{"id":6016,"date":"2022-12-01T14:57:17","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T14:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=6016"},"modified":"2022-12-11T18:48:13","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T18:48:13","slug":"quandry-aminu-vs-the-butterfly-man-by-rich-larson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=6016","title":{"rendered":"Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man<\/em><\/strong> by Rich Larson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man<\/em><\/strong> by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 21st<\/sup> September 2022) opens with an unnamed woman arriving at a makeshift biolab run by a man called Jow. After some brief conversation she opens a pouch containing something that looks like the cross between a foetus and a homunculus, and they watch it grow in the bathtub of biomass that Jow has prepared:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

There\u2019s a rattling gurgle, like rainwater racing through pipes during a storm, and the tub starts to churn. A wet pink fleck strikes Jow\u2019s boot. He steps back, heart humming, knees shaky. The biomass is sluicing away, but not down the drain. The thing from the pouch is greedy, growing, sucking with ravenous pores.
Jow watches the level fall, and fall, and a body emerge. It swells and thrashes. Limbs elongate. A cartilage skeleton stretches, twists. Muscles creep over each other, layer on bubbling layer; rubbery skin splits and reforms to accommodate. Jow can\u2019t take his eyes off it.
When the gurgling noise finally stops, the fully formed butterfly man is lying in a shallow carbon puddle. It\u2019s human-shaped, but strays in the details: joints distended, no finger or toenails, smooth uninterrupted flesh between the legs. Its face is the most perfect part of it, with planar cheekbones and soulful dark eyes.
\u201cThought it\u2019d be bigger,\u201d Jow says, to mask the crawling in his spine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The woman compares it to a tupilak, something made out of animal carcass that you send after a person who has wronged you but, before she can expand on her comment, Jow gets a text saying, \u201cFor diagnostic purposes, run or hide.\u201d The butterfly man then leaps out of the bathtub and stabs the woman to death with a plastic probe before pursuing Jow, who flees.
The next section switches to a bar where Timo finds a woman called Quandry and tells her that a gangster called Joki\u0107 is unhappy about \u201cthe harbour job going belly up,\u201d and that he has sent a butterfly man after her. The story subsequently turns into a Terminator<\/em>-style narrative (the butterfly man has extraordinary powers of regrowth) where Quandry is relentlessly pursued and has several close shaves. During this she learns about butterfly men from her father (Quandry keeps his oxygenated head in a case while she is acquiring funds to buy him a new body), and he tells her that they only survive for 24 hours, but no-one who is pursued lasts that long.
The pivotal part of the story comes when Quandry goes to a drug dealer\u2019s house and discovers (spoiler), when the butterfly man arrives, that she is in its temporary lair. Quandry then fights with the butterfly man, manages to inject a cocktail of drugs into its jugular, and restrains it. She subsequently manages to convince the creature that, if it kills Joki\u0107 before her, it can get control of the rest of the shipment of butterfly men that is due to arrive and, because they have linked memories, gain control of its own destiny and do what it wants rather than being endlessly compelled to be a bioware assassin (we have learned along the way that it likes noodles and painting). The butterfly man agrees to kill Joki\u0107 first, then her.
The climax of the piece comes when Quandry and the butterfly man go to the top floor of Jokic\u2019s building, where they kill his guards and then fight with him and his barber robot. During this Quandry watches a second butterfly man push the original off the roof (this second butterfly man has the same memories and essentially the same consciousness as the first but likes pushing things off of buildings). This latter act is fortuitous because the second butterfly man, unlike the first, has not been programmed to assassinate Quandry.
If you don\u2019t think too much about what is going on here (the part where Quandry ends up in the butterfly man\u2019s lair and manages to convince it to go along with her plan hugely stretches credulity) then this is an entertaining enough gangland assassination story with lots of grisly wetware action and a twisty plot. If you enjoyed Larson\u2019s recent How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobu\u010dar<\/em> (also on Tor.com) you will probably like this.1<\/sup>
*** (Good). 14,750 words. Story link<\/a>.

1. Both of these stories show Larson in Hollywood movie mode (albeit a movie with more SFnal invention than most).

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

Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 21st September 2022) opens with an unnamed woman arriving at a makeshift biolab run by a man called Jow. After some brief conversation she opens a pouch containing something that looks like the cross between a foetus and a homunculus, and they watch it grow […]<\/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_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[309],"tags":[539,24,1387,1389,7,310,116,1386],"class_list":["post-6016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rich-larson","tag-539","tag-3-2","tag-assassin","tag-homunculus","tag-novelette","tag-rich-larson","tag-tor-com","tag-wetware"],"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\/6016","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=6016"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6084,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6016\/revisions\/6084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}