Tag: 2021

You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is set in a near-future world where an artificial asteroid has infected humanity with a xenovirus that causes people to mutate into shamblers (later described by the narrator as “monstrous eldritch crayfish things”). After humans change into shamblers they migrate to the oceans and disappear into the deeps.
All this SFnal content is, however, largely in the background at the beginning of the story, as we can see in the opening scene where Elisabeth the narrator and her son Jack go to the beach. Although biocontainment staff are disposing of a shambler there (“remove him efficiently and with good technicality”, according to the guard), the focus is on Elisabeth’s prickly interaction with a neighbour:

[Jack] points a fat finger down the beach. “Shambla, mumma? Is it? Shambla?”
Alea coos and chirps. “They’re speaking now! Such fun.”
“He’s speaking,” Elisabeth says, bristling. “Jack’s a boy unless he eventually decides otherwise.” She adjusts Jack’s hat. “He’s two now. Yes, Jack, it’s a shambler.”
Alea settles back on her towel, with a curve to her lips that looks more amused than chastened.
[. . .]
A ways down the beach, a small knot of spectators has gathered about ten meters back from a distinctive shape. It’s crawling for the surf, red-and-blue flukes rippling from its bent back. A guard is busy zipping into a hazard suit, white with what looks like a gasoline stain across one knee. The shambler seems to sense its time is limited; it scoots a bit faster now, dragging a wet furrow behind itself. The whole thing is quite macabre.
“Is hubby back from his little trip?” Alea asks.
“What?”
The ejection is more forceful than she intended it. She was distracted by the shambler, and by the sputter and whine of the buzzsaw the guard will use to dismember it.
“Benjamin,” Alea clarifies. “Is he back from Australia?”
“Not yet.” Elisabeth shifts her gaze to Jack, who is meticulously pouring fistfuls of sand onto his tiny knees. “My brother is coming to visit, though. He’s an artist.”
Alea smiles dryly. “Here to freeload while he seeks inspiration, I suppose? Every family has one.”
“He’s quite successful, actually.”
“Oh.” Alea gives a pensive moue. “I think we’re all artists, in our own way.”
Elisabeth imagines gouging out her eyes and filling the holes with sand. “What a lovely thought,” she says.

The rest of the story is a slow burn that is largely a study of the tough but tetchy Elisabeth and her relationship with Jack (who we later learn has a genetic condition) as (spoiler) her personal and the wider world fall to pieces. During this slow disintegration her artist brother Will turns up, and we find he has become interested in the shamblers and has started painting them. Later on, he finds a ledge on a cliff that they use to drop into the ocean but doesn’t report it.
Meanwhile, there is background detail about the rest of the world—the increasing chaos, the haves who get immunomods to stave off infection, and the have-nots who do not. We also learn that some people have started joining anthrocide cults, and are voluntarily infecting themselves with the xenovirus. This division in how people are responding to the crisis becomes obvious when her brother brings a new acquaintance round for a drink (“Will is always fucking meeting people”, thinks Elisabeth):

The air is fresh and electric, and it seems impossible that the world is ending, but that is where the conversation invariably leads.
“You see, this is not like the other plagues and pandemics,” says the ex-sommelier, in a faint Romanian accent. “This is their photo negative. Their chiral opposite.”
“Well, it came by artificial meteor,” Will says, with a buttery smile. “That’s quite unique.”
“It came with purpose,” their guest says. “In my opinion, it’s a gift.”
“How do you figure?” Elisabeth asks, more bluntly than usual.
“In my opinion,” the man repeats, “humanity has been offered a way to save itself.” This prompts her to verify, again, that the front gate’s biofilter reported him clean. “To save itself from itself,” he continues, stroking the small bones of his dog’s head, “and this time, the downtrodden lead the way.”
Will gives an alarmed smile. “That’s quite the idea.”
“First shall be last, last shall be first, et cetera.” Their guest places the dog in his lap. “We left the poor behind, over and over, but now they finally get to leave us behind.”
“By becoming monstrous eldritch crayfish things,” Elisabeth says. “Such luck.”
“By growing iridescent armor and returning to our primeval birthplace,” the ex-sommelier says. “They are safe in the ocean while the old world burns. Or they would be, if we stopped senselessly hunting them down.”

Shortly after this Elisabeth asks the visitor to leave, and later on her brother is ejected too (Jack later falls ill and, when Elisabeth checks the house’s video feeds, she sees that Will has smuggled some shambler carcass into the house to get one of the colours he needs for a painting of one of the creatures).
The final arc of the story sees Jack’s health continue to decline, but this is due to his genetic condition and not the xenovirus. Then, while Elisabeth has a bath, she starts thinking the impossible:

“Wash you knees,” Jack suggests.
He is sitting on the heated tile beside the tub. She can’t deny him, not so close to the end, not when his little limbs might give out at any moment. He’s playing with a bright red fire truck that used to be his favorite. The fact feels disproportionately important now. She feels the need to recall everything about Jack, every habit and preference. He has only been briefly alive, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
“Wash you knees, mumma,” Jack says again.
Elisabeth rubs at her kneecap, feeling the gooseflesh around the bone.
“Wash, wash, wash,” she sings. “Wash, wash, wash.”
“Good washing,” Jack decrees, in an uncanny imitation of the nanny’s synthetic lilt. “Good job.”
“Thank you, Jack. I thought so, too.”
Jack returns to his toy. Elisabeth reaches forward and drains the bath a bit, listening to the gasp and gurgle of exorbitant water waste, then adds a shot of hot water. She stirs with her hand until it’s tepid throughout. Climbs out dripping.
“Jack,” she says. “Do you want to come inna bath, bubba? With your fire truck?”
He is momentarily suspicious, but the novelty wins out. He lets her peel off his clothes, hold him fruitlessly over the toilet, carry him back to the tub. He gives a squealing giggle when she skims his feet through the water, holding him under the armpits. She sets him down carefully and clambers in after him.
“Lots of animals live in the water, Jack,” she says. “Should we play pretend?”

Elisabeth then researches ways of disabling their immunomods. Then she gets back in touch with Will. When she tells him what is happening with Jack, he agrees to help.
The final scene sees her meeting Will at the shambler ledge on the cliff. He gives her the injectors that will disable the immunomods and infect her and Jack with the xenovirus. After Elisabeth and Jack change, they shuffle off the ledge and fall into the sea. There is a great payoff line:

But when they are far from any shore, the smaller hooks itself to the larger. They dive together, toward a city that might exist.

Although this is a quite a slow burn to start with (I had to take a break in the middle as I was beginning to lose focus) it comes to an ending that is both emotional (all those interactions between Elisabeth and Jack come to a moving culmination) and transcendent (the final hint that they will have another kind of life beneath the waves). It is also at this point that you realise that this wonderful story is about Elisabeth and her son as much, if not more, than anything else.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 14,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for their 2021 stories. It is the best of them by a country mile.

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld #174, March 2021)1 opens with a women being told about the death of her grandfather by her “instance”:

An instance is a duplicate self-cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern vocabularies. To become an instance is to instantiate; in the present tense, instancing.

So, the basic situation here is that (a) the woman receiving the call in America is the peaceable doppelganger of the woman in Korea, and (b) the instancing process is widespread in this world, most particularly among emigrants. Of course, this is all just an unexplained gimmick/metaphor (it might as well be magic) that lets the writer do a lot of identitarian hand-wringing over the next twenty or so pages:

America assumes instances will stay forever.
Here is a free state for those who want to leave, America says, ignoring the fact that the land was already peopled, that the borders were brought to them unwillingly. Ignoring those brought in force in chains. Ignoring the deportations at the border. Ignoring the fact that intention to leave actually just means acceptance of situations beyond your control.
Living in the States means that you’re blank-American. Korean-American. Mexican-American. African-American. Indian-American. Native American. America assumes instances leave their original country permanently and defines them by the self left behind.

You don’t know how to explain the way you feel about the States to your instance, who has never had to leave home. How she-you will long for worlds that no longer exist, for countries that only exist in your memories, how you’ve had years to come to terms with the tension that sits in your belly when you think about the homes you’ve left behind, how you have changed enough to miss America, now, and you can bear the loss of one homeland but not two. How to explain she would become a foreigner. How to explain to her how you are Korean-American. How you are American.

Mixed in with this agonising, and the narrator’s trip to Korea for the funeral where she meets her duplicate family, is a related fairy tale about a fisherman who spends a night with the mermaids, doesn’t realise that thirty years have passed, and goes home to find himself in bed with his wife. When the fisherman stabs the man in the bed, he switches to the man being stabbed. (The myth of Odysseus makes an appearance later on in the story as well.)
At the very end of this piece the subject of de-instancing surfaces, and (spoiler) this is what eventually happens—possibly against the American instance’s wishes—when the other woman takes her hand (I assumed it wasn’t what she wanted from the fact that the story cuts to a final line from the fairy tale about a knife in the heart).
This is (as is probably obvious from the title) mostly a literary tale about immigrant identity, and only tangentially an SF story. I had zero interest in its concerns, and am truly baffled as to why anyone would waste a moment of their lives thinking about this sort of thing—who wants to be defined by where they come from or the country they live in?
* (Mediocre). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. This was fifth equal out of eight finalists in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban (Clarkesworld #173, February 2021)1 begins with the female narrator going to a restaurant and munching her way through bread rolls while she savours the various food scents. She doesn’t have anything else to eat because she has been told by her internship supervisor that she should wait for eighteen hours after returning to Earth before exposing herself to strong aromas and tastes.
After this (largely irrelevant start) she meets an older version of herself, and we learn that the narrator was cloned from this person, Diana. Part of the explanation about this makes no sense:

“[Our parents] speed incubated the cells from the eyelash up to when you were thirteen, so I would have a wide memory base and they would only have to worry about raising me through high school and college. It’s a method that took them—”

How do you clone someone’s memories?
After this the older Diana launches into a parental issues diatribe (which, in one form or another, is what the story is):

“But I wasn’t—” I start.
“A disappointment?” Original Diana says, her lips tugging at the seams. “Yes, you’re now the same age I was when I ruined things for everyone and drove my life down the gutter. I was a selfish brat who got into Pitt instead of Carnegie Mellon, switched my major from galactic finance to art history, dropped out when I was twenty-one, and haven’t been seen since the screaming match with my parents about wanting to be a chef. All they ever wanted to do was look out for me when I had myopic dreams that would never take off. I was just some spoiled brat like all the white children whose parents didn’t know how to raise them.”

And:

 “There is no version of us that will ever make our parents completely happy,” she says. “There are only versions of us that have done our best to make ourselves happy.”

Diana then tells the narrator that she is the fourth clone the parents have created in an attempt to have a daughter who will have a prestigious career and be someone of who they can approve. Then, when the narrator, the original Diana, and the other clones meet up later, the narrator finds they have become, variously, a chef, tattoo artist, etc., instead of the career in cosmocurrencies that their parents wanted them to pursue—and for which the narrator is currently interning on the Moon. Eventually, at the end of the story, she too gives this up to become a parfumier.
I note that, despite the original Diana and the first three clones having gone on to do their own thing, they are co-dependents who perversely keep squabbling with the parents rather than just moving on (they regularly send their parents samples of their DNA along with a cheque for a large amount of money, stipulating they can have one but not the other).
Those readers with their own unresolved parental issues may get something out of this solipsistic moanfest; others will, as I did, start skimming.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was joint fifth place out of eight in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for stories published in 2021. There must be a lot of disgruntled children out there.

A Blessing of Unicorns by Elizabeth Bear

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Blessing of Unicorns by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2021) gets off to a promising start with Police Sub-Inspector Ferron getting stabbed in the foot by a mini-unicorn while she is investigating a missing person’s apartment with her colleague, Senior Constable Indrapramit:

Around Ferron’s foot clustered a dozen or so jewel-hued, cat-sized, bioprinted synthetic unicorns, stomping their cloven hooves and tossing their rapier-like horns. It was the sharp edge of one small hoof that had laid her flesh open. Now the toe was bleeding copiously, as foot injuries often do.
“Don’t just stand there. Bring me the first aid kit.”
Gingerly, Ferron set her sandal down. Blood slimed between her sole and the shoe.
The most ferocious of the miniature animals, a sparkly, butterscotch-colored stallion, snorted and arched his neck. He defecated a marble-sized poop to let everyone know he was the boss of everything.
Ferron, who had never had much to do with farm animals, even tiny ones, did not find this charming.  p. 160

After Ferron treats her foot they receive a video message from the police network and see the missing woman, a social media influencer called Bel Hinti, enter the deserted police station with a gun (all, or nearly all, of the city’s police force work at home or out in the field in this future world). Hinti eventually surrenders the firearm to the virtual assistant and tells it that someone is trying to kill her. Then, at the end of the video, Hinti scribbles something on a piece of paper before leaving the station.
So far, so good, but, after Ferron and Indrapramit complete their search and head out into the bright night (a supernova has appeared in the sky and there is mention of a dead alien civilization), Ferron heads home, and we get a four pages of description about her domestic circumstances. This involves, variously, what she has to eat, her interaction with Chairman Miaow and Smoke (her pet cat and fox), and her relationship problems with her extended family and mother (who has had her virtual reality budget cut off and is making Ferron suffer):

Ferron’s mother’s name was Madhuvanthi, and Ferron was used to seeing her only in virtual space, or as a body dressed in a black immersion suit, reclining on a chaise.
Ferron would never say it, but her mother was bedridden not because of illness, but because of self-neglect. She needed—had needed for years—treatment for depression, anxiety, and withdrawal syndrome. She obsessively archived her virtual memories, racking up huge storage bills that Ferron had, until recently, bankrupted herself to pay.
Ferron had long ago given up trying to talk her mother into treatment, and she had no leverage with which to force the issue. Her sisters pleaded poverty and unemployment, though Ferron knew at least two of them did pretty well on the gray market. The truth was, nobody really wanted to deal with Mom.
Madhuvanthi did not look at Ferron as Preeti pulled the omni away. Ferron made her tone exquisitely polite. “Hello, Amma. Hello, Preeti mausiji, Bijli mausiji. It’s good to see you out of bed, Amma.”
Madhuvanthi kept her face averted, and her hand went to the skinpet adhered just below her collarbone. Velvety fur rippled as she stroked it, her touch followed by the rumble of a purr.
“But look at this, Ferron,” Preeti said. “Look what we have done for you!”
The past tense increased Ferron’s apprehension to outright dread. She knew better than to say anything. She braced herself and accepted the omni.
It was a matrimonial ad, and Ferron was horrified to realize that it wasn’t some man that her family was going to try to force her to write to—or worse, had already written to on her behalf. This was an ad for her, seeking a groom. And it wasn’t a draft, either. It had already been posted.  pp. 169-170

This domestic soap opera (supposedly set in the 2070s or 2080s I think1) is a harbinger of what is to come in the rest of the story, which essentially devolves into a sequence of meals that Ferron has with or without Indrapramit, and tetchy encounters with her mother. This is punctuated with some light internet browsing and the odd trip out as the pair look for the missing woman. Eventually they find out (after a brief virtual reality episode) that another influencer from Hinti’s social media set is missing, which later leads them to suspect that a trustee or trustees of a fund the women belong to may be killing the beneficiaries to get control of the money.
The climax of the story comes after WhiteRabbit, a third influencer, (“Call me Rabbit”) turns up at Ferron’s house in the middle of the night, which prompts Ferron to meet Indrapramit at the station to look for the note that Hinti left but which no-one has been able to find . When they get there (spoiler), they see that someone has smashed the place up—and they are then held at gunpoint by Muhuli (the second of the missing woman), who is eventually shot by Ferron. Ferron then finds the note in the tea trolley, which identifies Muhuli as the villian—you cannot help but think that if the police search teams had done their job properly they could have saved Ferron and Indrapramit from a lot of eating and browsing. I’d also add that I would be surprised if any reader could work out that Muhuli was the murderer from the information provided.
By the way, Ferron suspects early on that Hinti’s body was dismembered and put through the bioprinter, turning the corpse into the unicorns found in Hinti’s apartment—but I can’t remember a CSI investigation for blood spatter, etc. when they can’t get DNA from the unicorns.
There is a very slight murder mystery story here, and it is buried under such a pile of extraneous description (food, pets, mothers, supernovas, aliens, etc.) that the piece eventually becomes do-not-finish tedious. Even though I, against my better earlier judgement, did, I had to take breaks and read it in three sessions.
Finally, I’d also suggest that, when most of a story is about the first three subjects in that list above (food, pets, mothers, etc.), you are looking at the work of someone who has burnt out as an SF writer.
* (Mediocre). 24,700 words. Story link.

1. Ferron is born in the years after 2042.

Glitch by Alex Irvine

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Glitch by Alex Irvine (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with Kyle waking up in a medical facility and realising that he has been “recompiled” (uploaded) into a new body (he notes a missing tattoo, unpierced ears). His partner Shari tells him that he was killed in a terrorist bomb blast and that there has been a glitch in his persona upload (there are unconvincing explanations about why they have had to delete his backup and so cannot repeat the process). Then, when Kyle later remembers the attack from the bomber’s perspective, he realises that part of the terrorist’s persona has also been uploaded into his new body:

An image drifted through his head, smeary and fleeting. A toddler on the bricks of Monument Square, spilling out of a baby backpack. Eyes closed, mouth open, dust in pale streaks on his skin and in the black springs of his hair. An adult’s arm still twisted through one strap of the backpack. Blood dark on the bricks.
One more maggot won’t grow up to be a roach.
Kyle twitched and his eyes snapped into focus. God, what kind of a person—
The thought had come from inside his mind.
He leaned his elbows on the porch railing and rested his face in his hands. Imagine dying, he thought, and that’s one of your last thoughts . . . and now it’s one of my memories. Because he did remember it, and to his shame a part of him had felt a visceral satisfaction. That was the other person.
Brian. That was his name. Another neural pathway knitting itself into the gooey matrix that made Kyle Brooks who he was, and who he would be. Brian.
“You’re a fucking asshole racist, Brian,” Kyle said into his hands. “Sooner you’re gone, overwritten, forgotten, whatever . . . sooner the better. I hope nobody recompiles you.”  p. 19

This idea of being trapped inside your own head with a racist terrorist is quite a promising one (in a chilling way) and, for the first part of the story, it is reasonably well handled—we get further racist outbursts from Brian, and memories of bomb-making with his wife Marie, etc. (that said, his character is never really developed much beyond a sanitised version of a stereotypical white supremacist villain1). Then the Feds turn up to question Kyle, suspecting that he has some or all of Brian’s persona in him; they tell him that if they find out that is the case, they will (by some legal hand-wavium) arrest him.
Kyle then goes to see Abdi, a Somali business contact and hacker, who agrees to track down the source of the hack that corrupted Kyle’s persona backup (Kyle figures that if he can find out more about the bomber he can make a deal with the Feds). Then a ticking clock is introduced when Kyle learns that the Feds have an arrest warrant for him, and the tempo speeds up further when Kyle sees a second bomb in one of Brian’s memories.
The rest of the story sees Kyle and three of Abdi’s cog swapping friends (body-swappers) run around (directed by Abdi’s magical hacker skills) looking for the bomb and, in one sequence, Kyle cogswaps with a transgender woman and goes to a club looking for a contact of Brian’s. There are further convenient memory reveals from Brian which move the plot forward when Abdi’s computer isn’t doing so.
The action draws to a conclusion when (spoiler) Kyle finds the bomb and the real Brian at a house Abdi has located from his computer searches. Brian beats up Kyle and injures him, but Kyle is rescued by Chantel from the house fire Brian starts afterwards. Then Kyle, Chantel and another cogswapper have to chase Brian to a fairground where Kyle finds the bomb under a school bus. Then Brian finds Kyle, and Kyle has to deal with Brian, the bomb and (of course!) his own inherent racism:

Over the loudspeaker, Kyle heard a voice instructing fairgoers to please exit to the parking lots in a calm and orderly fashion. He unzipped the backpack, exposing the explosive charge. Through the fog of agony, the Brian in his head tried to stop him, but Kyle was in charge now. You’re just an ugly part of me that already existed, he thought. And because I died, you got a name. Once I accepted that, I understood how weak you are.
you’re not so different, I fit right in
Kyle’s heel gouged a furrow in the ground as Brian dragged him all the way out.
As he emerged into the light again, he remembered Marie’s hands. He remembered exactly what they had done. Anyone pulls the red wires, boom.
He heard both Brians at once. No no no don’t—
He pulled the red wires.  p. 48

Kyle awakens in a new body, and sees Shari and Abdi (who has edited out Brian from the new persona backup that he has conveniently been running for Kyle since earlier in the story). Kyle has no recollection of anything that has happened since the original bombing.
This story starts with a neat idea but it is one that is sloppily executed (how did Brian’s persona get mixed up with Kyle’s; why are there such stupid laws surrounding the backup technology and responsibility for criminal acts, etc.). Much worse is the second part of the story, which devolves into a sub-Hollywood cyberpunk thriller with good guys and bad guys. I lost interest halfway through.2
* (Mediocre). 21,600 words. Story link.

1. Stephen King does a much better job of putting his readers in the heads of genuinely unpleasant characters, and you can’t help but think that if he wrote this story that Brian would have been portrayed in a considerably more realistic way. In particular, the absence of the n-word in a story that is about a racist terrorist shows the extent to which the author or editor or publishers (or all of them) are self-censoring. Now, I can understand that any one, or maybe all, of the above may not want to use language like that in their work or magazine (and I’m not particularly keen on having to read it). But, if that is the case, I’d suggest that you may want to avoid using racist characters like this as convenient stereotypical villains, because all you are doing is presenting a filtered and unrealistic version of such people.

2. I think Jim Harris may have lost interest before I did: he wrote a long blog post listing all the suspension-of-disbelief problems he had with the story. I note that he mentions that Irvine is a comic book writer: I should have picked up on that from the mindless action in the second half, if not from the poor conceptualisation in the first.

The Hazmat Sisters by L. X. Beckett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Hazmat Sisters by L. X. Beckett (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) sees a man approach three teenage girls in the wild, who quickly mount a hi-tech defence:

“Unknown interloper.” Text from the hot scrolls across her augmented display.
She flicks the warning away with a gesture, linking to Tess’s dragon and zooming with its cameras. It feeds a view of the brush direct to her goggles. No coyote this time. The man’s scrawny, but a man nonetheless. Not as big as Fee, but full-grown.
He’s creeping toward them. Not blundering, not snuffling about for shelter, and moving superslow. Bidding to fool their motion detectors? Not good.
Wilmie checks the charge on Pony—three quarters—then side-steps, fighting a sneeze as she crouches beside her twin, Tess, and puts a hand over her mouth. Tess goes from slack to electric under her hands. She joins the Dragon channel, takes one look, and sends, subvocally: “Someone’s coming, Fee.”
Wilmie’s earbuds make the utterance seem loud.
Fee, their fearless leader, rolls deeper into the culvert they’ve claimed for the night’s camp. “Secure the mule.”
Wilmie obeys, triggering a clattering furl of shield over Mule’s chest-mounted solar panel. Pony collapses into a pile of dull silver spaghetti, camouflage mode, pretending to be broken chain-link fence, scattered in grass. Dragon rises another three meters, propellers whirring lustily as Tess, emitting a cheerful spray of happyface moji, queues up a trank dart.  p. 74-75

The man is eventually confronted by the girls and slinks off. Afterwards, the three suspect that he may be a Dixie deserter up to no good (the Dixie militia is one of the factions in an ongoing American civil war that has reduced—along with corona superviruses—much of the country to a post-apocalyptic landscape).
The rest of the piece provides some backstory as well as further trials for the three as they try to walk to the DMZ, their mother/stepmother (I forget the family details), and safety. This involves: the man reappearing on two further occasions; potentially weaponised tree-planting drones appearing while they are queueing with others to buy supplies; a man with a wife and baby who helps them out; and much bickering between the three.
During all this the mother is monitoring the girls remotely, and conferences with them every night (one of the gimmicks of the story is that the mother gamifies—D&D, I’m told—their journey to try and make the three more co-operative).
This is alright, I guess, but the (spoiler) final fight scene with the man isn’t as clearly described as it could be (the problem is continually having to describe what various pieces of future tech are doing), and, overall, the story feels like an extract from a longer work rather than a self-contained piece.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,350 words. Story link.

Philly Killed His Car by Will McIntosh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Philly Killed His Car by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the protagonist, Philly, trying to sell his sentient car:

“How many miles did you say?”
“Madeline,” Philly said. “How many miles do you have?”
“That’s a rather personal question,” Madeline shot back. “How tall are you without the auto-lifts in those dashing faux-leather cowboy boots?”
Philly winced as the dude glanced down at his boots. He was so sick of this fucking car. “Can you just answer the question, please?”
“I’ve traveled fifty-six thousand incident-free miles, rounding up.”  p. 48

Matters do not improve when Mr Timms, the prospective buyer, offers a price:

“Madeline, how about it? He seems like a good guy, don’t you think? If he was your owner, he could take much better care of you than me.” Philly caught himself. “If he was your client, I meant to say.” Madeline went apeshit when Philly used the O word. He braced himself for one of her ass-chewings.
“Do you work with other vehicles, Mr. Timms?” Madeline asked.
“I own three,” Mr. Timms said proudly. “A Mercedes convertible AJ seven, a Tesla
Humvee Elite, and a mint 1982 Mustang.”
“So, you don’t really need my services. My presence in your garage would be meant as a further display of your economic prowess.”
Mr. Timms’ eyes narrowed. “That’s not at all the way I would put it.”
“No, I’m perfectly sure it isn’t. Let’s go, Philip. I’m ready to leave.”
“God damn it.” Philly raised his fist over Madeline’s hood, just barely resisting the urge to slam it down.
“That’s one nasty car you’ve got there. No wonder you’re not asking more.” Mr. Timms turned on his heel and headed up his driveway.  p. 49

The rest of the story details Philly’s increasing irritation with Madeline (his family badly needs the money). Then, while Philly is bitching to a friend called Gibsy about the wider AI situation (they gained limited rights after a one day strike and are now considered a nuisance by many), Gibsy suggests to Philly (spoiler) that he crash the car and claim on the insurance. Philly duly does this and, when the car doesn’t go in the lake, smashes the CPU to bits while Madeline begs him to stop (in an overly brutal scene). Then he and Gibsy push the car down the ravine and into the water.
The second part of the story sees his wife visit him in hospital—just in time to see all the lights and equipment in his room switch off. The AIs in his shoe lifts (which Philly had forgotten about) have told the rest of the AI world about his crime, Philly is now sanctioned—no AI controlled equipment will work in his presence beyond the very basics required to keep him alive.
The final section sees Philly doing manual labour in an onion field, having nightmares about killing a human Madeline, and then, after smashing the house toaster when all the appliances starts chanting “Killer”, repairing it. When he promises to modify the rest of the appliances we see that Philly may eventually be able to win forgiveness, at least from some of the AIs.
This is an okay story if you don’t think about it too much (e.g. a world where AIs are sentient and have rights but can still be sold as property is completely inconsistent, and an untenable situation—and the idea that the AIs may forgive the brutal killing of one of their number for a few modifications is just ridiculous).
** (Average). 8,500 words. Story link.

My Heart is at Capacity by T. J. Berry

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Heart is at Capacity by T. J. Berry (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) is narrated by Paul, the android partner of a young woman called Rebecca:

My heart is at capacity. I’m scheduled for an upgrade tomorrow. I don’t have the power to love Rebecca any more than I already do, and it is not enough for her.
I spend the day before my appointment creating economic projections for a developing nation’s STEM investment. Picking up an extra side gig means my upgrade won’t impact our household budget. I don’t want Rebecca to feel that the opening of my heart comes at her expense.
My numbers reveal that this young country will recoup their STEM investment within a generation. There’s a statistical certainty it will bring up their GDP by 5-7 percent in a year or two. My numbers also say that my upgrade will allow me to devote 9 percent more processing power to Rebecca’s needs. We don’t have a GDP-like measurement in our relationship, but my nested flowchart says that if I identify and satisfy a greater percentage of her needs, she will recognize my usefulness and love me more.  p. 131

Of course (spoiler) that latter conclusion (his being more useful will make her love him more) is obviously erroneous, and this becomes apparent during the rest of the story, where their interactions become increasingly suboptimal:

Rebecca kisses me on her way out in the morning, tight-lipped and perfunctory. Not the warm, open-mouthed kisses of our middle days together. I don’t push for more. Nor do I mention the lunch that’s in her satchel. In my experience, explicitly telling a partner what you’ve done for them elicits a negative reaction. Better to work silently and unnoticed than to demand praise that will only be offered resentfully.  p. 133

Paul’s solitary reflections, and his analysis of their interactions—which are acutely observed alternating with entertainingly wonky—occur during the same period he meets and interacts with Ashira, a more basic android partner (“Do you want some feedback?” he asks her after a limp handshake). Through these exchanges we learn more about the androids’ history and their use as human partners.
Eventually, Paul goes to get his upgrade (secretly paid by himself from the odd jobs he does when Rebecca is working or asleep) and, when it is complete, he instantly realises that Rebecca has a new, human partner. After they split up (or, more accurately, Rebecca dumps him) Paul moves on to a new relationship with a male bartender. He still thinks about Rebecca, but is reluctant to delete his memories of her because of the “valuable data mixed in” with them.
This is a smartly observed story that provides an intriguing and witty view of human relationships.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,300 words. Story link.

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with “Asimov was a Bigot” graffiti, as seen by an A&R man called Thom on his way to see a blues-playing mining robot in deepest Siberia. We learn that the robot, XJB, was involved in an underground mining incident:

There are robots that sing and play instruments. There are robots that dance, paint, sculpt. They do it because they were programmed to. What made XJB special, maybe even unique, is that it made its art spontaneously, as a consolation for dying men. It’d never been taught; it taught itself, out of desperation, to give the last moments of those men’s lives some scrap of kindness. It knew that it couldn’t dig an escape before their time ran out.  p. 152

One wonders why, if robots can do all those things, there is still a requirement for human miners.
Moving swiftly onwards, XJB breaks out of the manager’s office after talking to Thom (who has told it that a bootleg of its songs has gone viral). Soon XJB is on tour performing to mixed human and robot audiences. However, when a pair of active shooters start killing robots in the audience, XJB intervenes and kills one of them.
The next part of the story is about XJB’s trial and how, even though robots are sentient, they don’t have the same rights as humans (more story illogic—if they are only machines, why is XJB being tried in court?). Then, after XJB is sentenced to deactivation, Thom visits and we get some melodramatic and contrived bonding between the two (Thom’s daughter died when he refused to have her transferred to a cyborg, “What you do in life can be undone, but what you sing can never be unsung”).
The final section (spoiler) sees Thom and his boss Freddie ambush the police convoy taking XJB to be deactivated. However, just as it seems that they are on the cusp of freeing XJB, they are intercepted by police drones which cut its head off. All ends well when we find that XJB’s brain isn’t in its head but its hind quarters. XJB’s consciousness is later hidden in a railroad engine. The music company continue to receive and promote its new music.
This story is something of a kitchen-sink piece (blues-playing robot, a future where sentient robots don’t have the same rights as humans, the court case, the future-tech prison break, etc.), and the internal logic of the story is non-existent in places (see above and below). I also didn’t care much for the affected, musically-referenced writing style. Or the derogatory cracks made at Isaac Asimov’s expense:

If there were a residue of human decency left, wraithlike, drifting in the oily substance of the U.S. legal system, it never caressed the aghast faces of the robots drowned in it.
XJB was a dead bot walking. It had killed a human, in a concert hall filled with witnesses, recorded by thousands of its own assaulted fans.
The law had grown new limbs to reach bots, but grown them only from the diseased stumps of Asimov’s original, arbitrary, uncaring three rules. More evil had been done in this century with his “laws of robotics” that that scrofulous sci-fi writer could have ever imagined. They are explicit that robots—if confronted with such a choice—must sacrifice themselves, to save humans. As if human lives were somehow more important.  p. 156

Apart from wraiths drifting in oil, and the personal comments (“scrofulous”), what we have here is more story illogic. If XJB has killed a human then how are human lives more important than those of robots? The three laws obviously don’t apply here or, perhaps, as anyone who has any familiarity with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics might suspect, they have metamorphosed to the point where robots now consider themselves “human”. (The goalposts were always moving in Asimov’s robot stories—didn’t The Bicentennial Man become human?)
A complete muddle of a story, in multiple ways.
* (Mediocre). 6,950 words. Story link.

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens with a teenager called Bo going to the beach with his mother. There they see one of the inert alien blobs that have been on Earth for the last couple of decades:

It was up the beach from them, around a little point of wave-worn stone, just a bit above the tide line. It was massive. As Bo walked toward it, he thought: Now there’s something you could never paint. But he wished he had his field easel with him.
The misty light of the beach warped when it hit the surface of the alien, bent back and forth as it traveled through the thing’s translucent mass. There were forms inside it the eye could not make out, organs or other structures. Again, the mist thinned, and the sun came out with that shattering light. In the brightness the alien looked like beach glass rounded by the sea—a piece of beach glass larger than a passenger van, a fragment of a bottle dropped by giants. The light refracted from its body sent wobbly streaks out onto the sand.  p. 78

Bo goes up to the alien and touches it, and then, on the way home, we see the domestic tension between him and his mother (an affair and a divorce; his full name, “Beaulac”, etc.).
The story then switches view to a Visitor Center attendant called Illyriana, who notices that their rescued alien (called Beach Ball) has disappeared. It soon becomes apparent that all the aliens have vanished.
There are a few more developments in the story (spoiler): Bo sleeps with a girl and gets beaten up by her brother and friends and ends up in hospital; scientists discover changes to the cellular structure of human cells; and Illyriana hooks up with the police officer that investigates the disappearance of Beach Ball. The main revelation, however, is that Bo and Illyriana (and, we eventually see, all of humanity) have been infected with alien spores and are now “connected” to other people—can sense their thoughts and feelings and memories, etc. It appears that the “Prodigals” (the scientists conclude the aliens aren’t aliens but the product of parallel evolution on Earth) are turning humanity into a huge hive mind.
This isn’t badly done, I suppose, but it is bit of a drag in places (I think the characters’ personal issues are overdone), and it could have done with being shorter or had more time spend on the connectedness aspects. I could also have done without this outbreak of Sturgeonesque sentimentality (when Bo speaks with his mother in hospital):

“I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was you. And you were dreaming of me. Of us. We were in Oakland, and I was a baby. We were in a church, listening to organ music.”
“We were so poor it was all we could afford.”
“Were you dreaming about that?”
“I never remember my dreams. But I think of those days all the time.”
“I don’t remember those days. But you do. You remember parts of me I can’t. And I see you in a way you can’t see yourself. I remember things you don’t remember. And if we are good to each other, that can be what family is—a way to help each other remember who we are. So we can be better people.”  p. 87-88

I’m not entirely sure why people need help to remember who they are, or why remembering things for your family members will make them “better people”—but I suspect this is just modern therapy speak masquerading as an insight about family relationships.
*** (Good). 9,550 words. Story link.