by Lightspeed Magazine;Catherynne M. Valente;Tananarive Due;Adam-Troy Castro;Joe Haldeman
Author Spotlight: Tananarive Due
Wendy Wagner
Is there any real-life disease that inspired Virus-J? What kind of research did you do while you were working on “Patient Zero”?
I had a story I really wanted to tell about a child being raised in isolation, ignorant of an apocalyptic infection raging in the outside world, so my approach to “Patient Zero” was probably something like “A spoonful of science helps the narrative go down.”
Having said that, I was researching and writing The Living Blood at the time (or else I’d just finished it), a novel about blood that could heal any disease, and I’d done a lot of research into hot zones and Ebola and AIDS. Virus-J was created from my research for that novel, which went on to win an American Book Award.
It’s interesting that Jay tells us the virus came from the oil rig where his father worked. That’s got to have different implications for today’s readers than it did for the readers of ten years ago, when this piece was originally released. What inspired you to pick this career and workplace for Jay’s dad?
I was exploring the notion that this virus was something ancient that we had unearthed—and oil drilling was fair game, since oil dependency is such an unhealthy practice for our planet overall.
One detail that really hits the reader is the very brief discussion of the little girls in China, girls who had also survived Virus-J. There was a definite sensation that something terrible had happened to them. What inspired that moment in the story?
One of the consistent philosophies that has come across in my work, especially in The Living Blood and Blood Colony, is the notion that our survival instincts would drive us to almost any acts. Jay is probably lucky that he lived such a gentle life, and clearly the girls in China did not. I do think that if this kind of virus were sweeping the globe, anyone who was immune would definitely be imprisoned and studied—if not outright studied to death for reasons that would have as much to do with envy as with science.
Have you ever imagined what happened to Jay after this story ends?
It’s hard to think of poor Jay let loose in that horrific world outside. That’s probably why this short story never became a novel. But as I think about it now, I would like to imagine that Jay meets another group of survivors and they begin a path toward rebuilding the population.
Even though we’re stuck in Jay’s hospital room, there are still all these gorgeous details that place the story in Florida. What influenced the setting, and how integral is it to the piece?
I grew up in Miami, although I had left Florida by the time I wrote “Patient Zero,” so I’m sure the Florida references are evidence of homesickness. Florida will always be home in my heart. I live in Southern California now, but it’s a setting I plan to return to again.
Now we just have to hope that Jay doesn’t get eaten by alligators roaming empty streets! (Oops. Sorry. That was the horror writer in me…)
Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece?
I’m especially proud of “Patient Zero” because it was included in two Best SF of the Year anthologies; Year’s Best SF 6, edited by David G. Hartwell, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois.
Wendy N. Wagner’s first novel, Her Dark Depths, is forthcoming from the small press Virtual Tales. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology 2012 A.D. and in the online magazine Crossed Genres. Another is forthcoming in The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams. In addition to her fiction writing, she has conducted interviews for horror-web.com. She shares her Portland, Oregon, home with one painting husband, one brilliant daughter, and no zombies.
Bangs & Whimpers: A Look at the Top Five Doomsday Scenarios
Carol Pinchefsky
From 1945 to 1991, Americans woke up every morning to coffee, cereal, and the threat of a Ruskie-style, nuclear holocaust. But ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the only thing we’ve had to fear is undocumented fruit pickers and people named Abdul.
Sure, terrorism is a threat, but it’s not the kind of bowel-weakening specter of doom we know in our hearts we ought to be worrying about. Luckily, science fiction is a rich source of improbable worst-case scenarios, any one of which is bound to suit all you paranoiacs out there who just can’t go to bed at night without the comfort of knowing that something, somewhere, somehow is going to get you.
Here are a few of our favorite end-of-world scenarios:
BIG ASTEROID STRIKE
Asteroids are so threatening that scientists have created the Torino Scale to measure the damage a possible impact event could inflict. The scale runs from 0 to 10 with 0 being no chance of collision and 10 being a Michael Bay film.
The asteroid that ended the Cretaceous period was a definite 10. Even the largest of dinosaurs didn’t stand a chance against a massive flaming rock slamming into the Yucatan and kicking up more sunlight-blocking dust than the last night at Burning Man.
According to people much smarter than you, large asteroids hit the earth every ten million years, which means, of course, that we’re probably due. So when that day does finally come (and you know it will), kiss it all goodbye, baby: your life, your family, your friends and that meticulously color-coded and cross-referenced porn collection we know you’ve got stashed in your basement.
IN REALITY
Given that the oldest human, Jeanne Calment, lived 122 years and was never hit by a single space rock, chances are pretty good that you’ll make it from cradle to grave completely asteroid free. And since, statistically, you aren’t likely to live as long as Jean, it means your odds are even better.
Oh, and that Torino scale we mentioned? In the almost three hundred known asteroids with the potential to smack Earth upside the head, all but one are rated as 0, and only one is rated 1, which means, “extremely unlikely, with no cause for public attention or concern.”
Or as they say in internet-speak, “Meh.”
ALIEN TAKEOVER
Well over a thousand people claim to have been abducted by aliens, and millions—millions!—believe that aliens have visited this planet. Toward that end, over four thousand people have purchased alien abduction insurance, because they really, truly believe that the aliens are coming to get them.
And what if they’re right?
Despite BP’s piddling in the Gulf, this is a cozy little planet we got here: water, oxygen, American Idol. Who wouldn’t want to be our overlords?
So tomorrow morning when you wake up to find the Plutons have parked their Superdome-sized spaceship over the Empire State Building and are blowing us all to kingdom come, remember it’s not personal. They’re just here for the resources.
Or maybe it’s their way of saying Simon Cowell’s a dick.
IN REALITY
As Douglas Adams sagely pointed out, “Space is big. Really big,” so aliens likely are real. But before you start running to Walmart for shotguns (which, come on, wouldn’t do you any good against lasers, anyway), stop. Real aliens aren’t going to be those Grey, big-eyed-waifs we know and love from Close Encounters and elaborate autopsy hoax videos.
No, chances are, any aliens we do encounter will be the single-celled, microbial kind, not likely to be packing heat or trying to turn us into a slave race, forced to battle each other gladiator-style for their amusement.
So next time you’re paralyzed in bed, watching helplessly as that big-eyed, gray-skinned Dr. Kildare surgically implants a transmitter into the base of your skull, take consolation in the knowledge that you’re really just suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
Or maybe it’s the government.
SUPERBUG
According to our very good friend Wikipedia, viruses “are the most abundant type of biological entity” on the planet. They’re too small to be seen by a standard microscope, they infect every organism, they’re found in every ecosystem, and they’re resistant to antibiotics. If this were a horror film, viruses would be cast as the slow-moving yet surprisingly effective ch
ainsaw murderer.
Think we’re kidding? Smallpox: five hundred million dead; Spanish flu: fifty million dead; HIV, twenty five million and counting. And of course there’s the ever-present threat of viruses being “weaponized.” Scary thought, isn’t it? Some schmoe with a chip on his shoulder opens up a vial of pathogenic whoop-ass on a plane and next thing you know, the whole world’s bleeding out the eyeballs.
Course, none of this works if the terrorists are as unwilling as the rest of us to pay those new carry-on fees.
IN REALITY
You know that smallpox virus with the horrifically high body count? Eradicated. HIV? Slowed down. Spanish flu? Mutated into a less lethal form. And thanks to high-tech, modern hygiene techniques like hand washing and not hurling plague corpses and dung at our enemies, even viruses like Ebola can be curtailed.
And Twelve Monkeys aside, weaponizing viruses is not the simple procedure you might think it is. First, you have to manage to develop your bug bomb without killing yourself. In 1979, the Soviets tried it with Anthrax. All they managed to eradicate was a bunch of their own sheep.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call karma. Karma with phlegm.
GRAY GOO
If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term Gray Goo is a horror film about a goopy mass of mindless metaphor eating its way through 1950s suburbia, you would be mistaken…and not just because The Blob is red.
To explain Gray Goo, we have to start with nanotechnology. Nanobots are tiny machines built on the molecular, even atomic level, that, theoretically, can be used for a variety of useful tasks such as cleaning up oil spills, coaxing stem cells to regenerate damaged organs, or helping us understand the ending of Lost. Pretty handy, especially when you know that they self-assemble.
But what if those helpful little nanos suddenly went wild? And, no, we don’t mean getting drunk and lifting their shirts for every sleaze ball with a camera.
When nanos go crazy they out-of-control self replicate, gobbling up everything around them while continuing to build more and more and more of themselves. Eventually, all matter on Earth is consumed, up to and including your tasty, carbon-based flesh. All that will be left is an undulating lump of metallic Gray Goo.
Or, as we call it here on the East Coast, New Jersey.
IN REALITY
Nanomachines don’t exist yet.
The field of nantotechnology is relatively nascent, so rest assured, you’ll probably be dead before this civilization-ending event can ever come to pass.
In fact, one of the highlights of our current level of technology is a robot that can walk fifty paces. Impressive, until you find out each step is only half a nanometer long. No worries about this guy disassembling your DNA and rebuilding you in the form of a clown.
And besides, Gray Goo can only happen when nanos replicate out of control, and no self-respecting scientist would ever let that happen. Not because he gives a damn about the rest of us. No, it’s his grant money he’s worried about.
RISE OF THE MACHINES
Robots perform all sorts of useful functions: they vacuum our floors, they build our cars. In Japan, they even tend to our elderly. And best of all, they don’t care that we’re exploiting them. In fact, they don’t care about anything at all. They’re robots; they don’t have feelings.
And that pretty much sums up our biggest fear: cold-hearted machines devoid of emotions and programmed to respond only to logic. And what’s the least logical thing on this planet? That’s right, it’s us.
One of these days, Asimo’s gonna realize exactly how useless we are to him, and then it’s no more mister happy dance. We’ll be crushed under his literal iron fist like the fragile meat-puppets we are. Driven like rats, we’ll be hunted to near extinction with nothing to protect us but Christian Bale and his rage issues.
Boy, are we screwed.
IN REALITY
Look, robots can only do what we program them to do. All this hand-wringing about Arnold going back in time to kill your mother is about as realistic as Pacific Northwest emo veggie vampires.
In the unlikely event that there is a robot coming to crush your windpipe, just toss a tin can into its path. The ensuing hilarity will generate enough hits to crash YouTube.
And if all else fails, there’s always Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics to fall back on. We have to hope that the directive to preserve human life will be the base programming of any future artificial intelligence.
Course, Asimov might have changed his mind on that one had he seen what Will Smith did to I, Robot.
CONCLUSION
Worrying about the future collapse of civilization as we know it is a great thought-experiment, but the fact is that the chances of us all getting snuffed in one cataclysmic, species-killing event are really pretty slim.
But if stockpiling seeds and water and giant, Costco cans of tuna fish in the lead-lined bunker beneath your carport makes you happy, hey, knock yourself out.
And maybe it’s for the best. Cause if all that paranoid busy work accomplishes nothing else, at least it’ll keep you from worrying about how you’re really gonna die. In a nursing home. Surrounded by alien-robot invaders, fending off a mass of gray goo and a viral infection. Watching the asteroids fly into view.
When she is not freelance writing, Carol Pinchefsky is the editor of the Space Future Journal (www.spacefuture.com), a website dedicated to space tourism, as well as the humor competition editor for F&SF. To Serve Man is her favorite cookbook.
Arvies
Adam Troy-Castro
STATEMENT OF INTENT
This is the story of a mother, and a daughter, and the right to life, and the dignity of all living things, and of some souls granted great destinies at the moment of their conception, and of others damned to remain society’s useful idiots.
CONTENTS
Expect cute plush animals and amniotic fluid and a more or less happy ending for everybody, though the definition of happiness may depend on the truncated emotional capacity of those unable to feel anything else. Some of the characters are rich and famous, others are underage, and one is legally dead, though you may like her the most of all.
APPEARANCE
We first encounter Molly June on her fifteenth deathday, when the monitors in charge of deciding such things declare her safe for passengers. Congratulating her on completing the only important stage of her development, they truck her in a padded skimmer to the arvie showroom where she is claimed, right away, by one of the Living.
The fast sale surprises nobody, not the servos that trained her into her current state of health and attractiveness, not the AI routines managing the showroom, and least of all Molly June, who has spent her infancy and early childhood having the ability to feel surprise, or anything beyond a vague contentment, scrubbed from her emotional palate. Crying, she’d learned while still capable of such things, brought punishment, while unconditional acceptance of anything the engineers saw fit to provide brought light and flower scent and warmth. By this point in her existence she’ll greet anything short of an exploding bomb with no reaction deeper than vague concern. Her sale is a minor development by comparison: a happy development, reinforcing her feelings of dull satisfaction. Don’t feel sorry for her. Her entire life, or more accurately death, is happy ending. All she has to do is spend the rest of it carrying a passenger.
VEHICLE SPECIFICATIONS
You think you need to know what Molly June looks like. You really don’t, as it plays no role in her life. But as the information will assist you in feeling empathy for her, we will oblige anyway.
Molly June is a round-faced, button-nosed gamin, with pink lips and cheeks marked with permanent rose: her blonde hair framing her perfect face in parentheses of bouncy, luxurious curls. Her blue eyes, enlarged by years of genetic manipulation and corrective surgeries, are three times as large as the ones imperfect nature would have set in her face. Lemur-like, they dominate her features like a pair of pacific jewels, all moist an
d sad and adorable. They reveal none of her essential personality, which is not a great loss, as she’s never been permitted to develop one.
Her body is another matter. It has been trained to perfection, with the kind of punishing daily regimen that can only be endured when the mind itself remains unaware of pain or exhaustion. She has worked with torn ligaments, with shattered joints, with disfiguring wounds. She has severed her spine and crushed her skull and has had both replaced, with the same ease her engineers have used, fourteen times, to replace her skin with a fresh version unmarked by scars or blemishes. What remains of her now is a wan amalgam of her own best-developed parts, most of them entirely natural, except for her womb, which is of course a plush, wired palace, far safer for its future occupant than the envelope of mere flesh would have provided. It can survive injuries capable of reducing Molly June to a smear.
In short, she is precisely what she should be, now that she’s fifteen years past birth, and therefore, by all standards known to modern civilized society, Dead.
HEROINE
Jennifer Axioma-Singh has never been born and is therefore a significant distance away from being Dead.
She is, in every way, entirely typical. She has written operas, climbed mountains, enjoyed daredevil plunges from the upper atmosphere into vessels the size of teacups, finagled controlling stock in seventeen major multinationals, earned the hopeless devotion of any number of lovers, written her name in the sands of time, fought campaigns in a hundred conceptual wars, survived twenty regime changes and on three occasions had herself turned off so she could spend a year or two mulling the purpose of existence while her bloodstream spiced her insights with all the most fashionable hallucinogens.
She has accomplished all of this from within various baths of amniotic fluid.
Jennifer has yet to even open her eyes, which have never been allowed to fully develop past the first trimester and which still, truth be told, resemble black marbles behind lids of translucent onionskin. This doesn’t actually deprive her of vision, of course. At the time she claims Molly June as her arvie, she’s been indulging her visual cortex for seventy long years, zipping back and forth across the solar system collecting all the tourist chits one earns for seeing all the wonders of modern-day humanity: from the scrimshaw carving her immediate ancestors made of Mars to the radiant face of Unborn Jesus shining from the artfully re-configured multicolored atmosphere of Saturn. She has gloried in the catalogue of beautiful sights provided by God and all the industrious living people before her.
