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.