by Cat Rambo
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” Her eyes fixed beyond him at something on her desk.
“Okay, then.” He held out the screensuit. “I’m going to need you to take off your clothes and put these on.”
She took the suit from him and disappeared behind the curtain.
Siya gave me a panicked look before continuing. “You don’t need me to engage in supportive conversation, do you? If you were anyone else, I’d tell you how to put on the MAG now, but I’m going to assume you know that, and I’d tell you the screensuit is delicate, and the opening is in the—”
Maggie emerged and turned her back to Siya, who sealed the suit, still looking discomfited. She stroked her hands down her sides once, but didn’t look at herself the way most people did.
“I assume you’ll put in your own contacts?” he asked, holding out the case. She nodded and took them from him.
My turn again. I found myself going rote because it was easier to say what I was used to than change it up. “The next thing I’m going to do is set up an IV. It’ll have two things connected to it: fluids, for if the monitors say you get dehydrated, and the Stars.”
“No,” she said.
“Stars enhances the experience. It’s not addictive. It doesn’t give you—did you say no?”
“No,” she said. “Yes to the fluids, no to the drug.”
“Maggie. Don’t be silly.”
“My choice. No Stars.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been telling you for days. If you don’t know, you haven’t been listening. What’s the point of this if you sleep through it?”
“It’s 42 degrees, rainy, and windy. It’s going to be awful up there.”
“It’s supposed to be hard, Lex. It’s gone all wrong.”
She didn’t look like she would budge. “I have to ask one more time if you want the Stars. You have to say yes, ah, no for me.”
“I did. I said no, and I’ll say no again.”
I started the fluids IV without the Stars, even though nobody in the entire time I’d been working there had ever said no before. It threw my rhythm off, so that I had to check every step of my procedure three times, afraid I had missed something. Without Stars, there was a lot less to do.
“Are you ready, Maggie?”
She pointed at a picture on her desk, two teenage boys and a younger one. “Have I ever told you about my oldest grandson?”
I glanced at the clock. Her prep had been quick. “No.”
“He got beaten up four months ago by some ‘patriots’”—she spat the word “—for saying he thought the curfew was unevenly enforced. Not even that he hated it, just that they kept waiting outside the youth center to catch kids who dawdled walking home. Beaten bloody for pointing out the truth because he said it outside the designated place and time, and the ones who attacked him got their names up in lights.”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. “We should get going.”
Siya reached for her hand, but she pulled away. He shot me a look; we weren’t used to an alert Flag.
I reached for my radio. “Flag walking.”
“Flag walking, confirmed,” came the response in triplicate.
I handed off the IV cart and returned to my station to watch. At sunrise, the anthem began to play, and the platform rose. Maggie stood tall, her jaw clenched. She didn’t sing along.
In every home, in every business open this early around the country, Flagscreens played this tableau. Maggie was there with them, clear-eyed, biding her time as the anthem ended. She had a whole day to address them. Sunrise to sunset. If she pulled it off, our job might be very different from this day on. I’d never really considered what it meant to be a person who’d sacrifice her own comfort to say what she thought needed to be said. I leaned forward.
She looked straight into the camera.
“Wake up,” she began. “It’s time to wake up.”
About the Author
Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014 and a Nebula finalist for 2013. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, and Uncanny and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, Accessing the Future, and numerous year’s bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, among other languages.
Sarah’s first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories will be published by Small Beer Press in 2019.
Editor’s Note
Free speech is one of our rights, but we see it being both fettered and devalued, until we see protesters in literal cages labeled “Free Speech Zone.” Pinsker provides a hopeful tale of someone willing to reverse that trend in a society where turning in traitors is a daily, patriotic act.
I will admit, the National Anthem is a piece of music that always moves me, despite its bloody origin. I loved the echo of it in the title, which underscores the story’s examination of what patriotism means. There is an honest directness to this story that makes us think at the end that Maggie Gregg’s act will have an impact, and that their job will indeed be very different from this day on. Pinsker asks us, like the narrator, to consider what it means “to be a person who’d sacrifice her own comfort to say what she thought needed to be said.”
Because it’s time to say things. It’s time to wake up.
The Editor’s Eyes
Calie Voorhis
Alice’s eyes have become the text, plugged in through the optic socket located like a teardrop by her left eye. Bad grammar surges on and on. There is no stopping the inexorable flow of misspelled words, incorrectly placed commas, or tense confusions. Her eyes, editor’s eyes, rented for the spare seconds in between her other jobs, during her sleep. She edits in the cloud-ware: proofing user’s manuals from Japan, deep-cleaning bids and proposals from the biopharms, critiquing poorly written novels that never will be published except in the author’s netsphere. Three friends will read the book, pronounce the work brilliant publicly, and remind themselves to read no more.
The phone rings, a venomous wasp buzzing in her ear. Her shoulders rise and she twists her neck, hoping to pop the tension away. “This is Alice,” she answers, already knowing the call is from Tod. “Hey, bro. What’s the situation today?”
He is quiet and she knows he is shrugging, a man of few words, with a reluctance to ask for favors, not even for his daughter, her beloved niece, their dying Anne.
“I need more money,” he says. “The heart went up in the bidding war. The doctors said if we didn’t win this bid, we might as well give up. So, I won.”
“That’s great,” she says. A few sentences float past. She adds a semi-colon and deletes three commas, considers rewriting the whole sentence to avoid the run-on. “How much do we need?” Her chest pounds with relief.
He names a figure, causing her to lean her head back, to stare at the flaking ceiling of her home, the home suddenly no longer hers. Nor is the new hover sitting in the driveway, or the antique mahogany bedroom set handed down from her grandmother. Everything must go.
And she has to talk to her boss, the head of the Editor’s Guild. She’s going to need more hours, more jobs to fill the empty blinks of time she has left—breakfast, lunch, dinner. Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons.
“Aunt Alice.” A whisper in her ear. Anne, always so tired and limp from the lack of oxygen, pale as a fairy wraith, exiled from Avalon into a foreign sun that does not nourish.
She will do anything for this child.
Sunday afternoon used to be her solitude, her time to read her pad, catch up on the system news, relax in a café savoring her one cup of off-world java.
&
nbsp; Now the lazes and small pleasures have disappeared into the never-ending flow of words. They beat at her brain, flock about in an endless line of insistent contracts. Some grow impatient and flit off; others stack into piles requiring her attentions, her edits. She needs twenty today, sixty this evening while she sleeps. The first payment is due Monday to reserve Anne’s heart, to keep the vascular organ in the bank. If they can’t pay, no heart. No Anne.
She settles herself in her desk chair, closes her eyes, and gets to work.
All of her time is spent in the cloud-ware, immersed in the half-sleep of the void, editing. The words coil and thrash. She sees them as malevolent ebony snakes. They blend together and stop making sense.
The unthinkable happens. She misses an apostrophe error, a simple one: “it’s” instead of “its”. Contraction versus possessive pronoun, an easy mistake, for a beginner. The type of blunder she’s paid good money to catch.
Chirp, chirp. She answers. Her boss. “Look, Alice, you’ve got to cut back. I can’t afford these kinds of gaffes. I know your situation, but I’m not giving you any more contracts. The Guild is cutting you off.”
She tries to argue, shame staining her with heat. The chief editor is insistent: she needs rest, and he is going to make sure she gets some. “Our reputation is at stake too,” he says and clicks off.
When she next closes her eyes, there’s only black, lifeless, cold, silent black streaming through her lids. No words. No sentences.
Chirp. She doesn’t answer; it’s Tod. She can’t tell him what’s happened, how she’s put Anne’s life in jeopardy through a silly mistake brought on by the fugue of exhaustion. There’s no excuse.
Sunday afternoon. She’s trolling the cloud-ware, for illegal contracts, the words no one wants to take on, defying the Guild. Stories without hope of redemption. User manuals so cluttered with translations they make absolutely no sense at all. Snuff pornography. Autobiographies without purpose, only ramblings of a boring life.
Anne’s last payment is due in two days—the heart will be hers, completely. The words Alice finds will make the difference between Anne’s life and death.
She takes her first illegal contract, a proposal editing job looking to bypass Guild-mandated procedures. Full of misspellings of the client’s name, medical terms, and reads as if it was written by a highly educated chemist with an imperfect understanding of first grade English. The writer uses commas like they are the height of fashion and is overly fond of exclamation points.
Her head pounds. She signs up for some smut, just to vary the day. Left queasy and shaken, she wonders who would actually read the story, much less find sexual fulfillment in the activities described therein. All it’s done for her is shaken her belief in humanity and reaffirmed her faith in the misuse of the written word.
The afternoon progresses relentlessly into night, the sun setting outside in a bath of golden light, while the words wriggle around her.
The torture will never end. All of her work is running illegals now, twenty-four hours a day plugged into the cloud-ware, using all the processing time her brain has to offer. Her stomach reminds her with a growl of physical needs. She sips on a stim and ignores the pangs.
24 hours to go, then 10. The clock in her head keeps on ticking. The stims of caffeine, the calmer patches to keep the worst of the shakes at bay, rushes through her system, maintaining the virtual high.
Words swarm her, angry fire ants biting and clawing at her. Illegal documents materialize; each one worse than the last. A wiki assignment pops up; she edits article after article on obscure cricket regulations.
All the vile jobs of the editing world keep her going, keep the money account growing, but the deadline creeps closer. Sixty precious minutes left and she needs ten more contracts.
That’s when they find her. Her feed goes dark, the words stop. The head of the Editor’s Guild, her boss, storms in. The door to her office slams open. Bright light makes her blink.
“You’re under arrest,” her former boss says. “For illegal document trafficking.”
She doesn’t have time for this. Anne’s heart beats in her head, each second a chance floating away. She’s out of her chair, the first step wobbly because her muscles are screaming their inactivity. Her throat is dry and her vision blurred, unused to the lack of phrases. Her bare house is unfamiliar without the flow of grammar.
“Good,” he says. “You’re coming without a fuss. That might help your cause. I’ll put in a good word for you, I know why you’re doing this.”
“Then let me finish,” she says. “Anne depends on me. My brother is counting on me.”
He shakes his head, saggy eyes crinkled with pity. “I can’t. I’d lose my guild membership. We all have to eat.”
“Then eat this,” she says. The punch comes from her gut and the words flying out of her fist and into his face. “Strength,” “desperation,” “determination,” and “fortitude.” Spelled correctly and using the Oxford comma.
He crumples to the wood floor, cheeks no longer tense with mistaken sympathy. Her short fingernails struggle for purchase in the fragile skin by his eye . . . The clock in her head keeps ticking. One more job. Ten minutes.
She tears through, blood slippery in between her fingers, sticky on her palms, smelling like wet pennies, until she finds his cable. She disengages the plug from the side of his eye, yanking the cable down along the line of his socket, splitting the skin.
She digs her own cable out, the pain rippling out in tears. She lays down next to him, his body twitching and plugs the feed into her own outlet.
One last job. She sorts through her editor’s feed. Swims past the corporate edits, dives into the black market. One contract suits her needs, worth enough money, if only she can finish it in ten minutes—a Master’s thesis, mostly incomplete, incoherent. No worse task in all of editing. Eight minutes left. She demands her money up-front, but the student refuses.
She leaps in.
The first pass she fixes the spelling, the commas. Attempts to form coherent sentences.
Five minutes.
She writes a thesis sentence. Begins the reorganization.
The graduate student flutters around the document, trying to help, to insist on his viewpoint. She locks him out. Far away, in her body, she can feel the twitches of exhaustion and adrenaline, knows that the Guild will have already sent another representative.
Two minutes.
The document is in pieces now, floating around her as she cuts and pastes, smoothing transitions, working on the flow. When the paper is coherent, she turns to the last step, the dreaded MLE formatting of the citations pages and footnotes. Her hands shake, the words want to resist her control.
This time, the editors don’t bother knocking. She places a final period, turns in the file, accepts payment, and flings the money into her brother’s account. Alice is safe.
They storm in, socket removers in their hands, finger-like tips ready for her eye jack. Stunned with exhaustion and success, she waits.
Her sight fades in red pain.
Her feed goes dark. All the words are gone. The good ones, the perfect ones, the ideal sentence as well as the tortured phrases.
Her head is her own, forever, lonely.
About the Author
Calie Voorhis is a life-long fanatic of the fantastic, and internationally published short story writer and poet, with work in the anthologies Anywhere But Earth, DOA—Tales of Extreme Terror (Volumes I and II), Specter Spectacular, and the Urban Green Man Anthology, among others. She holds a BS in Biology from UNC-Chapel Hill, an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, and is an Odyssey workshop alumna. She also writes the “Changing the Map” column at SpeculativeChic.com. You can find her on Facebook, Instagram, and at CalieVoorhis.com.
Editor’s Note
This story will have particular resonan
ce for anyone who’s done freelance writing for a living and knows the oddity and randomness of such assignments. And it will have a lot of resonance for anyone who’s scraped away taking any such assignment in order to make money.
Alice is literally plugged into her labor, connected “through the optic socket located like a teardrop by her left eye” in what seems a truly nightmarish situation, exposed to the endless flow of text originating on the Internet.
45’s regime depends on the complicity of the rich, those willing to lend their power to keeping him where he can feed their purposes, enabling the existence that we glimpsed in the very first story of this book, Yu’s “Green Glass.” This is outright class war, masquerading as a soothing flow of kitten memes, geek capitalism, and unquestioned privilege.
Creatives are one of the groups hardest hit by the current administration’s removal of affordable health and insurance reforms. Speak up about its destruction.
Free WiFi
Marie Vibbert
Royden was the hottest boy at New Entrepreneurs Academy, and I treasured every flash of his thick lashes. I didn’t see him much, not since eighth grade when he joined the Labor Studies program. A lot of kids looked down on Labor Studies students, considered them bottom track. I was in Business Document Production, the top. But Royden’s work gave him yummy muscles and a glow of exertion.
There he was, walking just ahead of me, arms bare to the early morning chill. I ran to catch up. He turned and smiled. My stomach flipped.
“Hey, Jadine,” he said, voice all slow and easy like pouring caramel.
I shook myself from staring at his lips. “Uh, kind of a surprise, catching you on the way to school. Don’t you start early?”
We fell into step, walking to school like a couple.
He said, “Normally, yeah. I was getting in at 5 am for the packing warehouse, but that’s done.”
