Month: June 2022

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw (Analog, August 1966) begins with Garland and his pregnant wife, Selina, driving in the West of Scotland when they see a sign: “SLOW GLASS—Quality High, Prices Low”. Garland stops to inquire, much to the irritation of his wife (she is pregnant, neither of them are pleased about the matter, and it is causing significant friction between them).
After the couple go up the path to find the owner, they come to a cottage where they see the proprietor of the slow glass farm, Hagan, sitting on a wall. They also see, through the cottage window, a young woman holding a small boy. Hagan doesn’t invite the pair inside, but instead brings out a blanket so they can sit on the wall beside him.
Hagan then talks to them about the slow glass he has for sale—10 year in-phase material which has a view of the spectacular landscape in front of them, and which costs £200 for a four foot window. Garland is impressed by the 10 year specification, but the price is not as cheap as he hoped. Meanwhile, his wife Selina is shocked at the cost:

“You don’t understand, darling,” I said, already determined to buy.
“This glass will last ten years and it’s in phase.”
“Doesn’t that only mean it keeps time?”
Hagan smiled at her again, realizing he had no further necessity to bother with me. “Only, you say! Pardon me, Mrs. Garland, but you don’t seem to appreciate the miracle, the genuine honest-to-goodness miracle, of engineering precision needed to produce a piece of glass in phase. When I say the glass is ten years thick it means it takes light ten years to pass through it.”

When Hagan’s explanation about the time delaying properties of slow glass suddenly tails off, Garland looks away from the view he is buying and sees that Hagan is looking at the young woman and child, who have once again appeared in the window but seem to be paying no attention to what is going on outside.
After a few more clues are dropped (spoiler), the story resolves when Hagan goes to get a pane of slow glass for the couple. Selina takes the rug back into the cottage and—before Garland can stop her from going in—they discover the inside of the cottage is “damp, stinking, and utterly deserted”. There is no woman or child there, and the couple realise they have been looking at a pane of slow glass. When Hagan returns he sees what has happened and, before the couple go, tells them that his wife and child were killed by a hit and run driver on the Oban road. . . .
I think that this story would be better without its final line (“He was looking at the house, but I was unable to tell if there was anyone at the window”) but this is a very minor quibble about what is an excellent piece, a deserved classic, and something that should have been that year’s Hugo & Nebula winner (it lost against Larry Niven’s Neutron Star in the Hugo ballot, and Richard Wilson’s The Secret Place in the Nebula one).
***** (Excellent). 3,150 words. Story link.

1. The rest of the stories in the “Slow Glass” series are listed at ISFDB.

Rhizome by Starlight by Fran Wilde

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rhizome by Starlight by Fran Wilde (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set on an island that is overgrown with what appears to be a fast-growing, mutant, and malevolent form of kudzu. The story opens with the narrator cutting back the day’s growth from the seed bank cum greenhouse where she lives and works.
We later learn that she is the third generation of her family to do this job:

It was left to us to tend the seeds because something in grandfather’s genes wasn’t right. That’s what he wrote in the manual. He, and others like him, stayed with the greenhouse, while others, much stronger and better, found safety on the ships. At least that’s what the neat seed-letters say. His young daughter, her genes like his, remained too. She, and we became the promise he made: to stay, to be gardeners.

After some further description of the narrator’s daily routine and backstory (as well as a rare visit to the island from a scientist who she avoids), she decides to build a boat and leave the island.
When the narrator is later picked up by a ship (spoiler), she is kept prisoner, and it becomes apparent that she is a form of mutant plant or semi-plant life herself. At the very end of the story the scientist who visited the island frees her before she dies from lack of light.
This tale starts off as a future eco-disaster piece but appears to turn into something more far-fetched, or perhaps even magical realist.
** (Average). 3,750 words.

Impostor by Philip K. Dick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Impostor by Philip K. Dick (Astounding, June 1953) starts with the protagonist, Olham, having breakfast with his wife. During this they talk about a permanent war with the Outspacers, aliens from Alpha Centauri, and the recent development of the protec-bubbles that now surround the planet. What is also cleverly inserted into this opening section is the seemingly inconsequential mention of a fire at nearby Sutton Wood, a location that will reappear later in the story.
When Olham is later picked up to go to work by an older colleague called Nelson (they are both high ranking officials at a defence project), Olham sees there is another man in the car. The man identifies himself as Peters, says he works for security, and that he is there to arrest Olham for being an Outspace spy. The car quickly gets airborne and heads for the Moon while Peters calls his boss to tell him about the successful arrest.
The rest of the story is a fast-paced tale that sees Peters explain that an Outspace ship with a humanoid robot containing a U-bomb recently penetrated the protec-bubble surrounding Earth. Peters then states that Olham is the Outspace robot, and that they intend dismantling him on the far side of the Moon. Olham frantically tries to convince Peters and Nelson that the robot must have failed to reach him, and that he is the real Olham. However, when they land on the Moon, and Olham sees he still has not convinced them, he says he is about to explode. Nelson and Peters flee from the car (they have put their spacesuits on before landing), and Olham quickly closes the door and returns to Earth.
The final section of the story (spoiler) sees Olham return home, escape from an ambush, and eventually make his way to Sutton Wood. There he finds the remains of a burnt-out Outsider spaceship. Then, when Peters, Nelson and a security detail arrive shortly afterwards, Olham manages to convince Peters to go over and look at a body lying near the wreckage. Peters and the team look at the body and decide that it is the robot, but then Nelson pulls on what he thinks is the metal corner of the U-bomb in the robot’s body:

Nelson stood up. He was holding onto the metal object. His face was blank with terror. It was a metal knife, an Outspace needle-knife, covered with blood.
“This killed him,” Nelson whispered. “My friend was killed with this.” He looked at Olham. “You killed him with this and left him beside the ship.”
Olham was trembling. His teeth chattered. He looked from the knife to the body. “This can’t be Olham,” he said. His mind spun, everything was whirling. “Was I wrong?”
He gaped.
“But if that’s Olham, then I must be . . .”
He did not complete the sentence, only the first phrase. The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri.

This suspenseful and paranoid piece has a dreamlike feel (apart from Olham’s nightmarish predicament there is the quick trip to the moon and back), and you never really know until the final moments if Olham is a robot or not.1 This, and the fast pace of the story, keeps the reader off-balance and lets the writer gloss over one or two things that might have revealed Olham’s true nature (the brief door opening on the Moon; the question of how the robot would get Olham’s memories).
An impressive piece that reflects the Reds-under-the bed fears of the time, and Philip K. Dick’s only sale to John W. Campbell (I note that the story is another exception to Campbell’s supposed Human Exceptionalism rule2).
**** (Very Good). 5,400 words. Story link.

1. Dick would return to this theme in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was later filmed as Bladerunner).

2. A writer remarked to me, “It’s a story where The Thing wins”.

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set in a future America that is suffering from the effects of climate change (a flooded Iowa in this case) and has split into those who live in walled communities and those who live outside. The narrator, a biologist who specialises in distributed horticulture, is one of the latter, and the story opens with her son cutting his hand and developing an infection:

The next two sunrises bring barely more light than the nights that precede them. I always kiss my sleeping child after I get up. This morning, his forehead feels warm under my lips, more than usual. I sniff at his wounded hand and almost gag. Angry red streaks radiate away from the bandage.
Jin stirs as I pull on my raincoat.
‘Where are you going?’ he murmurs.
‘Rishi’s cut is infected,’ I say softly. ‘I’m going Uphill to see if I can get some antibiotics before I go to work.’
I step onto the balcony and uncover our small boat. We removed the railing when the rain started, turning it into a dock for the wet season. I push off into the turbulent water flowing through the street and start the motor. The boat putters upstream. Four houses down, the Millers are on the roof in slickers, checking their garden. They wave as I pass by, and I slow down enough to ask if they have any antibiotics, but they shake their heads, No.
‘Good luck!’ Jeanie Miller calls after me, her brow furrowed in concern. Their youngest died last year, just six months old, from a nasty case of bronchitis.

When she gets to Uphill, the walled community nearby, the gate guard tells her, after radioing the hospital, that they don’t have any antibiotics to spare as they are saving it for post-flu pneumonia cases that may develop. The guard tells her that it is nothing personal, and that her father “was a good man” (ironically, her father used to be a doctor at the hospital).
On returning home the narrator finds her husband and son having lunch, which includes a fresh loaf from one of their neighbours. As she eats, she thinks of her doctor father, and Alexander Fleming, which prompts her to retrieve a microbiology textbook from the attic. Then she decides to try and make penicillin.
The rest of the story details the narrator’s struggle to grow the penicillin mould and purify it, a process which starts with a visit to a rundown college campus where she gets fifteen minutes of precious internet time. There are various trials and tribulations that follow, including a sub-plot where (spoiler), her husband Jin rounds up the local militia to force Uphill to give them the antibiotics they need for their son’s worsening condition (Jin is arrested, but one of the hospital’s doctors visits the narrator with the antibiotics required for Rishi’s condition).
There is a final twist when the doctor later returns with news that Jin has been stabbed while breaking up a fight in prison, and that the hospital has by now run out of antibiotics. Needless to say the narrator manages to decant and purify the antibiotics her husband needs just in time. Finally, the last scene telescopes forward in time to show the industrial process that has been set up to supply antibiotics to the surrounding area.
This piece has, unlike a lot of post-collapse stories, a refreshing can-do/pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude and, even though the plot is relatively slight, it developed in a different way from what I expected. I rather enjoyed this story, and it struck me as the kind of piece that could appear in Analog.1
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,350 words.
 
1. A quick skim of ISFDB shows this writer has published all over, including a couple of pieces on Tor, and one in Analog.

Hunting Machine by Carol Emshwiller

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hunting Machine by Carol Emshwiller (Science Fiction Stories, May 1957) opens with Joe illegally modifying their robotic “hound” so he and his wife Ruthie can hunt a 1500lb black bear they saw the previous day. It will be the final trophy of their holiday.
The next day Joe releases the robot hound, and the pair then have a comfortable breakfast in the luxury camping site that has been provided for them. Later on the hound sends a signal indicating it has sighted the bear and is following it at a distance. Despite the bear’s best efforts, it cannot evade the hound.
Later on, after the couple have been following the hounds’ signal for a couple of hours, they start getting close to the bear:

[They] stopped for lunch by the side of the same stream the bear had waded, only lower down. And they used its cold water on their dehydrated meal—beef and onions, mashed potatoes, a lettuce salad that unfolded in the water like Japanese paper flowers. There were coffee tablets that contained a heating unit too and fizzled in the water like firecracker fuses until the water was hot, creamy coffee.
The bear didn’t stop to eat. Noon meant nothing to him. Now he moved with more purpose, looking back and squinting his small eyes.
The hunter felt the heart beat faster, the breathing heavy, pace increasing. Direction generally south.
Joe and Ruthie followed the signal until it suddenly changed. It came faster; that meant they were near.
They stopped and unfolded their guns. “Let’s have a cup of coffee first,” Ruthie said.
“Okay, Hon.” Joe released the chairs which blew themselves up to size. “Good to take a break so we can really enjoy the fight.”

While they have their coffee, the hound is instructed to goad the bear into a fury before it starts driving it towards them. When the pair eventually sight the bear, and it runs towards them (spoiler), they only give it a couple of medium energy shots to prolong the “fight”. Then they get in each other’s way and fall over—and Joe panics and orders the hound to intervene. It quickly kills the bear and, afterwards, Joe surveys the corpse and decides it is too moth-eaten to skin for a trophy.
This is quite well done for the most part, and the story makes its point about the cruelty and vacuousness of hunting (especially when you have such an overwhelming technological advantage). However, the story’s final events are flat and anticlimactic, and I’d rather hoped there would be a clever biter-bit ending.
**+ (Average to Good). 2,200 words. Story link.

When It Changed by Joanna Russ

Posted on by Paul Fraser

When It Changed by Joanna Russ (Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972) has an opening passage that describes the narrator’s fast-driving wife Katy and her engineering skills before speculating about how long it will be before one their daughters, Yuriko, goes off on a seemingly rite-of-passage trip to kill a cougar or bear armed only with a knife (there is also mention of the narrator having fought three duels). Then the story flips (1972) reader expectation about the narrator’s sex (she is female not male) by revealing that something awful has happened: men have returned to Whileaway.
The middle section of the story details the meeting between the narrator and the four men who have landed (“I can only say they were apes with human faces”, “muscled like bulls”, “I thought they would be good-looking!”), and we soon discover that men died out in a plague on Whileaway six centuries earlier. The rest of their conversation is mostly made up of the men’s patronising observations of Whileaway society and the women’s bridling and hostility, something which culminates when Katy feels that one of the men has insulted the couple and she tries to shoot him. The narrator manages to knock her wife’s laser-rifle off-target at the last moment.
The story concludes with the narrator giving an extended elegy for her planet and its society:

But men are coming to Whileaway. Lately I sit up nights and worry about the men who will come to this planet, about my two daughters and Betta Katharinason, about what will happen to Katy, to me, to my life. Our ancestors’ journals are one long cry of pain and I suppose I ought to be glad now but one can’t throw away six centuries, or even (as I have lately discovered) thirty-four years. Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the lot of us, hicks in overalls, farmers in canvas pants and plain shirts: Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes! I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of Yuki made to feel unimportant or silly, of my other children cheated of their full humanity or turned into strangers.

Well, at least the Earthmen won’t be killing them in duels.
There are a number of things that I don’t like about this piece or don’t think work: first, it is a polemic and not a story: second, its misandry (see the comments above and the general “men will ruin everything” vibe of the last pages); third, the culture the women have developed (or have allowed to develop) on Whileaway seems very odd—it is possible that women could develop a violent society (the teenage bear hunting, the duelling, the attempting shooting after the perceived insult), but it seems rather unlikely; fourth, the story (what there is of it) doesn’t address the issue that most of the women on Whileaway would probably be sexually attracted to any male settlers (six hundred years of cultural conditioning isn’t going to trump three hundred thousand years of evolution); finally, the more interesting story would have been what happened when the men actually arrived, not the temper tantrum that takes place beforehand.
The story went on to win the Nebula Award but it was only a finalist for the Hugo and Locus Awards. I would suggest it is an excellent example of a story getting its awards or nominations for surfing the zeitgeist—the Equal Rights Amendment had recently been passed in the USA and the ratification process had just begun.
I didn’t think much of this story when I first read it in the late-seventies and I thought even less of it this time around.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words. Story link.

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss (New Worlds #100, November 1960) is set on a far future Earth where humanity has departed and only animals are left; it opens with Dandi Lashadusa (who we later discover is an uplifted sloth-like creature) passing a musicolumn:

When old Dandi Lashadusa came riding down that dusty road on her megatherium, the column began to intone. It was just an indigo stain in the air, hardly visible, for it represented only a bonded pattern of music locked into the fabric of that particular area of space. It was also a transubstantio-spatial shrine, the eternal part of a being that had dematerialised itself into music.  p. 63

Dandi dismounts near the column to listen to its music, and telepathically communes with her tetchy mentor half a world away in Beterbroe. He ignores Dandi’s suggestion to look at the view through her eyes, and he instead provides a trenchant critique of an unnamed piece of music that is of significance to Dandi. The conversation then briefly touches on to her tentative plans to die, before she gets back on the megatherium and continues on.
As Dandi travels towards her next stop, the Involute (“it seemed to hang irridial above the ground a few leagues on”), we learn that, in this far future, the Moon has left Earth to orbit the Sun, and that Earth and Venus now orbit each other. We also learn about humanity’s expansion throughout the solar system, and their development of the Laws of Intergration, which ultimately led to the construction of the transubstantio-spatialisers used to project them onto the pattern of reality. They never came back.
When Dandi arrives at the Involute her mentor senses her dark thoughts. He tells her that moping does not become her, and that she should return home, and adds that he does not want to hear any more about the music she has chosen for her swan song. She replies that she is lonely:

He shot her a picture from another of his wards before leaving her. Dandi had seen this ward before in similar dream-like glimpses. It was a huge mole creature, still boring underground as it had been for the last twenty years. Occasionally it crawled through vast caves; once it swam in a subterranean lake; most of the while it just bored through rock. Its motivations were obscure to Dandi, although her mentor referred to it as ‘a geologer.’ Doubtless if the mole was vouchsafed occasional glimpses of Dandi and her musicolumnology, it would find her as baffling. At least the mentor’s point was made; loneliness was psychological, not statistical.
Why, a million personalities glittered almost before her eyes!  p. 68

The last part of the story (spoiler) sees Dandi arrive at her old home in Crotheria. When she goes to look at her old house she is confronted by an uplifted bear—transgressive creatures that are the only ones who wish to emulate “man’s old aggressiveness”. Dandi panics and summons her mentor (now revealed as an uplifted dolphin). He takes control of her body and moves to kill the bear, but Dandi fights her mentor and tells the creature to flee. The enraged mentor throws Dandi’s elephant-sized body against the wall and the house begins to collapse. She jumps to safety.
Dandi later realises, when she hears nothing further from her mentor, that she has been excommunicated. She continues her journey until she comes to a suitable spot, frees her mount, and proceeds with her plan:

Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could unbutton herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging—and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherim body . . . but an indigo column, hardly visible . . .
Lass for a long while cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly—and a little condescendingly—regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.
Almost the only landmark was a faint violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as old as the landscape itself and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as The Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: “All creatures that on Earth do dwell . . .”  p. 73

There isn’t much of a story here, and the pleasure that this piece provides comes from (a) its exotic and elegiac descriptions of a pastoral far-future Earth, and (b) its transcendent, sense-of-wonder ending. I thought this was an excellent story the first time I read it but, this time around, it was apparent that part of its charm is the novelty of its touching last line.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

This World is Made for Monsters by M. Rickert

Posted on by Paul Fraser

This World is Made for Monsters by M. Rickert (F&SF, September-October 2020) starts with an alien spaceship landing at a farm near a town and all the children rushing out to see it. The alien family come out of the ship and the farmer’s dog bounds towards them: one of the larger aliens reaches down to give it a pat.
Shortly after this (and other initial encounters), the first alien Fest begins:

It was the first annual Alien Fest, which grew so popular that the local economy has come to rely on it, and the recent sharp decline in attendance is worrisome. Revelers dress in green costumes, drink from alien cups, throw balls at alien targets, and eat fried dough dyed to look like green fingers. It is good old-fashioned fun, which apparently no one wants any more.
The mothers made sandwiches while the fathers set up tables quickly fashioned from planks of wood and sawhorses found in the Beltens’ barn. Mr. Ellreidge went back to town with the men to open his store. He kindly offered to start a tab for the various supplies such as cases of soda and paper plates and, as the day wore on, charcoal, beer, hot dogs, and condiments.
“Charge it all to the town,” the mayor said, but waited until after his reelection that November to send a bill to every household, the “alien tax” as it has come to be called.
I don’t know why this isn’t taught in our schools. I used to page through my children’s history books, and it took me a long time to stop being surprised it wasn’t there. Now, when I ask my grandchildren what they know about the genesis of Alien Fest, they have most of the details right but deliver it all in jest and laugh when I say I remember it well.
Recently, after trying to explain this to Tess, my youngest granddaughter, stranger than anyone in our family has ever been, she looked up at me with sad brown eyes then slipped her small hand into mine and I realized, with a shock, how old I am, so old that no one believes I know what I am talking about.  p. 222

Events go well at the first Alien Fest until (spoiler) the mother of one of the girls thinks that the aliens have abducted her: the mother shakes and interrogates one of the alien children, which causes her to be levitated by the displeased alien parents. Then the other alien child and her unhurt daughter appear, but the atmosphere has soured and the aliens go back to their ship. They leave (but not until after the dog runs onto the ship and is put back outside and given a tummy rub) and never return.
The story ends with the narrator saying the annual Alien Fests are becoming less popular with the young before she launches into an impassioned defence of the day, people’s memories of it, and how the aliens would be pleased at the commemorative event if they ever returned. The narrator concludes with the comment, “This world is made for monsters”, at which point Tess, the granddaughter, starts crying.
This has a readable narrative style (it feels like a 1950s SF story in some ways) but I’m perplexed as to what message the story is trying to deliver.1 Is it that that previous generations have different memories and values from the young? Is it that older generations are unaware that some of the memories they revere are monstrous? Is it that the young take a reflexively antagonistic and/or overly-sensitive response to the memories and values of the old? Or all of the above? I have no idea.
** (Average). 2,400 words.

1. A handful of us read this one in a recent Facebook group read. Two of us were mystified, and two didn’t comment about the meaning of the story. I think someone on Goodreads (where the point of the story is either not mentioned in reviews or seems to have gone over readers’ heads) suggested it was an “okay, Boomer” story.
I’m reminded of the old movie quote: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”.

The Long Tail by Aliette de Bodard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Long Tail by Aliette de Bodard (Wired, 30th November 2020) opens with Thu salvaging on the spaceship Conch Citadel, twenty years after the war, when a “lineaged memory” from another of her crew, Ánh Ngọc, makes her pause at the entry of the room she was about to enter:

Looking more closely, Thu could see, now, that the holes in the floor were a little too regular, the mechs’ multiple legs a little too polished, the edges of the robots’ disk-shapes distorted, as if someone had pulled and the metal had given in like taffy. Not a physical room, then. The real room, the one she could interact with, lay under layers of unreality. A whole lot of it.
Shit. Shit.
Thu chewed at her lower lip, considering. Everyone onboard the scavenging habitat knew there was no correlation between the unreality and what lay underneath. Going in there would be a calculated risk.

As she weighs up the possible problems against the financial advantages, she is contacted by a third crew member, Khuyên. She tells Thu that Ánh Ngọc has been infected by a new form of the nanites which infect the wreck, and that she is “on her way to chimeral”—a condition where the affected experience constant delusions (“unreality”).
The next part of the story sees Thu retrace Ánh Ngọc’s path through the ship to find out what she was contaminated with and where. During this journey we get backstory about (a) Thu’s mother, who became contaminated by nanites and had to have her implant removed (privately, the company wouldn’t pay) leaving her essentially lobotomised and (b) the Conch Citadel’s part in the final stages of the war.
Eventually (spoiler) Thu tracks down the ship’s Central (its AI), which was thought dead. Initially Thu thinks that the Central is still fighting the war, but it turns out that it is just lonely and looking for company (or something like that).
There isn’t much of a story here, and all the gimmicks and window dressing (nanites, unreality, her mother’s implant removal, the rogue AI, etc.) doesn’t really hide that. Also—and I don’t usually like making this kind of criticism of stories—why wouldn’t they uses drones or mechs or robots to search such a hazardous environment (especially one where problems of human perception are involved)?
** (Average). 4,600 words. Story link.

Four-Letter Word by Alexy Dumenigo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Four-Letter Word by Alexy Dumenigo, translated by Toshiya Kamei, (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) begins by introducing the idea of “calibration clinics”:

There were these government-run facilities where you could go and ask men in white coats to fix those aspects of yourself you didn’t like. Back then, fewer options were available, but it was at least possible to erase concepts from your mind, modify your character, and even take the first step toward personalizing your memories.
If you wanted to be more intelligent, more daring, or willing to tackle any project, you footed the bill and that was it. But those options, just like now, cost dearly and required special permits from the government.
Fortunately, other calibrations were inexpensive.  p. 29

The narrator then states that, forty years ago, she went to get not only a word, but a whole concept removed because of a domestic quarrel with her boyfriend over her dog Hamlet (who had an implant and could talk, part of the boyfriend’s problem). We later find out that that word/concept she had removed was “love”, and we learn (in among some back story about her life) about the result:

I felt the same as before. Of course, I wasn’t in the mood to immerse myself in my memories either, or I would have noticed the gaps. On the way home I listened to a song I liked and the audio seemed to skip at times. I tried to remember the lyrics, but only bits and pieces came to me.
I soon discovered that, except for that inconvenience, my new conditioning offered only advantages. Unlike other breakups, now I didn’t feel the urge to call Carlos or spy on his social media. I dedicated myself to living my life. Even my work became less tedious. In the evenings, I went out with friends. I talked to my parents on the phone more often.
I spent most of my free time at home. I took care of Hamlet and we talked about the old days. pp. 34-35

Hamlet later developed a neural problem which meant he needed to have his implant removed. At the clinic, and while they waited for the dog to wake up after surgery, the narrator and the vet talked and she discovered that the vet had had the same treatment as her. When Hamlet finally woke up he could no longer talk, but communicated non-verbally with the narrator by putting his head on her lap.
The story ends (spoiler) with her and the vet presumably communicating in a similar non-verbal manner and ending up together. They never need any further calibration.
This piece has a neat idea and a number of interesting passages, but the ending didn’t really work for me: partly this was because I wasn’t entirely sure about the point the story was making—is it that you don’t need love to have a successful relationship?—and I also thought the pair of them ending up together runs against the story’s set-up (you don’t expect a narrator who has had the concept of love removed from their psyche to happily couple up with someone else). A pity, as this was pretty good for the most part.
I’d be interested in seeing more work from this writer.
**+ (Average to Good). 2,450 words. Story link.