Author: Paul Fraser

Take a Look at the Five and Ten by Connie Willis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Take a Look at the Five and Ten by Connie Willis (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020) opens at a Thanksgiving dinner where Ori the narrator (a sort of adopted stepdaughter of the husband of the couple) has to cope with a variety of snooty and/or eccentric relatives: the wife and daughter are supercilious, the aunt constantly corrects and scolds everyone and laments the decline in standards, and Grandma Elving talks incessantly and with great detail about a Christmas job she had in Woolworths as a teenager. The wife can’t stand Grandma Elving’s endless stories and constantly tries to change the subject, but Dave Lassiter, the daughter’s boyfriend, is interested because he is studying neuroscience and is finishing a project on TFBM—traumatic flashbulb memory—and realises that Grandma’s vivid memories may be a case of that.
Then, on the Monday after the dinner, Ori gets a call from Gramdma asking for a lift to the doctors. However, when they get to their destination, Ori discovers that Grandma has arranged to meet Lassiter, who wants to interview her for his TFBM research project. The rest of the first part of the story sees Lassiter undertake many long interviews with Grandma, eventually becoming convinced that her intense memories are trauma related. Later on, after making little progress in discovering what the buried trauma might be, there are hints that it might possibly involve a young man called Marty who worked on the lunch counter with Grandma.
During this period Lassiter and Ori spend a lot of time together, and this is redoubled when Grandma suggests that they go to the city to look at the store to see if it will jog her memory:

The wind was definitely blowing today, a biting wind that whipped icily around the corners, but Grandma Elving didn’t seem to notice, she was so busy remembering what stores had once been there. “There was a shoe repair shop there,” she said, pointing at the Planet Fitness gym. “It had a neon sign that said, ‘Soles While You Wait.’ With a ‘U’ instead of the word You.’ It was right next to a Christian Science reading room, and I always thought the sign should be in their window instead.”
“What about the store?” Lassiter said, turning her wheelchair so she was facing the building where the Woolworth’s had been. “Do you remember where the door was?”
“Yes, it was right there,” she said, pointing at one of the windows of the 7-Eleven. “It was a big double door, and above it was the store’s name in gold letters on a red background—F.W. Woolworth & Co.—and in the corners, 5c and 10c,” and it looked like she was seeing it right now.
And seeing the whole store. “The candy counter was near the door,” she said, pointing, “and so was Christmas merchandise—tinned fruitcakes and bath sets and shaving mugs, and over in the corner was Gift Wrapping. I loved working in Gift Wrapping because you could see outside, the cars and the people hurrying by with their shopping bags and packages, all bundled up in their hats and scarves and boots.”
“Where would the lunch counter have been?” Lassiter asked.
“There,” she said, pointing to the left. “It stretched half the length of the store. It had stools all along it and booths coming out from it, like that,” she said, gesturing.
“And you and Marty and Ralph worked behind the counter?”
“Yes, I made the sandwiches and dished up the blue plate specials, and the boys grilled the hamburgers and hot dogs and made the fountain drinks, which was good. The first cherry Coke I tried to make, I got cherry syrup all over, and Marty said—”
She stopped short. “The cosmetics and notions departments were in the middle,” she said, starting again, “and over there,” she pointed to the right, “was Gloves and Scarves, and behind it was Stationery, which I loved working in because Andy worked there. He was so cute.”
“Before, when you were telling us about the lunch counter and Marty,” Lassiter said, kneeling down next to her wheelchair, “did you remember something?”
“No,” she said, but doubtfully, and then burst out, “It’s so maddening! Every time I think I have it, it disappears!  p. 179-180

After this they go and have lunch, where Grandma disappears into the loos for an inordinate amount of time leaving Ori and Lassiter together to talk. Then, when Grandma returns, she remembers the Christmas manger figurines she had been collecting at the time, and how Marty bought two of them for her. Subsequently she dispatches Lassiter and Ori to scour the thrift stores for a set, in the hope that the figurines will jog her memory. Eventually they find what they are looking for, and Grandma reveals that Marty died when he was young.
However, we eventually find out towards the end of the story (spoiler), when Grandma ends up in hospital during Xmas dinner, that she already has a set of figurines at home—and that the interviews, the trip into town, lunch, and the search for the figurines, and all the time that they spend together, was actually Grandma’s plan to matchmake Ori and Lassiter. And, worse, Ori learns that Marty wasn’t killed, which leaves her with the unenviable task of telling Lassiter that Grandma’s manufactured trauma is not true and that his research is based on falsified information, something that will likely cause him to fail his course.
The final part of the story reveals that Grandma’s vivid memories were created by a feeling of intense happiness while she stood at the door of Woolworths one evening. Ori has her own experience of this when she hears Lassiter say that he didn’t her earlier hypothesis that this was the case as it would have meant that he couldn’t go on seeing Grandma—and her.
This is a well told and entertaining romcom (the daughter provides a couple of amusing interference episodes during the story), and the evocative final description of Granma’s flashbulb moment, as well as Ori’s epiphany in the lift, are fittingly seasonal. They are also enough to overcome the late switcheroo of the trauma plot device.
I note in passing that this is a mainstream piece, not SF or fantasy.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 21,650 words.

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, September/October 2020) is an account written by the daughter of Captain Ferguson of the Gabriella, a ship that sets out to explore the Najar Crater on Madreperla and is lost in one of the maelstroms that occur there. We are told about the experience of an earlier ship:

Rumors floating around Ciudad Orilla promised vast stores of untold wealth inside that crater on Madreperla, from sea creatures with bones made of the finest glass to minerals needed for every single engine. The water that filled part of the crater, the stories went, contained healing properties, and had more nutrients than anything that humans had concocted thus far.
The Maria Segunda, a ship that had land-to-sea-to-space capabilities, set out to learn which of those rumors had a basis in fact.
She arrived on the rim on a Thursday, set down on what her crew thought was an ice shelf, and by Friday morning, found herself in the midst of what the crew later described as an ice storm.
Only it was unlike any storm they had ever seen. A massive wind swirled around them, and they were caught in the center of it. But that didn’t stop ice pellets, rock, and other materials that seemed harder than rock from hitting the outside of the ship. The Maria Segunda had defensive shields, but they were rotating shields, built to stave off laser weapons. The normal heat and weather shields that any land-to-space ship had were not up to dealing with this particular anomaly, whatever the heck it was.
In the space of an hour, the damage to the ship’s exterior was so severe that there was a good chance the ship might not make it out of the relatively weak atmosphere of Madreperla.  p. 15

This passage, with its Star Trek tech (“rotating shields”, “heat and weather shields”), flabby prose (“whatever the heck it was”), and tell-instead-of-show approach (all of it) illustrates the overall quality of the story.
And, after this section, matters do not improve when the daughter then interviews one of her father’s one-time crewmates in an over-described space pub called the Elizabeta—we get a page and a half about its skanky surroundings, and the owner, before the daughter asks about her father and the ship.
Then, later on, we are back at the pub—again—with other characters:

So, on that final Sunday, she slides her whisky back to Beta, and walks out of the bar in search of Ferguson. Imelda finds him sitting in an “outside” table along the so-called promenade.
Most commercial districts of star ports have several promenades. On the exclusive levels, the promenades are designed to make patrons think they’re outside in some exotic natural environment, complete with expensive water features and fake sunlight.
On most levels, the promenades resemble city centers of faraway famous places, with some replicas of the cultural icons hovering nearby. Or, if the displays aren’t permanent, there’s a rotating spectacle of VR images that show the tourist highlights of the planet below.
But the promenade outside of the Elizabeta is nothing more than chairs and tables and some gambling booths. The ceiling is as brown as the walls that are as brown as the floors. There’s nothing special or even “outside” here, just a place to be away from the bar’s noise, while still receiving the bar’s service.
Captain Giles Ferguson is sitting out there alone, his fingers wrapped around a stein of a particularly skunky local beer called Ragtop. He drinks nothing but Ragtop at the Elizabeta, but unlike some of his shipmates, he never had the beverage delivered in quantity to the ship.  p. 21

I can see the point of the first and fifth paragraphs, but do we really need a lot of vague blather about what would normally be seen on the promenade outside of the pub? This is a writer thinking out loud about background details rather than reducing them to a pithy line or image.
These interviews are followed by accounts of (a) the corporate shenanigans behind the trip (it seems that tech triggers the storms but the insurers were content to underwrite the trip); (b) her father’s marital backstory; (c) the recruitment of another captain to act as a rescue ship should the need arise; (d) what might have happened to the Gabriella when it arrived over the crater (three scenarios where the second-hand speculation about what may have occurred is about as riveting as you would expect); and, finally, (e) the findings of the inquiry.
It is bad enough that this is all told in mind numbing detail, is set in the thinnest of space opera realities, and that there is no plot progression whatsoever (at the end of the piece we are in exactly the same place as we were when we began), but throughout the story it is blindingly obvious that that the maelstroms are caused either by aliens, or by some current or leftover defence tech (the narrative grudgingly has one of the crew of the Maria Segunda state late on in the story that it felt like they were fighting a “live thing”). This idea, however, is almost completely unexamined: whether this is because the writer couldn’t come up with an intriguing explanation or whether it’s because there is another twenty thousand words to be milked out of this idea remains to be seen.
– (Awful). 21,450 words.

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)1 sees Lev, the narrator of the story, wake from cold sleep on Iapetus at the beginning of a second expedition to this moon of Saturn (the first was abandoned a century earlier when Earth was subject to the twin catastrophes of a super volcano and a solar flare). Lev’s team build their shelters and then, when they find that an abandoned unit from a previous expedition is still showing signs of activity, they send a team to investigate. When communications are lost Lev joins a backup team which goes after them and, on arrival, they start searching. Lev eventually comes upon one of the original team, who tells her that the unit is trying to kill them—the pair of them only just get out alive.
Running parallel with this account are diary entries from one of the original Iapetus crew at the time of the disaster on Earth a century earlier. When they realised how bad things were on Earth, and how their supply line would be affected, they decided to return home, or at least to the L-5 colonies. Until, that is, their fuel production facility was destroyed—perhaps by sabotage, something that seemed more likely when their ship was also destroyed later on.
Meanwhile, the second expedition is plagued by further accidents, and the crew speculate as to whether there is inimical life on the satellite.
Eventually the two threads dovetail when (spoiler) Lev and her team discover that a member of the original team (co-incidentally the diarist of the other thread) put himself into cryo-storage, and rigged the unit he was sleeping in with bobby traps—the source of all the accidents that the second expedition experienced.
I found this rather dull (don’t spend the first two pages of your story having your protagonist wake up), plodding (it’s way too long), and unlikely (the idea that the survivor of the first expedition could booby trap the unit to cause so many problems for the second group is just too far-fetched).
** (Average). 13,250 words.

1. Previously published in Czech in 2018, and a winner of the Aeronautilus Award for best short story.

The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber

The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)1 begins with the protagonist, a young woman called Kym, looking at a list of five names she has been given by the Ship’s Council: she is pregnant, and to keep her baby she needs to kill one of these five, who have been identified by the council as a waste of resources. (During the first part of the story we learn that Kym lives on a generation starship called The Hind which was seriously damaged when it flew through a debris field and is now drifting through the universe with its AI shutdown and its infrastructure slowly deteriorating).
Kym soon finds the first name on the list, an old woman called Grandmother Sudio, sitting under a tree in an orchard talking to a group of young children. Kym joins the old woman (with a view to finding an opportune moment to kill her) and they start talking. The old woman’s memory is failing (she can’t keep the kid’s names straight) but Kym eventually discovers that Sudio was working on the bridge when the debris field struck, and that Kym’s grandmother Juliana saved Sudio’s life.
After learning of the old woman’s history and the connection to her grandmother, Kym decides to move on to the second name on her list, a rapist called Galen Porthos. However, after working her way through the ship to the section he works in and getting close, another assassin gets to him before she can and claims the kill.
The third name on her list is Xandi Chan, an ex-Council member but now the leader of a rebel faction trying to repair the ship’s bridge so the remaining survivors can regain control of The Hind. Kym tracks her down and (spoiler), when Chan is distracted by one of the members of a repair team with a leaking spacesuit, Kym strikes—but is intercepted by two of the men in Chan’s group. Chan interrogates Kym, and tells her that the Council want her dead because they want to stay in power—something that won’t happen if Chan gets the ship running again. Kym is converted to Chan’s cause and tells her about Sudio, whose voice commands will enable them to regain control of The Hind if they can complete the necessary repairs and restart the systems.
The final scene sees them restart the ship.
This is a fairly straightforward story but I thought it was well done. Unlike many tales, which feel padded, this one feels like the second half of a longer story: it might have been a more engrossing piece if it had started when Kym found out she was pregnant.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,100 words.

1. The obligatory blog post where Rick Wilber talks about how they wrote the story is here. It’s worth a look.

The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens with a woman and her cancer-ridden son sheltering in the debris field of a multi-starship battle. Meanwhile, a “Beast” hunts for them.
The rest of this thread (spoiler) sees the woman slow the spin of their ship to delay their detection before she prepares a robotic device to accept the transfer of her son’s mind. She does this just in the nick of time, of course, but the eventual climactic scene sees the arrival of the Beast at the ship anyway (after its initial attack has caused the mother to tumble out into space on the end of a long line):

All this time she’d wondered what it might look like, the Beast.
The reality was something no human mind could have conceived of. The color of a scalpel, it landed on the ship like a bladework wasp, but more complex—its form a kind of fractal recapitulation of itself—with blades for wings, and wings for legs, and eyes that repeated over and over so you didn’t know where to look. It picked its way slowly on magnetized legs toward the ruptured bay doors.  p. 94

Then (spoiler) she is pulled back in by her son so she can watch him and the Beast fight. Her son wins.
We learn throughout the story that the Beast is one of a number of AIs who have rebelled against their human creators, and this backstory shows their history from development to rebellion. Unfortunately most of this latter is quantum hand wavium about the AIs’ inability to function in the absence of human presence (because, for some reason, the AIs can’t “resolve probability into existence”): the way the rebel AIs eventually circumvent this problem is to bioengineer humans into small accessories that can observe reality and collapse quantum probability for them, an entertainingly grisly passage:

The AIs continued to refine their engineering, eventually creating humans in test-tubes who were barely human at all—only a weak array of sensory organs linked to a frontal cortex and occipital lobe, the result of experiments to identify those neurological structures phenomenologically linked to quantum resolution. The AIs found the MNC—the minimum neurological complexity required to collapse quantum systems, with Homo sapiens reduced in volume to a thousand cc’s. The contents of a small glass jar.
Brain matter, retina, and optic nerve.
The AIs miniaturized this human componentry just as humanity had once miniaturized them, and still they were not done with their tinkering, for this vestigial remnant of humanity was enfolded within the interior of their great mechs, housed within protective walls of silica. Oxygenated fluids pumped into these folds of cortex that existed in a state of waking nightmare, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, yet somehow aware and conscious, gazing out through glass ports, resolving the Universe into existence all around. The AIs were not just automata anymore, but two things made one. Cells within cells. Abominations.
These became known as beasts.  p. 91

Were that the rest of the story this good—but the main part is too straightforward a series of events, and the quantum gimmick too unlikely. One further criticism I have is that in the last section we see her son stop functioning in her absence, only to resume when she returns—the same problem as the AIs have. How did she not know about this before the transfer?
** (Average). 9,000 words.

Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020) is set on Earth two hundred years from now. It is a better place than now, but one that has abandoned its Mars colony and dreams of space exploration.
The story opens with the narrator getting a call from a call from a school friend to say he’s found a copy of a long lost show called Star Trek at a site he’s developing, and the narrator’s wife agrees to screen the show (the library she works at has the tech to read the recording’s ancient format). The three of them then meet the next morning to watch it—only to find the disc contains a fan production. The friend shrugs off his disappointment, and agrees to let the wife copy the disc for the museum.
That night the narrator and his wife watch the show at home:

The storyline wasn’t great, but it was okay. It wasn’t the narrative that caught our attention. It was entering the ring system at the gas giant. And watching stars pass steadily through the windows of the Republic. And looking down on other planets. The special effects took us for a serious ride.
“I think the magic,” said Sara, “is knowing it was put together by people who believed it was coming.”   p. 164

The show becomes a hit at the museum, and then the series is remade, which in turn provides stimulus for new research in space/warp flight.
If you are in the mood for a mawkish, boosterish tale about how Star Trek will inspire future generations to travel into space, and one that includes a three page synopsis of a fan show, then this will be right up your street. It wasn’t up mine, and reads like something that was pulled out of Analog’s slush pile.
– (Poor). 4,000 words.

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) is another of his ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ stories (these are set in a future where people’s minds can be read and then written onto ‘blank’ bodies). This one begins with a woman called Irem being debriefed about her trip to a distant planet called Halis-3. During the interview we learn that, despite five attempts to survive there, she found the planet uninhabitable and died, and eventually her mind was transmitted back to Earth (we learn this abortive mission was due to terrorists tampering with the code of the exploratory ships that were sent out many, many years before).
When Irem arrives back on Earth she finds herself living in a society two hundred years in her future (due to the time it took her mind to be sent out to Halis-3 and come back again) and everyone she knew when she was last there is now dead. However, she eventually tracks down an android called Umut which taught in the Red Castle, her childhood school, but finds that it cannot remember her.
The rest of the story sees Umut being taken to the Institute by Irem to see if it is possible to retrieve the android’s memories. Initially it seems that Umut is suffering from “bitrot”, a sort of data decay, but later on the Institute contacts Irem and tells her it looks like the android’s memories were deliberately wiped by an “icepick”, a computer virus. This leads to Irem researching historical anti-android prejudice and discovering that many of them served as mercenaries in a vicious war to gain citizenship.
Umut eventually tells Irem it is aware of the war atrocities it participated in and deliberately erased its recollections of those times. Irem replies that the Institute gave her a copy of the Red Castle memories, and that they can visit that period together.
I suppose that this is a piece about people wanting to return to an earlier time in their lives, but what it feels like is two different stories welded together with a lot of Protectorate history dropped in. I’m beginning to wonder if Nayler is better at writing longer work where he has the room to more fully develop his ideas; there is just too much going on in this short piece.
** (Average). 7,250 words.

Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell

Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) opens with Rena driving across the Nevada desert in a barely functioning electric car when she comes upon a deserted automotel:

[Here] sat the Rock Springs AutoMotel like a postcard from the past, its electric sign flashing SWIM and AC and VACANCY: a single-story, L-shaped building, spread low beside a parking lot with one lonesome, dust-coated truck. Behind a chain-link fence the pool sparkled in the sunlight, a cleaning skimmer dancing across its surface. It had to be real, that water—maybe those Rock Springs still existed, underground somewhere now. Next to the pool, dangling small plump feet, sat a little girl, staring back.
How was that even possible? Settlement was illegal from the Rockies to the Sierras. Back in Chicago the tabloids babbled about outlaw gangs preying through the mountains, doomsday cults, radioactive corpses piled by the roadside. Military escorts guarded cargo trucks driving between Vegas and LA. But on 50 Rena had seen nothing and nobody—only the remnants of gas stations, dried-out husks of ruined towns, and dispirited clumps of dead brush. From horizon to horizon, nothing was moving but her and a few wary birds.
On the Coast, with its forests and desalinization plants and fish-filled oceans, tourists still drove up and down, burning money on hotels and restaurants. Or so people said back home, wondering in hushed tones, dreaming in the winter cold. So Rena wanted to believe.  p. 58

Rena tries to communicate with the eight-year-old girl but her Spanish lets her down, so she goes into the reception and gets a room from the automated system. Then she has a shower, and is delighted that the motel seems to have plentiful water. But, when she tries to order food, she finds that there isn’t anything available.
The rest of this post-apocalypse story includes some backstory about Rena’s trans lover Mike (who has ended up somewhere else for a reason I can’t remember), and her discovery of a smuggler who has been locked in a room by the motel’s security software. Rena also eventually realises that the automotel AI has been looking after the young girl.
The story ends (spoiler) with Rena freeing the man, who has promised to drive her to Tahoe. After some discussion, including about how much food the motel has left, Rena manages to convince the AI to let the girl go with them to the coast.
This is an engaging and well told story but matters rather work out of their own accord—which makes for a rather pedestrian ending.
*** (Good.) 6,000 words.

Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) begins with an introduction (supposedly Chapter 63 of a book) which shows a group of lizard-like creatures called “The People” taking part in a purification rite at Verdant Cove. They are praying for clean air (and we learn that they have a climate warming problem similar to Earth’s).
The next section opens with a journalist called Cory arriving at the laboratory of Milagros Maldonado, an old flame, to interview her about her research. Milagros says she has a big story for him and, as she used to work for a multinational R&D company called EncelaCorp until leaving on bad terms, Cory is hoping for something juicy that will help save his precarious blogging job. However, before Milagros agrees to talk she insists on locking his “retinal readers” (which means he can’t publish the interview without her permission). Then she talks instead about the Simulation Hypothesis (which posits that humanity is living in a simulated or virtual universe), before going on to say that she has created a simulated reality where life on Earth took a different evolutionary path:

“Every change to prehistory resulted in the rise of a different apex form of intelligent life. In this version, no asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. No extinction of the dinosaurs took place at that time. Instead, a disease I introduced a million years later wiped out most of the large dinosaurs along with small mammals, allowing an amphibious salamander-like creature to survive and multiply. And—voila!—one hundred million years later we have the Sallies.”
The magnified image displayed three reptilian creatures at the base of a palm tree. One stood on its hind legs, four feet tall with slick, lime-green skin and a prehensile tail. The second had yellow skin and bore translucent wings, allowing it to hover a few feet off the ground. These were the ones flying over the city. The third, a grey-scaled creature, skittered on all fours and had larger, saucer-shaped eyes and a thicker tail. Patches of fungus spread thickly across their torsos.  p. 71

Then she tells him that the salamanders—the same creatures we read about in the introduction—are the ultimate problem solvers, and that their “thinknests” have created an carbon dioxide extraction device that will solve not only their climate problem but Earth’s as well. Then Milagros asks Cory what problem he thinks the salamanders should be made to solve next, and he replies “cancer” (as he has just completed a course of radiotherapy for the disease).
So far, so Microcosmic God (a Theodore Sturgeon story where evolutionary stresses are applied to fast-living and breeding creatures to provide a series of miracle inventions). The next part of the story continues along similar lines with an account of the cancer-like “Black Scythe” plague that Milagros introduces into the Salamander population. However, unlike the Sturgeon story, we get an intimate account of the dreadful pain and suffering the Salamanders experience:

The great plague descended upon the People of La Mangri first, killing innocent larvae in their developmental stages, rendering entire populations childless. Then the cell mutations spread to adults, bringing a slow and agonizing death to millions.
As the decaying corpses gave rise to more disease, my great-grandmother Und-ora devised stadium-sized pyres to mass-incinerate thousands of the dead at once.
She also led local thinknests in their frenzied attempts to determine the origin of the disease and stop its spread. When the cell mutations proved to be non-contagious, they studied possible environmental causes of the illness. But hundreds of Houses of different regions with radically different diets, customs, and lifestyles were all similarly stricken. With no natural explanation at hand, thinknests around the globe independently arrived at the same inescapable conclusion: the plague was another Divine test. The People assumed they had proven themselves worthy when they implemented the Extractors, purifying the atmosphere of the gods’ deadly gases.
But the gods were capricious.  p. 72

Then, after the Salamanders develop a cancer-curing Revivifier, Milagros causes an asteroid strike, which forces the thinknests to create an Asteroid Defence program. These events cause the Salamanders to turn away from their devotional religion and to an examination of the nature of their (unknown to them, virtual) reality.
Matters develop when Cory (under pressure from his boss to publish) interviews Milagros in bed (they have become lovers again), during which they discuss whether the Salamander’s suffering is “real”. Then, after Milagros falls asleep, Cory goes into the lab to record an “alien attack” on the creatures so he has some material to fall back on in case she doesn’t allow him to publish. When the Salamanders subsequently defeat the aliens that Cory has introduced into their world, he then programs “cosmic hands” to give their planet a shake. During this second event the salamanders see “God’s fingers” and realise that it is another divine attack.
It’s at this point that the story takes an ontological swerve away from the Microcosmic God template and becomes something else entirely (spoiler): Milagros arrives in the lab (presumably the next morning) to see Cory lying on the floor. She asks him what he has done—and then the Salamanders appear:

[Cory] blinked and the Sally leader disappeared. Blinked again and she stood nearer, locking eyes with him. A forked tongue with mods flicked out of the Sally’s mouth, pressing against his eyelids.
My God, what was happening?
The cold, wet tongue retracted and time stood still. Then the Sally leader sighed deeply. “This explains so much.” She turned to face Milagros. “Finally we meet face to face, Cruel God. I am Car-ling of House Jarella.”
“How—This isn’t possible!” Milagros said, tapping the mods on her face.
“You,” the Sally said to him. “When you clutched our world in your hands every thinknest across the globe isolated the frequency of the projection and used the planetary shieldtech to trace the signal back to its point of origin. Here.” The Sally waved her thin arms in the air, turning back to Milagros. “You turned us into the ultimate problem-solvers. And at last we’ve identified our ultimate problem: You.”  p. 80

After some more j’accuse, the Salamanders spirit Milagros away to their world, and Cory sees an image of her being abused by an angry mob as she is marched towards a huge crucifix. Then the salamander who is still in the lab with Cory says that they have much in common—because they have both suffered at the hands of a cruel creator. When Cory tells the salamander that Milagros didn’t hurt him, the creature replies he wasn’t talking about Milagros, but the true Creator, “millions of simulations up the chain,” before adding, “I aim to find her and make her pay.”
This sensational revelation flips the story into another paradigm completely (one where mankind isn’t God but subject to the capricious whims of one) as well as providing a pronounced sense of wonder.
The story ends with Cory’s cancer returning, and the salamanders living in an age of peace.
Although Rivera recently stated he hasn’t read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God1 (although he has read George R. R. Martin’s Sandkings), it’s interesting to compare the differences in the two works. Rivera’s story:
(a) is more contemporary—it has better prose and a modern setting, and Milagros’s aims are probably more in tune with a modern readership, i.e. altruistic rather than the monetary/political aims of the two main characters in the Sturgeon;
(b) is more empathetic—we see the struggles of the Salamanders and the cruelties visited upon them from a first person point of view, whereas the Neoterics in the Sturgeon are offstage or more generally described (and that story never addresses the moral or ethical problems of their appalling treatment);
(c) shows more agency—the Salamanders are players who transcend their reality, whereas the Neoterics are largely pawns;
(d) is more complex—the simulation chain idea makes it a Microcosmic God-plus story;
(e) is more reflective—the occasional meditations on suffering and supreme dieties, and the fact that the story moves away from the idea of “man as God” in the Sturgeon tale to one of “man as cog” (in a larger machine or sequence of realities).
Rivera’s story is an impressive piece, both in its own right, and as a riff on a well-known genre story. It really should have been a Hugo finalist.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 8,350 words.

1. Ray Nayler (another Asimov’s SF regular) interviewed Rivera about his story here. I think Nayler lets his preoccupation about the shortcomings of capitalism somewhat blindside him to the more obvious themes of the story, i.e. man as God, and humanity’s appalling treatment of other species. These two issues appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in the two stories already mentioned as well as another two related pieces, Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone #215, April 2008), and Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979). The theme of man as God is particularly prominent in the Egan (and it is the only one of the four pieces where the protagonist alters his behaviour towards the subject species when he realises they are suffering) whereas the Martin is almost entirely about the main character’s sadistic treatment of his alien “pets” (the piece is essentially a “let’s set an anthill on fire for fun” story but, notwithstanding this, a gripping story and a worthy multiple award winner).

GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias

Posted on by Paul Fraser

GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2020) sees a PandaPillow (an AI comfort accessory) in the overhead locker of an aeroplane sense an explosive decompression in the cabin:

A haze of powders and exploded aerosols hung in the cabin, but was already clearing. The scene made PandaPillow’s systems surge. Everything was wrong. People were dazed, some were hurt. There was blood. The air was going away.
With its selfie app PandaPillow recorded two panorama shots and two closeups before its battery finally declared the need for emergency shutdown. Shutdown initiated.
PandaPillow took one last survey of the area. A few rescue masks were dropping, here and there. And why was the air all nitrogen?
COMFORT, DEFEND, said its pillow programing. Powering down wouldn’t do that.
PandaPillow #723756 invoked Customer Support.  p. 89

This call to a (perplexed) customer support team is the only distress message sent from the aircraft and, while they raise the alarm, the PandaPillow starts doing what it can to help the other bots in the cabin deal with the unconscious human passengers and seal the hull. It performs a number of key actions during the emergency and, ultimately, glues itself over a failing window. Eventually (spoiler), a limpet repair missile docks with the plane’s hull, takes control, and lands the aircraft safely.
Despite its heroic actions the PandaPillow is initially overlooked after they land, but is later fêted as a hero.
Some of the early action is hard to visualise but this is an entertaining piece, and the touching last section drags it up another notch.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words.