Of Death Deserved We Will Not Die by Bennett North (Lightspeed #162, November 2023) has a narrator who helps his mother make bread outside a city that has closed its gates. Various other snippets of information are presented as the narrator wanders the area gathering supplies—he practises climbing the city walls, there has been a plague and many have been locked outside the city, the narrator’s mother is paid for her bread with “broken chairs and baby clothes and sacks of bones”, etc. (I got the vague feeling the bones were what they ground down to make the bread).
This very short piece never coheres into anything more than a dream fragment.
* (Mediocre). 700 words. Story link (available 23rd November).
A Review: The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7 by Lars Ahn
A Review: The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7 by Lars Ahn (Lightspeed #162, November 2023) takes the form of a review of a documentary about a Mars mission that went wrong. We subsequently learn that Riveria, the maker of the film, locked the four remaining survivors in a room and interviewed them about the mission and the circumstances surrounding the commander’s death:
Mission commander Ruben Corto had died in a tragic accident and his remains had been left in space, per his wishes. That was all the surviving members were willing to say, and nothing else could be drawn out of them. Speculations ran wild, not helped by Dieter Hamilton’s suicide a few months after the return. Was Corto’s death really an accident? Had there been a mutiny onboard? Was Corto to blame for the ship going off course? Did the crew eat him when they ran out of supplies? (Riviera shoots that rumor down by documenting that Sigrún 7 had plenty of food in storage.)
The central mystery is never explained so, interestingly oblique approach aside, the story is ultimately slight and unsatisfying.
** (Average). 1,450 words. Story link (available 16th November).
Dr Seattle Opens His Heart by Winston Turnage
Dr Seattle Opens His Heart by Winston Turnage (Lightspeed #162, November 2023) is a short, two page fragment about a cruel and arbitrary superhero called Dr Seattle. We learn about the thousand faces people see when they look at him, his damaged body, and how he deals ruthlessly with a terrorist incident at an internet company building (“Detonate it”).
A notion, not a story.
* (Mediocre). 650 words. Story link (available 23rd November).
Confession #443 (Comments open) by Dominica Phetteplace
Confession #443 (Comments open) by Dominica Phetteplace (Lightspeed #162, November 2023) begins with the narrator describing how he and his friends are being haunted by internet images of a Professor Mangleman. It materialises that the group startled the Professor on a hiking trail the day before, whereupon he fell into a canyon and subsequently died—they did nothing to help him for fear of being blamed by the police.
The narrator later learns more about the Professor:
His death was ruled an accident. He liked to go hiking wearing complicated earbuds that messed with his vestibular system. He had fallen down trails before. Apparently, his colleagues had been begging him to stop hiking on skinny trails with his weird earbuds. He had multiple concussions from past falls.
The earbuds were his own invention. They connected directly to his brain via an implanted neural interface. He was mapping his own connectome with the goal of merging it with an AI.
Eventually (spoiler), one of the group can’t bear the constant images anymore and goes to the cops—who already know that the narrator and his friends have violated the Good Samaritan law:
I asked my Lawyerbot why they didn’t just arrest us as soon as they knew. Why did they instead sic each of us with a haunting algorithm? Seems mean. Well, you weren’t rated as flight risks, she said. But really, it’s cheaper this way. The haunting algorithm follows you around the internet confronting you with your crime until one of you confesses and narcs on the others. It cuts down on prosecution costs.
We eventually discover that the account we are reading is the narrator’s court statement (“rated by a sentiment algorithm for both remorse and honesty”).
This is an entertaining and quirky piece that crams quite a lot into its short length.
*** (Good). 1,300 words. Story link (available 23rd November).
Magnificent Maurice or the Flowers of Immortality by Rati Mehrotra
Magnificent Maurice or the Flowers of Immortality by Rati Mehrotra (Lightspeed #126, November 2020) concerns a cat and a witch that live in a cottage between the roots of Yggdrasil:
It stands at the nexus of worlds, dark matter coiling around its roots, the rim of the universe held aloft by its ever-expanding crown. Its branches bend spacetime, its cordate leaves uphold the laws of physics, and its tiny white flowers grant immortality.
Let us be more specific. One flower grants immortality, two flowers cause a prolonged and painful death, three flowers the obliteration of an entire species. It does not pay to be greedy.
The story is mostly about Maurice the cat who, apart from having to defend the tree from various interlopers, has other problems to deal with:
Time flows differently here. Maurice is not immortal, and neither is the witch. They are also not as young as they used to be. There are other cats now, milling about the cottage, meowing for the witch’s attention. One day, one of them will take his place.
But not yet. Oh, not yet. Maurice raises his head and casts a yellow-eyed glare at the tortoiseshell that has just landed on the edge of the roof. To his astonishment, she does not retreat. He allows his fur to stand up, his lips to curl away from his sharp white teeth.
“Good morning, Maurice,” she says smoothly. “Surely the roof is big enough for both of us?”
Maurice’s astonishment turns to rage. A mere kitten, challenging his territory! The roof is his. The tree is also his. He will die defending it. The witch knows this, knows how good he is at his job, and yet she has allowed these . . . these . . . children to invade his home!
He rises in all his torn-eared, ragged-furred glory and arches his back, hissing like a storm of bees.
The tortoiseshell regards him, unfazed, out of bright green eyes. “There’s chopped sardines for snack. In case you want to join us.” She turns to leave. “My name is Butterscotch,” she tosses over her shoulder. She leaps down, as silently as she came.
The next part of the tale sees Maurice telling the other cats about his first battle, and how he used one of his nine lives to create a doppelganger that helped him defeat the demon beetles that attacked the tree (we also learn that subsequent battles mean he now has only one life left). Then Time passes: a God visits the tree in an attempt to steal one of its fruit so it can form a new Galaxy; meanwhile, Butterscotch and the other cats bring Maurice treats and try to ingratiate themselves.
The story eventually comes to a climax when a human called Ulhura visits the tree to steal a flower which will grant her dying lover immortality. When Maurice defends the tree, she manages to imprison him in a cage. Maurice is conflicted and does not know whether to use his last life to burst out of his enclosure and attack her, or grant her wish—then, after considering the matter, he decides to offer her a job (the witch is old like him, and would welcome an apprentice). As Maurice and Ulhura discuss the pros and cons of immortality (mostly cons, according to Maurice) and the job offer, the tree is attacked by vampire corpses: Maurice manages to convince Ulhura to release him, and the other cats also join the battle to repel the invaders. All ends well.
This is a charming, if slight, tale. But definitely one for cat lovers.
*** (Good). 4,550 words. Story link.
Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air by Matthew Kressel
Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed, August 2020) opens with a holy man called Gil finishing his meditation to find that Muu (an incorporeal alien “God”, I think) has “already removed the body of Demi”, a pupil of Gil’s who was also his lover. Apparently, Demi “isn’t dead exactly”, but Gil will never see him again.
Shortly after Gil’s loss another pupil turns up on Gilder Nefan (I am not sure why the planet has a similar name). Tim is female—she had previously changed gender several times but “but ultimately chose female because she felt it suited her temperament”—and she subsequently spends most of her time running errands for Gil when not annoying him with a thousand questions. When Gil gets some time to himself, he thinks about Demi and feels sad.
Eventually (spoiler) Tim convinces Gil to let her join him in taking “jithmus” (some sort of alien weed). He warns her of the dangers, but she insists.
During Gil’s trippy experience, he sees Demi and talks to Muu:
Demi—oh, lovely Demi—stood on a precipice in an endless white desert, while the horizon behind him stretched to infinity. Beyond the cliff’s edge spread an infinite blue sky. Demi, bright-eyed and eager. Demi, smiling and reaching out his hand. Gil floated down, down toward the hand, ready to grasp it and never let go. But he was just a photon. And as he raced toward Demi’s palm, the molecules of Demi’s hand spread into their constituent atoms, and the atoms spread into quarks, and each of these minuscule bundles of smeared energy drifted as far apart from each other as stars in a galaxy.
We are all empty, Muu said to him, in thought pictures. Demi was never anything at all, nor will he ever be anything again. The thoughts you have of him are like waves that ripple in a turbulent sea. Sometimes they form shapes and sense impressions. You ascertain meaning in them, but in reality they are just waves in a stormy sea. You mourn his loss, but why mourn when Demi was never anything at all? He has more life in death than you do in life, because now he is infinite.
But, but, but . . . Gil struggled to say. His photon energy leaped from orbital to orbital like stones across a pond. I felt something real, he said, and that was enough . . .
You are a bird, trapped in a room with a single half-open window, Muu said. The escape is just an inch below you, where the window lies open, yet you keep flying headfirst into the glass.
Can I see him? Gil said. Can I speak to Demi, as he was?
But you are him, now, Muu said. You are the photon which reflected off his eye and wound its way into space, where it has been speeding away from Gilder Nefan for eighty million years. All of your senses of him were nothing more than reflected photons and electrostatic pressure.
And what of my feelings? Gil said.
Just waves on a stormy sea, said Muu.
Why do you hurt me? Gil said. Why do you make me suffer so?
It is you who make yourself suffer.
Deep.
Gil wakes to find that the drug has had no effect on Tim and, because of this, she decides to leave the planet. She tries to convince Gil to go with her but he remains and, after she has gone, he eats all his remaining jithmus stash in one go (about a millions times the usual amount).
A tedious and sometimes pretentious piece that offers moping and cod-transcendence instead of a story. The only time this comes alive is during the back and forth between Gil and Tim.
* (Mediocre). 5,650 words. Story link.
The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty
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).