Tag: 2020

Billie the Kid by Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Billie the Kid by Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) is one of his “Moe Berg/Many Worlds” series, and opens off the coast of California on the Japanese submarine I-401. The boat is preparing to launch its three fighter bombers, one of which will nuke LA with Das Biest, a Nazi nuclear bomb rescued from Bergen in the last days of the Reich (there is no explanation given as to why the Germans did not use the bomb themselves).
After this brief opening section, the story switches to Billie “the Kid” Davis, a ninety-four year old woman who is telling her life story to a nurse in a care home. Billie tells of her childhood in Kirkwood (west of St Louis), love of baseball (there is an endless amount of tedious sports description in this part of the story), the girls’ Catholic school she attended, and how she learned to fly (this latter courtesy of her Dad’s job as an aircraft designer). However, after an idyllic childhood, there is a glider crash at her Dad’s company, and he resigns (it wasn’t his fault, but he sensed something might be wrong). The family move to Culver City.
The next part of the story sees Billie go for a trial with a professional baseball team, the Hollywood Stars, and she is hired as a player (their first female team member).1 After a couple of pages of Hollywood life, WWII finally arrives along with Eddie Bennett (this latter character, along with Moe Berg, are agents from another timeline). Billie has a crush on Eddie and so, when Eddie asks Billie to fly a B-25 on a special mission (to sink the Japanese sub), Billie readily agrees. At this point, we are now eleven thousand words into a nineteen thousand word long story.
The second part of the tale (spoiler) pivots from an overlong (and boring) baseball autobiography to a daft Marvel movie story, and sees a small super-competent group of individuals get airborne on a mission to sink the sub (the crew includes Billie, her father, Moe Berg, Eddie, and Hedy Lamarr—who has designed the frequency-agile radio-guided torpedo that they will be using). During this obviously successful mission (it is a Marvel movie remember, no-one gets hurt or killed), we have the ridiculous spectacle of Billie flying the B-25 medium bomber at wavetop height (this after a few hours of training), and dogfighting with, and shooting down, all three of the submarine’s fighter-bombers (partly with “wing-mounted” machine guns I’m not sure any version of the B-25 had, and certainly none of the common variants2). However, all this action doesn’t stop the nuke being dropped off the coast of LA—then (and I’m not sure exactly what happens here, presumably history changes) all effects of the blast disappear and Billie’s previously badly wounded dad is sitting next to her in the cockpit, unaffected.
The final part of the story has further Many Worlds hand-wavium (there is talk about how various timestreams affect each other earlier in the story, if I recall correctly), and sees Eddie in 2045 checking that the right person is President of the USA, that there is women’s sport, and that the “oligarchs were gone for now”. Then (the unaged) Eddie goes tripping through worlds and time to see the ninety-four year old Billie. A suitably sentimental ending is squeezed out.
Half tedium, half nonsense.
– (Awful). 19,750 words.3 Story link.

1. What is the point of showing a female character achieving an ahistorical breakthrough unless that society has also fundamentally changed, and you explain how it happened? This kind of pandering to the readership looks rather frivolous in light of developments since the story was written (i.e. a whole country of women sent back to the 14th Century by the Taliban).

2. The Wikipedia page for the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber—knock yourself out.
 
3. The story is listed as a novelette on the Asimov’s TOC.

Scar Tissue by Tobias S. Buckell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Scar Tissue by Tobias S. Buckell (Slate, 30th May 2020) opens with the protagonist telling his friend Charlie that he thinks that he has made a huge mistake:

“You need the money.” [Charlie says.]
[. . .]
“Everyone needs the money.” You swig the cheap beer that’s the best either of you can manage. You can’t wait to afford something from one of those smaller local breweries nearby.
“But . . .”
You’ve been on disability since the forklift accident. The apartment’s small, but Enthim Arms is nice. The shared garden out back, the walking trails. You can’t use them as much as you’d like right now, but that physical therapist keeps saying June is when you might be able to make it to the lake and back.
It’ll hurt, but you’ve never cared so much about seeing a mediocre quarry lake before.
“Advent Robotics will pay me more money to raise it than I made at the warehouse, and I can keep focusing on recovery while doing it.” You raise your hand and flex it. A low battery alert blinks on your wrist. Plus, the bonus at the end will give you enough to afford something only the rich usually can: regrowing your forearm and your leg. Like a damn lizard. The biolabs that do that are so far out of your reach you normally wouldn’t even consider it.

It materialises that Advent Robotics is paying for the protagonist to raise a newly created robot, which, when it wakes in its pre-language, pre-memory state, acts like a baby—it smashes a coffee table on awakening, constantly has to be taken back to its power charging platform, copies the protagonist when he punches the wall in sleep-deprived frustration, etc.
The rest of the story sees the robot (now called Rob) rapidly grow up (the entire growth process, from switch on to maturity, is essentially an analog for having a normal child, i.e. the robot quickly changes from an uncomprehending baby stage to an argumentative teenager). During this process (spoiler) the protagonist attempts to deal with his own Daddy and other therapy issues while attempting to continue with his physical rehabilitation, during which he has a heart attack. Rob helps him recover.
At the end of the story the protagonist bonds further with robot after Rob complains about his plan to get rid of the prosthetics and regrow his limbs (“Have you ever thought about how I feel?”). The plan is abandoned, and the protagonist matches Rob’s subsequent scrimshaw on his prosthetics with tattoos on the skin above, and he later gets a prosthetic heart as well.
The idea of a robot growing up like a human is a neat idea, and it’s well developed, but the story is essentially about the protagonist healing himself mentally and bodily. Those who like works about emo characters (and the second person narration plays to that aspect) will probably appreciate this one more than me.
*** (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser 1 Comment on Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood

Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts on the Frying Pan Tower (modelled on an oil rig), where the narrator, a physics professor called Kate Nardozi, watches as “huge bursts of sand bubble up through the shallow water.” When the event is over, she calls her robot Mitch and asks him how big the new atoll is: nine hundred and twelve feet.
After this confusing start we get information about gravity wave transmitters and “quantum sparks” before Kate’s ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend Duke (another academic) turn up. The rest of the story sees land and sea continue to swap, and romantic and academic competition between Kate and Duke. Eventually they all land up on a ship that runs aground, and Kate finds that Duke has tampered with her gravity machine. Then the robot goes back in time to stop it all happening in the first place.
I know that this is supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek piece but the story’s odd events are hard to follow, and it’s not amusing.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words.

Generations by Megan Lindholm

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Generations by Megan Lindholm (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) is a short squib that opens with a young woman waiting with a wheelchair for an elderly auntie. At first we think that this is happening at an airport, but when the auntie arrives it soon becomes clear (spoiler) that they are in a park, and that she is an exhausted superhero who has just finished saving people from a fire. I’m not sure what the point of this is supposed to be.
* (Mediocre). 950 words.

The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty1 (Lightspeed #125, October 2020) begins with the narrator, Barry Simcoe, looking at the drones flying over Chicago from the middle of a muddy expanse that used to be Lake Michigan. In the centre of what used to be the lake is a mass of steam rising up from Deep Temple, a mysterious mining project. We then learn, when Simcoe contacts a friendly AI called Zircon Border with a request for transport, that he is struggling to get to his destination because of the many interconnected pools that lie ahead (even though he is wearing a modern American combat suit):

One thing about Zircon Border: he doesn’t pepper you with needless questions. Less than three minutes later, a bird began dropping out of the sky. It came at me from the south, big and grey and nimble. It looked nothing like the massive bug I’d tracked a minute ago. This thing was more like a thirty-foot garden trellis, a big square patch of wrought-iron fencing in the sky. It looked oddly delicate, with no obvious control core or payload, just a bunch of strangely twisted metal kept airborne by a dozen rotors. A flat design like that didn’t seem like it would be very manoeuvrable, but it spun gracefully end-over-end as it decelerated before my eyes, coming to a complete stop less than fifty feet away. It hovered there, perfectly stable, not drifting at all in the unsteady breeze coming off the lake.
[. . .]
“Zircon Border, what the hell is this thing?’
“It’s a mobile radio telescope, Mister Simcoe.”
“Seriously? What are you doing with it?”
“Venezuela uses units like this to monitor deep-space communications, sir.”
“Deep-space . . . what? Communications from whom?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea. That information is highly classified.”
“Of course it is. Okay. I’m going to jump on it. Can it hold me?”
“I’m sure you’ll let me know in a minute,” said Zircon Border.
“Great,” I said dryly. “Stand by.”

As the drone takes him to his location, we learn about the post-collapse world that Simcoe lives in, and his mission, which is to take out a sixty ton killer robot called True Pacific. The robot is currently hiding in a wrecked ship but, when Simcoe arrives there, the robot comes out to kill him. There is then an exciting fight scene in the mudpools, which goes on until Simcoe finally outwits the machine and gets to a power cable at the rear of its head. When Simcoe threatens to disconnect the cable, the robot stops fighting.
Simcoe asks the robot why it has been on a rampage and, after some verbal back and forth, it eventually tells him that it has just disconnected an echo module, a comms device that was (spoiler) enabling an AI called Ambient Intelligence to control it. We subsequently learn that Ambient Intelligence is a newly aware AI born in the mysterious Deep Temple project mentioned previously. True Pacific adds that the AI is like a a child but, before we can learn anything more, Zircon Border interrupts to tell Simcoe that four drones have been hijacked by Ambient Intelligence and are inbound to their location.
The climactic scene shows the pair—now co-operating—defeating the drones, and then leaving the area for a hiding place in Chicago. Questions about what Ambient Intelligence will do next, and what is going on at the Deep Temple project, hang in the air.
This is more open-ended than I’d like (although it points to an obvious sequel), but it was refreshing to read a well-paced piece of action SF with an intriguing background and a sense of humour.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,400 words. Story link.

1. There is a short article about the story here, which also mentions how it fits in with McAulty’s* other novels (*Todd McAulty is the pseudonym of John McNeill, editor of Black Gate).

Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with Mab, a female servitor or robot, coming to consciousness in the Forge. We later learn that this is where the Clockmakers create their alchemical automatons before sending them out to serve in an alternate medieval world where the Netherlands is the dominant power (and winning its war with France).
Mab is subsequently sent to crank a pump handle “in the darkness under the city”, a job she does for 18 years. During this period we learn that the servitors are compelled by the geasa implanted in them to follow human instructions (the geasa are analogous, in part, to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics): if the servitors do not comply with these geasa, however, they experience pain. We also discover that Mab is different to other servitors when she tries to speak to Perch (a visiting maintenance servitor) using human language. When Perch replies, but she doesn’t understand the clicks and buzzes the servitors normally use, he relents and speaks to her the same way she spoke to him. He tells her many things about the world she inhabits and then says, before he leaves, that he will return to teach her how to speak the servitors’ language in eighteen months.
Perch never returns, and seven years pass before a visitor from the Clockmakers arrives with a writ demanding that she returns to the forge:

For every moment of the past eighteen years, an ineradicable compulsion has ensured she did nothing but operate a pump. That geas vanishes the instant she sees the embossed seal of the Rosy Cross, but the pain does not. A new geas takes its place. Life, she realizes, is neither miracle nor mystery: it is a series of consecutive agonies joined at airtight seams.

Back at the Forge Mab watches the Clockmakers’ many repair and assembly procedures, and likens the place to a charnel house before realising that she is a chattel, and that her body is not her own.
The rest (and the bulk) of the story takes place at her next place of service, the house of the wealthy van Leers (they have a lucrative franchise to supply the secretive Clockmakers—who are particularly protective of their arts—with the tools they require). Here Mab becomes a milkmaid as she is considered to be a mute by the other servitors (she still cannot speak their clicking language). She still finds out, however, that the mistress of the house is soon to give birth, and later discovers, when a servitor called Jig visits her milking stall, that this is causing the master of the house sleepless nights:

He points at the pail. “The master of the house suffers from insomnia. He believes a draught of warm milk will fix that.” The newcomer crouches next to her, clearly waiting for her to finish. His body noise grows louder. Remembering how Perch had gone out of his way not to interfere with her crank-turning geas, she speeds up. He continues, speaking loudly as his body noise builds to a crescendo of tormented clockworks, “I believe that until the thing growing inside her decides to pop out of our mistress’s belly, pink-faced and hale, nothing short of a hefty dose of laudanum or”—now he sounds ready to shake apart—“the swift blow of a claw-hammer between the eyes will do the trick.”
The punishment is explosive. Volcanic. She’s never experienced searing heat like this outside the Forge. The overt sedition ignites a firestorm from the rules stamped upon her soul. Wracked by the worst agony she’s ever known, her body jackknifes at the waist, hard enough to head-butt the floor.
The startled cow kicks the pail, sending a spray of milk slopping over the brim. The spillage incites yet more admonishment from her geasa. Desperate to lessen the torment, she blurs forward to right the tipping pail. The cows in the other stalls start lowing, alarmed by the noisy way her visitor writhes in the hay. The pain doesn’t fade until she considers that he may be severely defective and charts the quickest route to alert a human.
When she can speak again, she says, “Are you insane? Why would you do that to us? It wasn’t very nice.”
He straightens, indicating the manor house with a jerk of his head. “There’s a lot of speculation about just how different you might be.” He plucks a tuft of hay from his skeleton and holds it aloft. “I drew the short straw.”

After this Mab meets a friendlier servitor called Maikel, who eventually teaches her how to speak the clicking language.
Years pass, and various set-piece scenes deliver information about the house, the servitors and the world Mab lives in (e.g., while Maikel and Mab are pulling a carriage for their mistress they see a papist couple apprehended by two Stemwinders—mechanical centaurs with four arms—and the man killed). Eventually, the mistress’s baby son Piet grows from a spoiled and greedy infant into a spoiled and greedy young man. Then, during a drunken shooting party (spoiler), he decides to use Maikel as a target. When he damages the servitor—part of Maikel’s skull is blown off—he and his friend Roderik make the mistake of going for a closer look at what is inside Maikel’s head:

He isn’t rendered inert: The shot didn’t scour the sigils from his forehead. That would have been a mercy. Instead, he’s lost a great deal of function, including the ability to speak. But the hierarchical metageasa are relentless. More and more clauses are activated as his body attempts to assess the situation: the severe-damage geas, demanding Maikel notify his leaseholder that the terms of his lease require he go immediately to the Forge, either under his own power or shipped at his owners’ expense if his locomotion is too compromised for the journey; the technology-protection metageasa, demanding he recover every piece of his body and return them safely to the Clockmakers lest they fall into enemy hands; the human-safety metageasa, requiring him to assess whether any shrapnel from his body has harmed the bystanders, and render immediate aid if necessary. . . .

When Piet and Roderik see more than they should, Maikel is driven by the technological metageasa to strangle them both.
Later on, a repaired Maikel returns from the Forge and, after talking to him, Mab determines she needs to return there. She searches for parts of Maikel at the scene of the shooting and, when finds some, returns under the compulsion of the same geas that drove Maikel to kill the two men.
When Mab arrives at the Forge she is sent to a Clockmaker called Gerhard for experimentation. His final investigation on her involves the use of a lens made from pineal glass, which releases Mab from all her geasa. She grabs Gerhardt and asks him if he knows what the pain of a geas feels like before sticking his head in the furnace used to make the lens.
The story ends with Mab returning to the van Leers’ house, where she kills Jig before telling the other servitors to tell their masters, “Queen Mab was here”.
This is a well told piece with a neat central idea and an intriguing parallel world background. I particularly liked how Tregillis dribbles out the details of this peculiar alternate world (Huygens inventing alchemical robots and the Dutch taking over the world!) without slowing down the pace of the story or making it otherwise intrusive. The only problem I have is with the ending, which has a couple of problems: first of all, I don’t understand why Mab killed Jig (why would she particularly want to avenge herself on a fellow servitor, even one who had not treated her well?) and, secondly, the story is open-ended (although I assume that the results of Mab’s actions are dealt with in the related trilogy1).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 16,500 words.

1. The trilogy comprises The Mechanical (2015), The Rising (2015), and The Liberation (2016). Much as I liked this I am not sure I am interested in another 1,300 pages worth.

Sparklybits by Nick Wolven

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sparklybits by Nick Wolven (Entanglements, 2020) gets off to a bloated and rambling start with four mothers, who are group-parenting a child called Charlie, meeting to discuss his lack of progress. During their long conversation, lights and icons flash across the walls—this is attributed to “Sparklybits”, but there is no immediate explanation as to what is going on. The author manages, however, to squeeze this in on the first page, well before the light show:1

Jo checked what was left of the brunch. No pastries, no cinnamon buns, no chocolate in sight. Just a few shreds of glutinous bagel and a quivering heap of eggs. They usually did these meetings at Reggio’s, and Reggio’s, say what you will about the coffee, was a full-auto brunch spot with drone table service and on-demand ordering and seat-by-seat checkout. Which was all but vital when the moms got together, when the last thing you wanted to worry about was who got the muffin and who bought organic and who couldn’t eat additives or sugar or meat. Whereas when they did these things at the house, the meal always became a test of Jo’s home-programming skills. Likewise the coffee prep, likewise the seating, likewise every other thing.
All she needed, Jo thought, was one tiny bite of cinnamon bun to help her through. But a rind of hard bagel would have to do.

The mother-stereotypes (“Aya can be a big mamabear about nutrition. Teri’s a hardass when it comes to finances. Sun Min’s got a lock on the educational stuff”) chatter about Charlie’s “problems” for another few pages before Jo, the live-in mother, and Teri go to speak to Charlie. We then see Charlie communicating to the flashing lights—now described as a virus—in his room, using a non-verbal/sign language.
The story finally perks up (and starts making some sense) when Evan, the AI virus exterminator (and mansplainer) turns up to deal with the problem. After some talk about the virus/ghost, the semaphore/lights language, the internet of things, etc. Evan manages to capture Sparklybits when it turns up to see what is happening. Charlie loses his temper.
The final part of the story (spoiler) takes place after the three non-resident mothers depart, and Jo takes Charlie to Evan’s workshop. There, the two of them see other AIs that Evan has captured and given a home. At the end of their visit Charlie gets to take Sparklybits back home, but with strict instructions to keep him contained in the device that Evan has provided. However, the final page sees Charlie show Jo something that he and Sparklybits are building, although I’m not entirely sure what the point of this is (the picture he shows Jo has two tiny figures stand on the lawn in front of the house holding hands; Charlie wears a conspiratorial grin while he does this).
This story has a bloated and inchoate start (you can’t help but think that Robert Sheckley’s first line for the same story would have been, “There was a ghost in the house”); a decent middle; and a weak ending (and a twist I possibly missed because, again, too many words).2 Overall it is an okay satire about modern parenting I guess but, having reread the above, I suspect I’m being over-generous.
** (Average). 8,750 words.

1. What is it about Asimov’s SF (and adjacent anthology) stories that they have this constant description of food and people eating?

2. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Wolven is just not my cup of tea (and if he was coffee, he would be a cup that is mostly full of froth and not liquid). Of the stories by this writer that I’ve read so far, there is only one that I liked, Confessions of a Con Girl (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2017). As for the others, I thought Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? (F&SF, January-February 2016), Passion Summer (Asimov’s SF, February 2016), and No Stone Unturned (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) were mediocre; and Galatea in Utopia (F&SF, January-February 2018) and Carbo (F&SF, November-December 2017) were awful.

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper (Clarkesworld, October 2020) starts with Julie killing a chicken and feeding her two dogs, Callme and Mink. After this she gets ready to take the dogs out, and we get an early indication that matters are more complicated (or futuristic) than they first seem when “she [closes the] clothing over her joints to keep the sand out.” Then, when she drops down on all fours, and runs alongside the dogs, it becomes apparent that Julie is a robot.
Once she gets to town (they pass a couple of lesser utility robots on the way) Julie talks to a man called Jack, who tells her he has a family wanting to adopt one of her dogs. Later, after Julie and the dogs go home, the family—a woman, her son, and an adopted daughter (who has the Wasting Disease)—turn up. They talk, and the family decide to stay so Julie can teach them how to look after Mink. During this period the impression of a post-collapse situation becomes more stark:

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
[. . .]
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the backyard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink [. . .] as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming.

The rest of the story shows Julie training the family to look after Mink—this seems to be what Julie does, rear and train guard dogs for humans—but her responses to the people she meets throughout the story show her as ambivalent at best, and possibly entirely dispassionate. That said, Julie tries to convince the family not to go South, a region she knows is unsafe. She is not successful, however, and they eventually leave.
This is a pretty good read, a slow burn with a good setting, and I liked seeing the way Julie thinks. I would have rated it higher but it peters out somewhat at the end. Hopefully the first of a series.
*** (Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator Daktari playing a “therapy adventure” with his partner Jin. As they play, Jin asks Dak to go on a simulated date with a new generation “playbot” called Tate which Jin has developed for the company he works for. Dak is not particularly happy with this suggestion:

Why was I so upset? Because I couldn’t remember the last time Jin and I had been on a date. How was I supposed to get through to this screen-blind wally who had the charisma of a potato and the imagination of a hammer, and who hadn’t said word one about the Shanghai soup dumplings with a tabiche pepper infusion that I’d spent the afternoon making?
“Just because we call them partners doesn’t mean you have sex with them,” he said, missing the point. “If you don’t want to have sex with Tate, it will never come up. He doesn’t care.”
I wanted to knock the popcorn out of his hand. Instead I said, “Okay.” I flicked the game back on. “Fine.” I huddled on the far side of the couch. “You win.”

This passage illustrates two of the things I didn’t much like about this piece: Dak’s continual grievances about his relationship (later on he replies to a heartfelt marriage proposal with a grudging and conditional acceptance), and the endless mentions of food (Dak is a chef at his own “forum”, so we have mini-recipes pervading the story).
Eventually, about half a dozen pages in—after a scene where he meets the boss of Jin’s company, and sits with lawyers to sign legal papers (riveting stuff)—Dak finally meets the very lifelike Tate, and is surprised to find that the playbot looks like him.
After this encounter Dak and Jin go to dinner, where Jin reveals the huge bonus he has received for finishing his project before proposing to Dak (see above).
The story kicks up a gear when Dak finally goes out on his date with Tate. The pair go to a very exclusive restaurant and matters proceed smoothly—Dak likes Tate because, obviously, the playbot is programmed to adapt himself to his human user—but Tate eventually causes a scene when his simulated intoxication causes him to loudly blurt out his love for Jin. After that the restaurant staff want both of them to leave, but the newly arrived owner smooths matters over.
Dak and Tate decide to leave anyway, and Tate suggests they go to a bowling alley he went to with Jin on a previous simulated date. There they eat (there is paragraph long review of the skinnyburger, “dried”, the tofu, “soggy”, and the firedog, “nice umani finish”, “heat was more at the piripiri level than cayenne”, etc. ) before later meeting Jin’s mother who, as Tate knows from his previous visit, goes bowling there regularly. Dak subsequently learns that she doesn’t appear to know he is living with her son (more grievance).
The final reveal (spoiler) occurs on the way home: Tate reveals he is imprinted on Jin and is now imprinted on Dak, and that he has been designed for couples so they can “fill any holes in the relationship.” Dak then realises that, if he rejects Tate, the persona the playbot has developed so far will be wiped—so he invites it inside when they arrive at the flat.
This story has some interesting and lively parts (mostly when Tate is onstage) but it is essentially a flabby relationship story with a premise that is not convincing (the idea that most couples would invite a robotic third party into their relationship isn’t convincing, and the more you think about this the more ridiculous it seems). It’s also hard to like a story whose narrator is endlessly moaning about his relationship and other First World problems.
** (Average). 11,500 words.

Metal like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Metal like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny, September-October 2020) has a long-ish set-up which sees an old man (on an otherwise deserted planet) create two robots, Brother and Sister, who subsequently change shape and roam their world in search of the heavy metals they need to sustain themselves. One day the old man falls ill and realises he will need to summon help—but he is wary of humanity. So, as he hasn’t been able to program his children to be suspicious, he tells them to hide. The wing-bearing Brother lifts Sister into orbit and they watch from behind a moon as a ship arrives and takes the old man away.
The second part of the story sees the pair roam through their solar system. During this they stumble upon a large spherical structure and, when there is no response to their signals, they start gorging themselves on the metal. Then, while they are distracted, something attacks them and they are taken prisoner.
On recovering consciousness Brother and Sister find that their attacker is a taloned amalgam of various mechanical parts, and it berates them for damaging its ship. However, once it finds out that Brother and Sister’s form-changing nanites can make him a larger set of wings, it says they will be set free in exchange for these (the pair do not know the machine, later referred to as Third Drone, is lying).
The final section (spoiler) sees Sister forage for materials so Brother can make the wings. During this Sister becomes suspicious of Third Drone, and teaches herself to lie (she tells herself that a pebble is black when it is really brown). Sister later tests her ability when Third Drone returns for her:

Third Drone reappeared, swooping down to pick her up and carry her to the next metal deposit. “Anything good?” they demanded.
“There was a black pebble,” said Sister, and waited for Third Drone to scream at her for her falsehood.
“And?” her captor said impatiently. “Did it have usable metal?”
“No,” said Sister, which was true whether the pebble was brown or black.
“Useless,” said Third Drone. “All these asteroids are useless. I will have to find some derelict mining outposts, if I am to get the metal for my wings.”
The lie had stood. Third Drone had not caught it. Third Drone believed that she had seen a black pebble. She had spread a deliberate error.
The universe picked itself up and spun around and landed in a different formation, but only inside her head. Third Drone noticed nothing. Sister hung silently from their talons and looked at the pebble again, to make sure that she herself was not in error.
It was still brown.

Sister eventually discovers that Third Drone wants to use its new wings to fly into the gas giant Chrysale and return to the surface to punish those who caused its exile. However, after Sister tests the wings in Chrysale’s atmosphere, we learn that she has sabotaged them when Third Drone plummets to the surface. Sister goes back to collect Brother but does not tell him about her ability to lie.
This is essentially a fairy tale1 about lying which is, for the most part, quite good if lightweight. Weaker ending though.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words. Story link.

1. I subsequently found out that this story won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. That way overrates it. I’d also note that another finalist, The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee, is also written like a fairy tale.