The First Slayer kills everyone except Buffy (in their dreams, not in real life), but Buffy defeats her by ignoring her. Notable Guest Stars: David Wells as the Cheese Man, who I put here because it’s a funny character name; Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder, back from the dead in dream form; George Hertzberg as Adam, seen for the first time without his makeup. It Made The List Because: “Restless” was unlike any Buffy episode filmed or aired, before or since. There’s an exhaustive write-up of it on Wikipedia. It’s interesting to me that, about a week before I saw this episode, someone in my writing group mentioned it in reference to the use of dreams in fiction. Overall it was a weird, interesting episode, but for more, I’ll leave you to the wiki. # 14: Prophecy Girl (Season 1, Episode 12) Xander – “You were looking at my neck.” Angel – “What?” Xander – “You were checking out my neck. I saw that.” Angel – “No, I wasn’t.” Xander – “Just keep your distance, pal.” Angel – “I wasn’t looking at your neck.” Xander – “I told you to eat before we left.” Synopsis: Buffy faces off against The Master, despite the fact that a prophecy has her dying at his hands. Well, it happens; he drinks her blood and throws her face-down into a pool of water where she drowns. Xander brings her back with CPR, and she goes on to kill The Master and end the season. Notable Guest Stars: No one not already mentioned. It Made The List Because: Buffy’s death in this episode reinforces Joss Whedon’s predilection for killing main characters, but it also sets up several interesting storylines, most notably those of Kendra and Faith. # 13: After Life (Season 6, Episode 3) Buffy – “I was happy. Wherever I was … I was happy …at peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time…didn’t mean anything. Nothing had form. But I was still me, you know? And I was warm. And I was loved. And I was finished. Complete. I … I don’t understand theology or dimensions, any of it really… but I think I was in heaven. And now I’m not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out, by my friends. Everything here is hard and bright and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch. This is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and and bright and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch. This is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that. Knowing what I’ve lost.” Synopsis: In the previous two-parter, Buffy was resurrected after sacrificing herself in the Season Five finale to save her sister. Now she’s trying to get back to normal. Unfortunately, a demon followed her back from wherever she was, using Willow’s magic as a guide; Willow and Tara use magic to make it solid, and Buffy kills it. At the end of the episode, Buffy tells Spike that she was in heaven, not hell. Notable Guest Stars: Amber Benson as Tara, although really she doesn’t count because she was more or less a regular by this point. It Made The List Because: Glory, season five’s Big Bad, came from a Hell Dimension. The rift she was trying to open with the key (Dawn) should have led back to it, right? Well, not so much. This episode begins Willow’s downfall into magic addiction by showing the consequences of her actions and her selfishness (wanting Buffy back despite her friend having nobly sacrificed herself) and also strengthens the relationship between Spike and Buffy. # 12: Halloween (Season 2, Episode 6) Buffy – “A demon! A demon!” Willow – “It’s not a demon, it’s a car.” Buffy – “What does it want?” Synopsis: Giles’s old frenemy Ethan Rayne comes to Sunnydale and uses a chaos spell to make everyone turn into what their costumes portray. Willow is a ghost, Buffy is an 18th-century noblewoman, and Xander is a soldier. Xander protects Buffy while Willow and Giles take on Ethan, eventually defeating him. Also, Oz is seen around town being interested in Willow. Notable Guest Stars: Robin Sachs as Ethan Rayne. It Made The List Because: This is the episode that launched hundreds of thousands of fanfics. Just go to any fanfic site, find the Buffy section, and search for YAHF. Also, it helped to set up the long-term courtship of Willow by Oz, which would eventually lead to Seth Green getting into the opening credits. So, y’know, good for him. Finally, by having been a soldier in his costume, Xander retains much of the knowledge the chaos spell gave him, which comes in handy later. # 11: Surprise/Innocence (two-parter, Season 2, Episodes 13 and 14) Angel – “Still, not every dream you have comes true. I mean, what else did you dream last night? Can you remember?” Buffy – “I dreamt… I dreamt that Giles and I opened an office supply warehouse in Vegas.” Angel – “See my point?” Synopsis (“Surprise”): Spike and company are attempting to bring forth a demon called Judge to defeat Buffy. With the help of computer teacher Jenny Calendar (Giles’s love interest), Buffy figures out what’s going on. However, she’s unable to stop the rise of Judge. Later, she and Angel consummate their relationship — Buffy’s first time. That night, as Buffy sleeps, Angel wakes and runs, screaming… Cordelia – “So does looking at guns make you wanna have sex?” Xander – “I’m 17. Looking at linoleum makes me wanna have sex.” Synopsis (“Innocence”): …and loses his soul, the thing that made him a good vampire instead of an evil one. He joins up with Spike and company, taking over as the season’s Big Bad, and begins terrorizing Buffy, who is pretty torn up over the whole thing. Somehow, in the middle of this, Oz and Willow begin their relationship. Anyway, Buffy uses a rocket launcher to kill Judge, then fights Angel (now Angelus) but doesn’t kill him. Buffy admits her mistakes to Giles, who forgives her because she loved Angel and he her. Notable Guest Stars: Brian Thompson as Judge; Vincent Schiavelli as Uncle Enios; Robia LaMorte as Jenny Notable Guest Stars: Brian Thompson as Judge; Vincent Schiavelli as Uncle Enios; Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar.

It Made The List Because: For many people, losing one’s virginity is a watershed event that occurs in the high school years. It’s fraught with mystery, worry, and afterward, a profound sense of relief*. Buffy is clearly not the type of girl who sleeps around, as is referenced many times through the series (and the one time she does, she faces real-world consequences that any person might); she chose to be with Angel because she loves him, which is a good message: that intimacy with someone you love should not be avoided. Unless that person you love is an evil vampire who killed countless people before he was stopped. The episode shows just how much more evil than Spike Angel actually can be, which is quite powerful. And hey, they killed a demon with a rocket launcher. That was pretty darn cool. # The final part of the retrospective will hit my top ten Buffy episodes. Until then… “goodbye, Picadilly; farewell Leicester bloody Square.” # Note to Parents: Although BtVS is only rated TV-PG at its “worst”, the show does contain violence, sexual situations, adult language, and intense action and emotional sequences. I’d say it’s safe for middle-schoolers on up. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children. # * Or maybe that was just me. <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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. Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Buffy Retrospective (part 3 of 3)

This is part three of a three-part fifteenth-anniversary retrospective of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It contains spoilers for the entire run of the show. # Continuing with my top 25 episode countdown, here’s the top ten. You’ll notice that I cheated a little and did a couple of two-parters as single episodes. Well, I did say that 20 percent of the show was 28.8, so if I have 27 favorites, you’ll have to forgive me. Now, on with the show. # 10: Becoming, Part 2 (Season 2, Episode 22) Angelus – “I want to torture you. I used to love it, and it’s been a long time. I mean, the last time I tortured someone, they didn’t even have chainsaws.” Synopsis: Buffy, now a fugitive, joins up with Spike to stop Angelus because, while Angelus is trying to destroy the world via a demon called Acathla, Spike actually kind of likes the planet the way it is. Buffy is also expelled from school and confronts Whistler, an agent of the Powers That Be, to find out what she’s supposed to do. She tells her mother she’s the Slayer, and her mother delivers the classic “if you go out that door, don’t come back” line. Buffy goes out that door. Xander lies to Buffy, saying that Willow told him to tell her to kick Angel’s ass, but really Willow is working to restore Angel’s soul. She successfully completes the spell just as the fight between Buffy and Angel reaches a climax. She kisses him goodbye and then kills him, sealing the vortex that would have destroyed the world. Spike and Drusilla escape, and Buffy leaves Sunnydale for parts unknown. (It turns out to be Los Angeles.) Notable Guest Stars: Richard Riehle as Merrick, since Donald Sutherland probably would’ve been too expensive; Julie Benz as Darla, the vampire who turned Angel. It Made The List Because: Which is more important to you? Do you save the man you love, or do you save the world? Buffy chose the world, and the pain of it is writ large on her face. Everything she knows is collapsing — Xander and Willow are hurt, Giles was tortured, Angel is dead, and, worst of all, her mother has turned her back on her. Gellar plays it beautifully. # 9: Graduation Day, Parts 1 and 2 (Season 3, Episodes 21 and 22) Anya – “When I think that something could happen to you, it feels bad inside, like I might vomit.” Xander – “Welcome to the world of romance.” Anya – “It’s horrible. No wonder I used to get so much work.” Xander – “Well, I’m sorry I give you barfy feelings.” Angel – “Well, he’s not crazy about germs.” Cordelia – “Of course, that’s it. We’ll attack him with germs.” Buffy – “Great. We’ll get him cornered and then you can sneeze on him.” Synopsis: Throughout the season, Faith and the Mayor have been growing closer, becoming almost like father and daughter. Oz and Willow consummate their relationship. Faith poisons Angel, a poison which can only be cured by the blood of a Slayer. Buffy and Faith fight, and it ends with Buffy stabbing Faith, possibly fatally, and Faith falling onto a moving truck and escaping. The Mayor is quite upset over the fight — he really does care about Faith — and sends his minions to find her and Buffy. Buffy allows Angel to drink her blood so he can be cured. In a prophetic sends his minions to find her and Buffy. Buffy allows Angel to drink her blood so he can be cured. In a prophetic dream, Buffy and Faith seem to reconcile, although that’s only on a subconscious level. The Mayor, speaking at graduation, turns into a demon and starts wreaking havoc, including eating Principal Snyder. No one really complains. Buffy’s master plan — mobilizing the graduating class with weapons and using Xander’s military knowledge from Halloween — saves most of them. The other part of her plan is to lure the Mayor, now in demon form, into the library, where she detonates a large amount of explosives. The Mayor is killed and the school destroyed. Angel, as he promised, leaves Sunnydale (to get his own spin-off). Notable Guest Stars: Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndham-Pryce; Harry Groener as the Mayor. It Made The List Because: The conflict between Buffy and Faith comes to a head and we finally see who is the better Slayer. Also, Angel leaves Sunnydale despite the fact that he and Buffy are still in love. It was just a good season finale, satisfying in every regard… which makes sense, given that the main characters are now about to move onto the next phase of their lives: college. # 8: New Moon Rising (Season 4, Episode 19) Willow – “Tara, I have to tell you –” Tara – “No, I understand. You have to be with the person that love.” Willow – “I am.” Tara – “You mean…” Willow – “I mean. OK?” Tara – “Oh, yes.” Willow – “I feel horrible about everything I put you through. And I’m going to make it up to you, starting right now.” Tara – “Right now?” Synopsis: Oz returns to Sunnydale having learned control over his wolf side. He and Willow talk for the whole night, but when Tara arrives, she becomes uncomfortable and leaves before Willow can get back from the bathroom. Willow admits to Buffy that she’s getting serious with Tara. Spike makes a deal with Adam to get the chip out of his head. Oz is captured by the Initiative, but Buffy gets him out. Oz leaves Sunnydale again after talking to Willow — the two of them confess that they will always love each other — and then Willow goes to Tara. Tara blows out the candle. Notable Guest Stars: Leonard Roberts (Heroes) as Forrest Gates; Bailey Chase as Graham Miller; Amber Benson as Tara. It Made The List Because: It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Willow/Tara relationship. Willow loves Tara because she’s Tara; it doesn’t matter that she’s a girl, or that she’s a witch, or that she’s a college student, or that she thought she was going to turn into a demon someday (don’t ask). Since I was a teenager I’ve always believed that you love who you love, regardless of what parts they have in their pants, and this relationship is about that. Plus, we get lots of Alyson Hannigan’s goofy smiles as a result — always a positive. # 7: The Wish (Season 3, Episode 9) Buffy – “Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic.” Xander – “Mine is much more advanced.” Synopsis: Cordelia is pretty upset after Xander and Willow are discovered kissing — at the time, she was dating Xander — and she makes a wish while speaking to the new girl, Anya. Anya is really a vengeance demon, and Cordelia’s wish — that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale — becomes reality. We’re then shifted to an alternate reality where the Master won and Xander and Willow are vampires. Giles figures out that they’re in an alternate universe and they call in Buffy, who was in Cleveland (location of the other Hellmouth). Although Buffy, Angel, Willow, and Oz are killed, Giles defeats Anya by destroying the source of her power and trapping her in human form. The alternate universe disappears. form. The alternate universe disappears. Notable Guest Stars: Emma Caulfield as Anya, in her first appearance on the show. It Made The List Because: Mostly because of Willow’s “bored now!” line that comes back with horrifying consequences in the sixth season. Also because alternate universe episodes are cool, and while this one does center on Cordelia a little too much, it’s still pretty good overall. # 6: Chosen (Season 7, Episode 22) Buffy – “So here’s the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power, now? In every generation, one Slayer is born, because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power, should be our power. Tomorrow, Willow will use the essence of this scythe to change our destiny. From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?” Synopsis: The series finale. Buffy kills Caleb, minion of the First Evil. The Slayers and the Potentials go to the new Sunnydale High School for the final battle. Willow works a spell that activates all the potential slayers around the world, giving the Potentials the power to win the battle. Anya is killed in the fight. Spike, wearing a mystical amulet, calls down the power of the sun and sacrifices himself to save everyone else. Buffy barely makes it out, running along the roofs of Sunnydale’s buildings (in poorly-done CG) until she can jump for the schoolbus with everyone else on it. In the end, Sunnydale is nothing but a crater and the Hellmouth is closed. As the series fades to black for the last time, Buffy smiles. Notable Guest Stars: David Boreanaz as Angel. It Made The List Because: Truthfully, I found everything after the activation kind of weak. I really felt as though there should’ve been something bigger in terms of a one-on-one fight between Buffy and the First, but then, the First is completely noncorporeal. And Anya’s death was kind of a throwaway, sadly. However, we did have “are you ready to be strong?”, an immensely powerful sequence in the show, and of course Spike’s redemption. Oh, and an appearance by Trogdor the Burninator, who is defeated by Amanda the Potential Slayer. # 5: Grave (Season 6, Episode 22) Xander – “The first day of kindergarten you cried because you broke the yellow crayon and you were too afraid to tell anyone. You’ve come pretty far, ending the world, not a terrific notion, but the thing is, yeah, I love you. I loved crayon-breaking Willow and I love scary veiny Willow. So if I’m going out it’s here. If you wanna kill the world, well then start with me. I’ve earned that.” Willow – “You think I won’t.” Xander – “It doesn’t matter. I’ll still love you.” Xander (Nicholas Brendon, right) stops Dark Willow (Alyson Hannigan) from destroying the world. Synopsis: Willow, wracked with grief over the death of Tara, has become Dark Willow, using magic for evil. Spike completes his ordeal in Africa, regaining his soul. Buffy and Dawn are trapped in a pit by Willow, forced to work together to fight against demons Willow raised. Andrew and Jonathan escape to Mexico. Willow, who feels all the pain in the world, attempts to cast a spell to end everything. Only Xander, her oldest friend, can stop her, and despite being attacked he keeps on coming, telling Willow that he loves her and that he’ll be right there with her when she destroys the world. She can’t do it, and she turns back into regular Willow. Anya is quite shocked to find out that Xander saved the world.

Notable Guest Stars: Danny Strong as Jonathan; Tom Lenk as Andrew. It Made The List Because: Dumbledore was right: love is the greatest power there is. It stopped the most powerful witch in the world from destroying everything. When Willow finally gives in to Xander, it’s the capstone: an intense, emotional moment in a season full of roller-coasters. # 4: Hush (Season 4, Episode 10) Spike – “We’re out of Weetabix.” Giles – “We are out of Weetabix because you ate it all. Again.” Spike – “Get some more.” Giles – “I thought vampires were supposed to eat blood.” Spike – “Yeah, well sometimes I like to crumble up the Weetabix in the blood. Gives it a little texture.”

The Gentlemen. Synopsis: Demons called The Gentlemen steal the voices of every person in Sunnydale. Then they start stealing people’s hearts, killing them in the process. Giles figures out how to defeat the Gentlemen, and Buffy and Riley release the voices of the townspeople. Buffy screams, and the Gentlemen are killed. At the end, Buffy and Riley face each other… and say nothing. Also, we meet Tara.

Notable Guest Stars: Phina Oruche as Olivia, Giles’s on-again-off-again girlfriend; Doug Jones, Camden Toy, Don W. Lewis, and Charlie Brumbly as the Gentlemen. It Made The List Because: Do not, under any circumstances, watch this episode in the dark. It is by far the scariest of the series, and one of the best. I actually stayed up and watched a second episode the night I saw “Hush” because I was so creeped out. # # 3: The Gift (Season 5, Episode 22) Buffy – “You have to be strong. Dawn, the hardest thing in this world … is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me.”

Buffy prepares to sacrifice herself as her sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) looks on. Synopsis: Buffy asks Spike to protect Dawn, because she now trusts him implicitly. This is important next season. Spike’s Buffy-Bot is used as a decoy to distract Glory. The fight continues until Buffy turns Glory back into Ben, her human host, and tells him to leave Sunnydale (she’s shown in the past that she won’t kill a human being). However, the rift Glory created is still there. With everyone distracted, Giles kills Ben. At the top of Glory’s tower, Buffy tells Dawn she loves her and flings herself into the rift to destroy it. At the end, we see Buffy’s grave. Her epitaph: “She saved the world. A lot.”

Notable Guest Stars: Clare Kramer as Glory; Charlie Weber as Ben; Joel Grey as Doc. It Made The List Because: I added this mostly because of Buffy’s speech to Dawn at the end. Whedon has a habit of doing speeches in retrospect — you don’t hear them until afterward, as a voiceover. Unlike in the first season, when you really don’t know Buffy well enough to care that she’s dead, you feel it in full now, and you see the reactions of her friends and family. A worthy death for a warrior like Buffy… but it doesn’t last. It never lasts. # 2: The Body (Season 5, Episode 16) Anya – “I don’t understand. I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean I knew her, and then she’s, there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she can’t just get back in it and not be dead any more. It’s stupid. It’s mortal and stupid, and, and Xander’s crying and not talking, and I was having fruit punch and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever. And she’ll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever and no one will explain to me why.” Buffy finds her mother (Kristine Sutherland) dead in their living room. Synopsis: Some episodes ago, Buffy’s mother had a brain tumor removed. Just before this episode, Buffy came home to find her mother dead on the couch. An aneurysm in her brain killed her quickly and painlessly. The main characters attempt to deal with this loss.

Notable Guest Stars: Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers. It Made The List Because: One of the most powerful hours of television. Ever. No music, no traditional arc of exposition/rising action/climax. Just all of the characters dealing with death. It’s not even so much about Buffy and Dawn’s grief of a child losing a mother. It’s about Willow, who can’t decide what to wear to the hospital; it’s about Xander, feeling powerless in the face of death; it’s about Anya, who doesn’t understand how to react since she hasn’t been a human long enough to face death; it’s about Tara, who’s been through this before and knows that nothing will make the pain go away. Masterfully written, shot, edited, and acted, this episode is probably near the top of every “Best of Buffy” list on the planet. # 1: Once More, With Feeling (Season 6, Episode 7) Anya – “It has to be stopped. It was like we were being watched, like there was a wall missing from our apartment. Like there were only three walls and not a fourth one.”

Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar, center) sings the final battle song with Anya (Emma Caulfield, left) and Tara (Amber Benson, right) Synopsis: After returning from heaven, Buffy has felt increasingly disconnected to the world around her. She expresses this in the form of a song, much to her surprise. The Scoobies vow to figure out what’s going on. Xander and Anya, soon to be married, sing a duet about what they think is wrong with the other person. Tara serenades Willow. Spike tells Buffy to leave him alone if she’s not going to love him the way he wants her to. Giles says he’s going to leave Sunnydale. Dawn is kidnapped by a demon called Sweet, who is the cause of all the singing. Buffy vows to fight Sweet even though she doesn’t feel the emotions she should be experiencing. After revealing to her friends that Willow pulled her out of heaven, Sweet forces her to dance, almost to her death, but Spike stops her in time. Xander admits to invoking Sweet — he wanted to know if he and Anya would have a happy ending. At the end, Spike and Buffy kiss.

Notable Guest Stars: Hinton Battle as Sweet; David Fury as the mustard guy; Marti Noxon as the lady with the parking ticket. It Made The List Because: A musical episode is hard enough without having to advance the plot; one that advances the plot should be spotlighted. Whedon wrote and scored the entire episode (Adam Shankman choreographed it), and the plot should be spotlighted. Whedon wrote and scored the entire episode (Adam Shankman choreographed it), and every actor on the show actually sings his or her songs. Amber Benson is particularly good in this one, and she’s given a nice little naughty verse at the end of her solo song, as I mentioned in my review of the soundtrack some time ago. Watching this episode after seeing the entire series only underscores just how much viewers care about these characters. From Buffy’s emptiness at being taken from heaven to Spike’s unrequited love, from Dawn’s fear of being unnoticed to Tara’s depth of love for Willow, from Xander and Anya’s odd-couple relationship to Giles’s fatherly feelings toward Buffy, every character on the show receives full attention in this episode, and every one of them is allowed to be funny, or sweet, or sappy, or angry. Between this and “The Body”, you have two of the best hours of television you’ll ever see. Log into Netflix and watch this one right now. # And there you have it: my top 25 episodes of Buffy. If you don’t have 144 hours to watch the entire show, you can probably find “must-see” lists all over the internet, but seriously… I made the mistake of not catching this when it was in first-run. I was lucky it was on Netflix and I didn’t have to buy the DVDs. Take advantage, take half a year’s worth of lunch breaks, and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’ll give you something to sing about. # Note to Parents: Although BtVS is only rated TV-PG at its “worst”, the show does contain violence, sexual situations, adult language, and intense action and emotional sequences. I’d say it’s safe for middle-schoolers on up. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children. Soundtrack Review: “Once More, With Feeling”

This review contains spoilers for the Buffy: the Vampire Slayer television series. # If you follow me on Twitter (@listener42), then you know I use the app GetGlue to play a FourSquare-like game with the media I consume. And, for the last six months or so, you’ve observed many quotes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as I finally got around to watching a series my college friends told me was something I should see. This isn’t a review of the show — I’ve saved that for the 15th-anniversary retrospective that’s being posted this week. Instead, it’s a review of the soundtrack to the musical episode “Once More, With Feeling”, which I received last month and loaded onto my phone.

Yesterday*, I was having kind of a bad day, and I had a long drive ahead of me. So I figured I’d put on some music that had good associations. See, I really liked the Buffy series, and “Once More, With Feeling” was a really good episode — on Facebook, my friend Dave said, “to this day I consider this to be the greatest single episode of a series I’ve ever seen”, and while I’m sure I’ve seen great single episodes before, I can’t think of anything at the moment to contradict his statement. And, according to the episode’s Wikipedia page, the critics tend to agree. I think the soundtrack works best if you have fond memories of the show, or were significantly affected by it. For me, one of the most emotional arcs of the show was Willow and Tara’s relationship — beginning with the episode she chooses Tara over Oz, and ending with Tara’s accidental death at the hands of Warren Mears. I was particularly moved in the episode following Tara’s death, “Villains”, when Willow invokes the god of death to try and undo what was done to the person she loves. Tara’s death occurred after she reconciled with Willow following a breakup, and that breakup happened shortly after “Once More, With Feeling”. (Trust me, all of this will be relevant in a paragraph or so.) Emma Caulfield (Anya) So, in the beginning, I got a few laughs out of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s opening number, “Going Through The Motions”, and I actually thought I’d have a nice Saturday afternoon drive. Although Gellar’s voice occasionally sounded thin, I remember being surprised at how good she did with the song — which explained how empty she felt about her life after being resurrected in the beginning of the season**. “Motions” was followed by a medley featuring solos by Anthony Head (Giles) and Emma Caulfield (Anya), and again I found myself laughing along with Caulfield’s rock anthem about her dislike of rabbits. Bunnies aren’t just cute like everyone supposes. They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses, And what’s with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway? I guess you had to be there. The third track was equally amusing — “The Mustard” — which is a 19-second declaration that the dry-cleaner got the mustard out of producer David Fury’s shirt.

Amber Benson (Tara) and Alyson Hannigan (Willow) And then things took a turn for the sad, because Amber Benson (Tara) began her first solo, “Under Your Spell”. The song is actually pretty happy on the surface, and if you haven’t seen the episode, you may not know that, just before it, Willow and Tara argued about Willow’s increasing usage of (and dependence upon) magic. Benson has a beautiful voice — an unexpected joy, given her character’s soft-spoken manner — and she spends several minutes serenading Willow. She ends with a verse that could be considered a little dirty, but is still kind of sweet: The moon to the tide I can feel you inside I’m under your spell Surging like the sea Wanting you so helplessly I break with every swell Lost in ecstasy Spread beneath my willow tree Because of what happens through the rest of Season Six — the fight, the reconciliation, the death — I found my throat getting a little tight*** as I listened to the song, and I think that set the mood for the rest of the album. Nicholas Brendon (Xander) and Caulfield On the heels of that song comes the duet “I’ll Never Tell”, where Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Anya sing to each other about the things that niggle at their seemingly-perfect relationship. It’s a hilarious song which, among other things, rhymes the words “Scoobies” and “rubies” with the words “tight embrace”. Brendon isn’t the best singer in the group (by a long-shot), but Caulfield carries the song for him, and anyway it’s more about his lyrics than his abilities. X: Is she looking for a pot of gold? A: Will I look good when I’ve gotten old? X: Will our lives become too stressful / if I’m never that successful? A: When I get so worn and wrinkly / that I look like David Brinkley? One more interlude follows that song — producer Marti Noxon lamenting “The Parking Ticket” she receives — before things get serious. There’s a great scene with Spike where he fights the urge to sing and dance before being forced to succumb — “Rest in Peace”, in which Marsters channels the rock gods of the 70s and 80s while still sounding like a small-theater performer. He’s not an amateur, but he’s no Anthony Head.

Hinton Battle (Sweet) We move on next to “Dawn’s Lament” and “Dawn’s Ballet” — Michelle Trachtenberg, trained as a dancer, has a very thin soprano voice, but she dances her feelings instead. The Dawn songs are followed by “What You Feel”, where Tony Award-winning guest star Hinton Battle explains that he’s going to be taking Dawn back to Hell to be his bride, and that he’s the one who’s been making people sing and dance. Next, we go back to the Scoobies: Anthony Head (Giles), who is a rather talented musician and singer, doesn’t seem to hit his full potential in “Standing”, although he definitely excels in his duet with Benson (“Under Your Spell/Standing — Reprise”). Again, Whedon’s writing to this point in the series strengthens the emotional connection viewers (and listeners) feel with the song: Giles is going to leave Sunnydale because he feels he’s standing in Buffy’s way, and Tara is going to leave Willow because she’s been lying about her addiction to magic usage****. The next song, “Walk Through The Fire”, is an ensemble/”get ready to fight the villain” montage number, led by Gellar (again her voice is a little thin and her singing feels flat — although she’s supposed to feel unemotional so I guess it was a character choice). Eventually everyone joins in, and Hannigan receives the line of the day with “I think this line is mostly filler” — I wonder how long it took Whedon to come up with that. It’s followed by the most plot- filled song of the episode, “Something to Sing About”, when Buffy reveals to everyone (except Spike, who she already told) that, when Willow resurrected her from the dead, she pulled her out of heaven. There was no pain, No fear, no doubt Till they pulled me out Of heaven. So that’s my refrain. So that’s my refrain. I live in hell ‘Cause I’ve been expelled From heaven. I think I was in heaven. So give me something to sing about. Please give me something. Spike, who over the past twenty or so episodes has been getting closer to admitting (to himself and to others) his feelings for Buffy, saves her from dancing herself to death, and then Xander admits that he summoned Sweet (the demon played by Hinton Battle) because he wanted to know if he and Anya would have a happy life together. Sweet reprises “What You Feel” and then disappears.

James Marsters (Spike) and Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) The episode ends with “Where Do We Go From Here?”, a final ensemble where everyone sings about the way their relationships have changed, and closes with “Coda”, where Spike and Buffy kiss for the first time. Where do we go from here? Where do we go from here? The battle’s done And we kind of won So we sound our victory cheer Where do we go from here? Though the episode itself was excellent, the soundtrack was more effective (in my case) because of the emotional associations with the material. Fans of Buffy will definitely enjoy listening to this, although casual watchers may not get the same level of appreciation. As far as the material itself, the songs are arranged and ordered in such a way that the weaker offerings are interspersed with the stronger. If we could’ve had Benson knock it out of the park with the opening, I think that might have worked a little better, but it wouldn’t have been germane to the primary plot — that Buffy feels nothing since leaving heaven and can’t admit it to anyone except Spike, who she’s supposed to hate (but doesn’t, not really) — I can understand why Whedon didn’t go that route. Still, if for no other reason than to hear “Under Your Spell”, “Under Your Spell/Standing — Reprise”, and “Walk Through The Fire”, I am definitely keeping this soundtrack on my phone. I might get a little teary-eyed driving to work someday soon as a result, but you know what? I don’t care. Because I am drawn to the fire. Apparently, some people will never learn. # Note to Parents: I’d rate this soundtrack a very light PG for mild language (mostly “hell”) and thematic elements (death and sex). Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children. # * February 4. I’m writing this on the 5th. ** At the end of Season 5, Buffy sacrificed herself to save her sister, jumping to her death to destroy a portal to a Hell Dimension. *** Okay, a LOT tight. **** I realize that pretty much every TV show has to have a character addicted to some kind of drug or behavior — alcohol, gambling, sex, painkillers, whatever — but I never really liked the “Willow’s addicted to magic” storyline. It seemed a bit forced in there just to give us some additional tension. The tension was necessary — up until the last quarter of the season, The Trio wasn’t really that great of a Big Bad in terms of villainy — but I almost wish we could’ve had something else (besides Dawn’s kleptomaniacal cry for help, which also was pretty annoying). <<<>>> Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as 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.