{"id":3917,"date":"2022-05-11T22:32:59","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T22:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3917"},"modified":"2022-08-12T11:23:35","modified_gmt":"2022-08-12T11:23:35","slug":"lone-puppeteer-of-a-sleeping-city-by-arula-ratnakar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3917","title":{"rendered":"Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City<\/em><\/strong> by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld<\/em>, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then \u201ctend the sick lands\u201d. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn\u2019t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly\u2014so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Even if you know, as I did, that the \u201cyou\u201d in that passage is an AI called Opal, it\u2019s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times.
After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, \u201cnon-manipulated biological\u201d) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the \u201cdimensionality\u201d of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on \u201cinter-procreation\u201d with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha\u2019s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch).
After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life\u2014but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can\u2019t go back in again.
Then, after Eesha\u2019s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can\u2019t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms.
Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story\u2014who knows. Oh, and Opal\/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they\u2019ll just mess up the Earth again).
I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?\u2014All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha\u2019s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal?
It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year\u2019s Best. Dreadful.
– (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link<\/a>.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then \u201ctend the sick lands\u201d. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[929],"tags":[79,296,487,930,622,548,566,7,601],"class_list":["post-3917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arula-ratnakar","tag-296","tag-ai","tag-arula-ratnakar","tag-clarkesworld","tag-climate-change","tag-future-earth","tag-novelette","tag-virtual-reality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3917"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5338,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917\/revisions\/5338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}