Category: Andy Dudak

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld, December 2020) is set in a Galactic Empire future, and opens with Pinander at college reciting one of his set texts. After this, he meets his friends for lunch:

Pinander’s mind expands with activated Lore. He sits with Jain and Philo.
“Alright?”
A penitent Jain hunches over her steaming bowl.
Philo studies a scroll. “I’m not going to make it,” he says.
“Where are you?” Pinander says.
“The Temple Odes.”
Pinander explains the Temple Odes were songs. “Some verse lends itself to silent reading, but not the Odes. You should be reciting or singing.”
Jain giggles in her soup steam.
Pinander reckons Philo is doomed. Intelligence goes a long way in the imperial service exam, but shyness can hobble you. There are soundproofed study rooms for students like Philo, but to pass the exams you must study constantly: at meals, in showers, in the loo, to and from study groups, as you drift off to sleep. There’s a lot of verse like the Odes. If you don’t recite or sing, Lore will go un-activated, remaining useless noise in your skull.

We learn that the students spend several years in an aestivation facility dubbed “The Crypt” before they come to college, during which time a huge body of knowledge called the Lore is downloaded into them. Afterwards they have to activate it by reading or reciting or singing various texts.
The rest of the story sees Philo commit suicide, and Jain drop out, but only after she passes on the revolutionary idea that there was another context written for the Lore by a poet called Sinecure. Further academic and counter-revolutionary intrigue follows (a Professor makes a cryptic remark that takes root in Pinandar’s “activated mind”) and the story eventually proceeds to an ending (spoiler) where Pinander manages to track down a scroll written by Sinecure and uses it to gain a dual view of his Lore and the Empire.
The core idea of this story is a bit unlikely, and much that follows is either a hand-wavey development of that idea or a rather over-elaborate description of college students and parental pressure and revolutionary intrigue in a far-future Imperial Empire (i.e. too much description and not enough story). It also has an ending that seems a bit unfocused. Ultimately, I guess I liked this, but it takes some getting into, and I’d understand if people bounced off it.1
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. This story got a mixed response in one of my Facebook groups.

Salvage by Andy Dudak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Salvage by Andy Dudak (Interzone, January-February 2020) gets off to an intriguing start with a woman called Aristy examining “homifacts” on New Ce. These homifacts are petrified humans created by an alien race a thousand years previously, with the purpose of stopping human observation of the Universe (which was, apparently, causing it to fly apart). The hominids are, however, still alive as software inside their transmuted bodies—and Aristy is there and able to interface with them because her people were far away on near-lightspeed spaceships at the time of the alien action. As she tells one of the homifacts (a political man in the Picti dictatorship which ruled the planet):

“They asked humanity to turn its damaging gaze away from the cosmos. Turn inward, lose itself in simulated realities. And some did. Whole civilizations did. But it wasn’t enough for the aliens, the Curators as we’ve come to call them. So, they acted. They swept through the human Emanation in less than a century. No one knows how they did that.
“They turned the human species inward. Cities, worlds, systems, empires. The Curators’ Reagent froze people instantly, preserved their brains, which were gradually converted into durable networks suffusing their remnant statues. A trillion human beings Turned Inward, a trillion isolated minds in a trillion virtualities.”

Aristy now spends her time interfacing with these homifacts and asking them if they want to be downloaded onto her servers, where they can live in a world of their own creation; stay where they are, with or without improvements; or be deleted:

Of the six she hacked today, four chose transfer to her server: Acolyte, Night Soil Collector, Visiting Student, and Doctor. The small-minded Printer opted to remain in his simulated village, but with a larger, more prosperous print shop, a remodeled wife, and a medal of distinguished service from Generalissimo Picti. The brainwashed Commissar, unable to bear the historical irrelevance of Picti’s long-gone reign, chose oblivion.

Just as this story looks like it is settling down into its groove, the next part veers off in an unexpected direction: Aristy goes back to her camp and finds a lawyer and an armed guard waiting. They ask her about the homifacts she has salvaged, and then tell her that she needs to go with them to Drop City.
After her arrival, Aristy is quizzed by the Drop City Committee, and later has to listen to a number of homifacts give testimony about the historical crimes committed against them by Picti the dictator: they go on to demand his reclamation so he can stand trial. Then, during a recess, Aristy goes for a drink in a bar, followed by her guard; there, an old man challenges her about something she did on her starship. Finally, the committee reconvene and sentence Aristy to community service for her illegal salvaging operations, which means she has to track down Picti and bring him to trial for them.
The search for General Picti starts at a former torture chamber under a building called The Tannery. Aristy finds his security boss there, and starts going through his memories to find out where Picti was when the aliens arrived: these scenes build up a picture of the planetary society of the time.
When (spoiler) Aristy finally finds Picti, she enters his simulation and goes through the timeline, watching as it veers from reality into fantasy (during this sequence Picti turns himself into a god). Then she appears to tell him that he is to stand trial for his crimes, and Picti learns what has happened over the last 1000 years. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Aristy was one of the waking crew of the starship, and deliberately killed its sleepers. We aren’t really told why Aristy did this, but the ending has such an intense, almost hallucinatory, quality that I wasn’t as bothered about this unresolved subplot as I might have been.
This is an original piece, has a complex development and, all in all, is pretty good.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 10,600 words.