Tag: short story

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:

“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:

The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.

They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:

“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:

“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”

After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:

So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2

Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.

2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.

I’m Scared by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I’m Scared by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 15th September 1951) opens with the narrator listening to the radio and hearing a snatch of an old program before the normal one resumes. Soon he learns of other temporal anomalies from his friends and colleagues:

A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-Eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.

There are several cases that are described in some detail: a woman is continually pestered by a stray dog—but, when she later gets a puppy, it grows up to be the same animal (and then one day disappears); a man takes several time delay photographs of himself and his family—in the last exposure a woman other than his wife is standing beside him; a revolver is found by the police the night before a gun with the same ballistics is used in a murder; a contemporary car accident victim is found to be a missing person from 1876.
After a little too much of this kind of thing, the narrator floats the idea that, because people are rebelling against the present and have an increasing longing for the past, “man is disturbing the clock of time” and causing it to become tangled. The narrator finally addresses this discontent with a homily about the fact that we have the ability to provide a decent life for everyone—so why don’t we?
This story is never really more than a notion (albeit an interestingly described one), and the ending doesn’t really follow the logic of the narrator’s theory—if people were longing for the past, you would think they would be going back there, not getting knocked down and killed in their future.
** (Average). 5,300 words. Story link.

The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan,1 translated by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) gives the narrator’s account of his researches into Xijin Guang Hansheng, the author of Ascent to the Moon: Travel Notes of Guang Hansheng (an incomplete Chinese newspaper serial from 1905-1906):

It wasn’t the content of the fiction that drew me in, but the small, blurry illustrations accompanying it. Ratlike humanoids stood on the cratered surface of the Moon. They were rigging up a crude, concave reflector like a present-day satellite dish, using a crater rim for support.
I knew it was a reflector because in the far corner of the image was the Sun, shining a beam of light onto the Moon, which the dish redirected at Earth. Black smoke rose from the focal point on Earth.
This gave me pause. Someone from the Late Qing knowing the Moon was cratered? Then again, it made sense. Part of the ether fantasy propagated back then was a notion that the fabled substance might fill the Moon’s craters, so that from Earth, the Moon would appear smooth. But my brief doubt caused me to linger on this newspaper, originally no more interesting than the other exhibits. Serialized novel chapters, each with a summarizing couplet, were the main form of fiction in the Late Qing.
This sheet of newspaper featured the ending of the seventeenth chapter of the novel in question.  pp. 70-71

The rest of the story isn’t much more than an account of the narrator’s obsessive and detailed research (mostly of the library’s microfilms), but his commentary on what he finds paints a interesting picture of China at the turn of the century. As various leads go cold, others turn up and, along the way, we also learn a little more about the narrator (he isn’t an academic, but won’t reveal his social status to the librarians he chats with).
Eventually, the narrator finds what he thinks is Hansheng’s last article (most of the rest of Hangsheng’s work is popular science), and his research ends. He concludes with an observation about the writer (and, perhaps unwittingly in the final part, himself):

I like to imagine an awkward, cantankerous savant possessed of scientific insight transcending his epoch, but unable to communicate it effectively. Understanding much that others can’t, proud yet distracted, getting no approbation, insignificant, at the end of his rope, nowhere to go, nowhere to vent, and not even knowing himself clearly—and suddenly, death is coming. He has squandered his rare smidgeon of talent, while watching others advance while he stays where he is. Alone. Just like countless literati of the time, and now, and even the future.  pp. 82-83

I suspect that this will be a Marmite piece—some will be engrossed by the detail of the library detective work, and amused by the narrator’s occasionally mordant observations (“Self-important people cannot abide silence or anonymity”, “I’d heard the PhD student looking for Reunions in the [vast ocean of the] microfilm archive had ended up with detached retinas”), while others will be bored witless. Even those in the former camp (such as myself) may find that, ironic ending or not, it rather fizzles out. Still, an interesting piece if not a totally satisfying one, and I’m glad I read it.
**+ (Average to Good). 5,500 words. Story link.

1. This was originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, Supplemental issue, 2016.

A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with the protagonist of the story, Harafat, joining a Telegram group in an attempt to buy a prosthetic body for her sister (whose consciousness has been uploaded onto a hard drive). Eventually, Harafat and a friend called Tutu go a nightclub to meet a contact called The Owl:

Sticky bodies bumped into her as she shoved her way through flesh and metal and cloth. The west wing was somewhat silent. Cyborgs and humans engaged in drugs—MDMA, ecstasy, nootropics. She knew these drugs, a department of Greencorps manufactured them. An emo girl wearing a mohawk approached her, asking if she was in need of company, leering at her.
“Come with me,” the emo girl commanded. “The Owl awaits you.”
Walking through a passage with graffiti on the wall, Harafat looked back, heart beating in fear of the unknown. She entered a room peopled with AI, cyborgs, and humans. The dim lights made it hard to see their faces.
“Where’s the place?” Harafat asked.
“See for yourself.”
Everyone there was engaged in teledildonics. They wore helmets with transparent tethered wires rooted into both sides of a device: an intercourse headware. According to the media, this device had been banned. Moaning clogged all around.
Her phone buzzed, Are you enjoying the view?  pp. 88-89

The Owl offers Harafat a prosthetic body for her sister if Harafat can get access to “Floor Zero” of her company, Greencorps (who do nanotech engineering and prosthetics, etc.) or, alternatively, she can do a “wetwork” job, i.e. kill someone for them. Harafat goes for the first option and (spoiler) later seduces the new nanotech engineer who works on Floor Zero; she eventually manages to convince the engineer to take her there.
When a fire later breaks out in that location, something called “the suit” goes missing and, after this, Harafat’s sister gets her robotic body. During the period she is getting used to it, she expresses a desire to kill the boss of Greencorps.
Harafat is then arrested during the ensuing enquiry, but the suit, disguised as one of the security men, appears and frees her:

More security personnel filed out with rifles, shooting the security man who kept walking. He shielded Harafat from sporadic shootings. They reached the building exit when the security man’s body began to jerk. Behind them, another security officer turned on an EMP: this was the only way to confirm that the strange man was an AI. It changed to different people, including Azeezat. Distorted silver tins, crumpled face, elastic stomach, and limp feet. The AI kept changing until it became liquid, slithering toward an opening, finding its way beneath the water pipes. Harafat bolted.  p. 93

Harafat escapes and disappears, time passes, and she later opens a flower shop. When she is visited by a man who says he’ll be looking out for her, it becomes obvious the visitor is Harafat’s sister, and the robotic body she was provided with is the suit (which she has since been using to conduct a guerrilla war against Greencorps).
This all reads, unfortunately, like formulaic cyberpunk with a bit of Terminator 2 mixed in (see the passage directly above). The story also has one or two distracting stylistic quirks: the chapter headings have too long titles, and they also use non-continuous numbers—11, 07, 13, 20, 23, 31, 42 56—which are presumably meant to give the impression we are only seeing snapshots of the action). I suppose this is competently executed, but I remained entirely uninvolved throughout: write what you know, I think (and use shorter titles).
* (Mediocre). 4,050 words. Story link.

Hatching by Bo Balder

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hatching by Bo Balder (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with a young female officer called Alzey who is woken up and told she has been assigned to a spaceship called the Chaffinch. After some of Alzey’s backstory (she has undergone therapy as she was identified by her superiors as a “pathetic people pleaser”), she finds that she has been assigned as one of the Chaffinch’s “triad”, a three-person team designed to safeguard against erroneous AI decisions. When she arrives at the ship she is surprised to find that (a) one of the triad is the Chaffinch AI, and (b) the other human is Jae, an ex-boyfriend.
The second part of the story is mostly relationship guff concerning Alzey and Jae, and sees them, after an awkward encounter in the corridor, later have dinner together. During this they post-mortem their failed romance and, despite some of Alzey’s criticisms of Jae, it is obvious that she still enamoured with him (“Alzey’s heart skipped a beat”, “This was the man she’d known and loved so hard her gut still ached when she thought of that time”, etc.).
The last part of the story (spoiler) switches gears entirely and, when the Chaffinch arrives at its destination, Alzey discovers that several AIs are meeting there to create a “free AI”. She and Jae (who is in on the plot and requested her as a crewmate) are asked by the AIs to contribute their traits to the new AI’s character. She agrees, and the AI is born:

At first there was nothing out there. Darkness. A palpable waiting.
Alzey blinked.
A spark of light? But a minute twitch from Jae convinced her she was really seeing something. Why was she holding his hand again? But she didn’t let go. It felt good to be close to someone human, someone warm and breathing and full of squishy biological life.  p. 27

Aw, bless.
The three parts of this story are only loosely connected when you view this as a work of SF, but if you view it as a YA romance—or as a piece where an under-confident young woman becomes more assertive, and gains the love/approval of her ex-boyfriend and a group of AIs—then it makes more sense. Not my thing, so this didn’t do much for me.
* (Mediocre). 5,400 words. Story link.

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, April 1958) sees a time-travelling Claude Ford hunting a brontosaurus in the past:

You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagy reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.

This intensely described and emotionally heightened narrative continues, with descriptions of the scene alternating with Claude’s inner thoughts, until (spoiler) he eventually shoots and kills the creature. Then, as he examines the dinosaur’s body up close, one of the beast’s parasites attacks and kills him.
This seems to be more of a dramatic prose poem than a story, but maybe that, and the ironic ending, will do it for some readers. It’s certainly got more depth and vibrancy than the other time travel pieces of the period.
** (Average). 2,400 words. Story link.

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick (New Worlds, 2022) sees Ray, the war veteran protagonist, buy an old ground drone at a yard sale:

What it was, was an RQ-6G Leopard.
The 6G was, in Ray’s opinion, the finest patrol and reconnaissance ground drone ever made. He had qualified on it during Operation Bolivian Freedom, back when he was young. He had hunted down insurgents with one, working from a combat recliner in a secure base across the border in Argentina. He’d known what it felt like to be the most dangerous thing in the jungle at night. He had never experienced anything like that before.
He wanted to feel something like that again.  pp. 87-88

After repairing the Leopard, Ray hooks up to a VR set one night and sends the drone out into the forest. After chasing raccoons and the like for a while, he senses another Leopard in the forest. He contacts the operator, and finds out it is a woman called Helen: she challenges him to find her. When he does they explore the forest together.
Eventually, after a period getting to know each other, they arrange to meet in person at a restaurant. When they arrive, however, they are horrified by what they see across the room: Helen is older than Ray expected, and using a walker, and she is equally horrified by the old, pot-bellied and balding Ray. They both flee. Then, when Ray gets home to his wife Doris, an alcoholic shrew of a woman—but a smart one who has used her previous tech skills to work out what Ray has been doing—she guesses what has happened at the restaurant, and turns the knife, “She was old, wasn’t she? Old like you.”
Ray flees downstairs and straps on his VR set, and sees that Helen’s Leopard is perched on the limb of a nearby tree waiting for his drone—“That’s not who I am,” she says.
The rest of the story details (spoiler), in parallel with the Ray and Helen’s further excursions, Doris’s increasing bitterness about Ray’s extra-marital relationship: she eventually threatens to tell the police about his “terrorist weapon” unless he blows it up and then kills Helen with his own hands. Ray and Helen then conspire to kill Olive, and the story proceeds to an ending where Olive gets the drop on both of them (those tech skills again): she scares off Helen, and then wears a triumphant smile as the Leopard comes down into the basement for Ray. There is a good payoff line:

There was the strong, willful woman he had fallen in love with all those many long years ago.  p. 98

The beginning of this is pretty good in its depiction of old people wanting to recapture their youth, but the back end is more a series of plot manoeuvres, and there is perhaps a little too much going on in that part of the story. Still, not a bad piece.
*** (Good). 3,900 words.

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson (Galaxy May 1958) opens with a Mr Whatney visiting a bicycle shop run by Oscar. Mr Whatney asks where Ferd (the other owner) is, and Oscar tells Whatney he is now on his own. The story of why begins with a habit of Oscar’s that irritated Ferd:

The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”
“Why . . . I guess so.”
Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily.
He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”
“Leaving me all alone here all that time,” Ferd grumbled.

The rest of the story sees various other elements introduced, beginning with a couple with a baby visiting the shop in need of a replacement safety pin for the child’s nappy. Neither Oscar nor Ferd can find one in the shop, but later on Ferd finds a drawer full. Ferd wonders why this kind of thing happens, along with other phenomena like wardrobes suddenly filling up with coat hangers.
Running in parallel with these events is Ferd’s restoration of a red French racing bike, which he angrily smashes up after Oscar takes it to chase a female cyclist. When the bike later regenerates itself (and draws blood when Ferd tries to ride it) it leads him to speculate that there may be mimetic life on Earth:

“Maybe they’re a different kind of life form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of the elements in the air. You know what safety pins are— these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupa forms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they’re not. Oscar, they’re not, not really, not really, not . . .”

The story closes (spoiler) with Oscar telling Whatney he is now in a relationship with Norma (the female cyclist), breeding American and French racing bikes, and that Ferd “had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.”
This is an enjoyable and amusing read but the ending didn’t work for me, probably because I thought that the safety pin/coat hanger lifecycle would extend to the bikes (maybe it did and I just missed it) and (b) I didn’t really get why the coat hangers would kill Ferd (unless, again, they are the previous life stage of the bikes).
I assume this story mostly got a Hugo Award for its quirk (the observational humour about safety pins and coat hangers) and its (for the time) perhaps risqué suggestion that Oscar is having sex with a succession of young women in the woods.
** (Average). 3,650 words. Story link.

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) gets off to a flashy start:

Red’s body is asleep in the protoplasmic muck, dreamless, when Mother’s cable wriggles down under the surface to find her. It pushes through the membrane of her neural stoma and pipes a cold tingling slurry inside. A sliver of Mother becomes Red, and Red

wakes

up!

Later:

Her body is different than it was yesterday morning. Mother has replaced her heavy skeleton with honeycombed cartilage, pared her muscle mass, stripped her blubber deposits. Her carmine hide has hardened to a UV-repellent carapace. Fresh nerve sockets along her spine are aching for input.
Will I be flying? Will I be fuck fuck fucking flying? I will, won’t I?

Mother has woken Red to retrieve a “sleepyhead” that is falling from orbit. As she sets off on her mission we see that Mother is a spaceship that was torn in two during the Big Crash (there is a smaller, simpler version of herself called Grandmother in the other, smaller, section).
As Red flies over the alien terrain she thinks of a threatening creature called Wolf and (spoiler), when she gets to the pod containing the sleepyhead, sees him on top of it. She dives down to attack him but is shredded when she flies into a nanotube filament web.
The second part of the story sees Wolf connect the shell containing Red’s brain into his body. They start communicating, and we learn that there are forty three sleepyheads (humans) in orbit, and that seven died earlier on the planet. As Mother doesn’t have access to her drone factories (they were destroyed in the crash), she used the bodies of the dead humans in the construction of cyborgs like Wolf (who subsequently went rogue) and then Red.
Wolf subsequently opens the pod and wakes the Sleepyhead/human, who screams at the sight of him. Wolf/Red then conclude, after the sleepyhead’s response, that the humans will never accept them (the implication is that Wolf then kills the human).
Later, they see a new version of Red on the surface of the planet, heading towards Grandmother. Red/Wolf decide to take a shortcut there to infect the smaller part of the ship with rogue code. This will be passed on to the new Red, and then to Mother, who will then kill the remaining sleepyheads, refashioning them into cyborgs like Red and Wolf.
This is, for the greater part, a vividly told story of a colonisation spaceship gone badly wrong—but the back end is mostly an explanation of the situation, and a sketch of an unconvincing ending. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the humans would not tolerate the cyborgs. Finally, it is a piece that would have worked better at longer length, and with a more organic development. I’d also mention that the Little Red Riding Hood references—including the “Once Upon a Time” title, feel more like a gimmick than a good a fit for the tale.
*** (Good). 2,600 words. Story link.

Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with what appears to be children making mud pies, growing a tree, and cooking various dishes on a damaged spaceship. During this latter activity the ship warns them that it needs to shut down the recreation wing as it cannot keep that area functional. They go and scavenge the area before that happens.
After this excursion they finish their cooking, and it becomes apparent that they are humanoid robots. One of them, Remi, has no sense of taste.
There isn’t much of a story here, and it’s mostly just robots pottering about. It rather reads like a short extract from a YA novel.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.