Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 85

by Julie Novakova

  She kept thinking about the alien ship. If her dating was correct and it landed here a quarter of a billion years ago, it would vaguely coincide with the Great Permian-Triassic Extinction Event. It was usually attributed mostly to geological factors, but there was a possibility of a contribution of other effects—a disturbance of the Oort cloud and more comets sent to the inner solar system afterward would do. She was recently able to measure how long had Peregrine been exposed to cosmic radiation and it seemed to be just several hundred years unless there was a mistake or some factor she didn’t know about. There was no chance any ship like this could have come here from another star system in such extremely short time—unless the star was really close at the time. It started to make more and more sense to Theodora, although all she had was still just a speculation.

  “And it will remain a speculation until someone else finds us,” she said aloud, glancing at Peregrine. “But they will. You’ll see.”

  However, she wasn’t so sure. Would the company send a new expedition after they realize that Theodora and Dimitri were not going to ever call back? It depended mostly on the budget; she was rather pessimistic. And about other companies or countries, she couldn’t even guess. But Sedna’s distance would grow each year. Before another mission could be sufficiently prepared and launched, years would probably pass. And other years during its voyage. Then even more years on the way back.

  She had to admit to herself the possibility that no one was going to discover them soon—maybe until the next perihelion. So far away in the future she couldn’t even imagine it.

  She looked at the other ship and touched the dark metal surface. But still closer than how long you had to wait . . .

  “You were shipwrecked here too, am I right?” Theodora managed a little smile. “Pity that we cannot talk about what happened to us. I’d really like to hear your story. And it looks like we’re gonna be stuck here together for a while.” Her smile grew wider yet more sorrowful at the same time. “Probably for a long while.”

  I hope you found us and heard our story, whoever you are. I really wish you did.

  “Very interesting,” said Manuel. “We must report these findings to the Consortium immediately.”

  Without waiting for an approval from Chiara or Jurriaan, he started mentally assembling a compact data transmission with the help of Orpheus. In a few minutes, they were prepared to send it.

  Nor Chiara, nor Jurriaan objected.

  When he was done, Manuel sent them a mental note of what he intended to do next.

  “No!” Chiara burst out. “You cannot! They don’t deserve this kind of treatment. They died far too long ago for this procedure to be a success. You won’t revive them; you’ll get pathetic fragments if anything at all! They were heroes. They died heroes. You cannot do this to them.”

  “It has a considerable scientific value. These bodies were preserved in an almost intact ice, sufficiently deep for shielding most of the radiation. We have never tried to revive bodies this old—and in such a good condition. We must do it.”

  “He’s right,” interjected Jurriaan. Chiara looked at him in surprise. It was probably the first thing he had said on this voyage that didn’t involve his music.

  She was outvoted. Even Orpheus expressed a support for Manuel’s proposal, although the Consortium didn’t give AIs full voting rights.

  She left the cabin silently.

  It took Manuel several days of an unceasing effort just to prepare the bodies. He filled them with nanobots and went through the results. He kept them under constant temperature and atmosphere. He retrieved what he could from the long dead ship about their medical records.

  And then he began performing the procedure. He carefully opened the skulls, exposed the brains, and started repairing them. There wasn’t much useful left after eleven thousand years. But with the help of cutting edge designed bacteria and the nans, there was still a chance of doing a decent scan.

  After another week, he started with that.

  Chiara finally felt at peace. Since their rendezvous with Sedna, she felt filled with various emotions every day and finally she thought she couldn’t bear it anymore. As she stepped inside Orpheus after the last scheduled visit of the surface of Sedna, she knew it was the time.

  Inside her cabin, she lay down calmly and let Orpheus pump a precisely mixed cocktail of modulators into her brain. Then Chiara entered her Dreamland.

  She designed this environment herself some decades ago in order to facilitate the process of creating new musical themes and ideas from her emotions and memories as effectively as she could. And Chiara felt that the story of the ancient alien ship, Theodora, Dimitri and Sedna would make wonderful musical variations. Then it will be primarily Jurriaan’s task to assemble hers and Manuel’s pieces, often dramatically different, into a symphony such as the world has never heard. Such that will make them famous even beyond the Jovian Consortium, possibly both among the Traditionalists and the Transitioned. They will all remember them.

  Chiara smiled and drifted away from a normal consciousness.

  During her stay in the Dreamland, Orpheus slowly abandoned the orbit of Sedna and set on a trajectory leading back to the territory of the Jovian Consortium. Another expedition, triggered by their reports back, was already on their way to Sedna, eager to find out more especially about the alien ship and to drill through the ice crust into the possible inner ocean.

  Chiara, Manuel, and Jurriaan had little equipment to explore the ship safely—but they didn’t regret it. They had everything they needed. Now was the time to start assembling it all together carefully, piece by piece, like putting back a shattered antique vase.

  Even Manuel didn’t regret going away from this discovery. He had the bodies—and trying to revive their personalities now kept most of his attention. A few days after their departure from Sedna, he finished the procedure.

  Chiara was awake again at the time, the burden of new feelings longing to be transformed into music gone. She didn’t mind now what Manuel had done; it would be pointless to feel anything about it after she had already created her part of the masterpiece.

  Manuel first activated the simulation of Dimitri’s personality.

  “Where am I? Dora . . . Dora . . . Dora,” it repeated like a stuck gramophone record.

  “His brain suffered more damage than hers after he died,” Manuel admitted. “She had time to go through a fairly common cryopreservation procedure. However . . . ”

  “I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down and the ship tore apart. There is too much damage. My husband is dead . . . But we found something, I have to pass this message on . . . But I feel disoriented, what have I finished? Where am I? What’s happening?” After a while, the female voice started again: “Have I said this already? I don’t know. I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down . . . ”

  “They are both mere fragments, a little memories from before death, a few emotions and almost no useful cognitive capacity. I couldn’t have retrieved more. Nevertheless, this is still a giant leap forward. Theoretically, we shouldn’t have been able to retrieve this much after more than eleven thousand years.”

  Chiara listened to the feeble voices of the dead and was suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow. It chimed every piece of her body and her mind was full of it. It was almost unbearable. And it was also beautiful.

  “It is great indeed,” she whispered.

  She didn’t have to say more. Jurriaan learned her thoughts through the open channel. She knew he was thinking the same. He listened all the time. In his mind and with help of Orpheus, he kept listening to the recordings obtained by Manuel, shifting them, changing frequencies, changing them . . . making them into a melody.

  “Keep a few of their words in it, will you?” Chiara spoke softly. “Please.”

  I will. They’ll make a great introduction. They will give the listeners a sense of the ages long gone and of personalities of former humans. And he immersed into his composition once again. She knew b
etter than to interrupt him now. In a few days or weeks, he will be done; he’ll have gone through all her and Manuel’s musical suggestions and come up with a draft of the symphony. Then it will take feedback from her and Manuel to complete it. But Jurriaan will have the final say in it. He is, after all, the Composer.

  And after that, they should come up with a proper name. A Symphony of Ice and Dust, perhaps? And maybe they should add a subtitle. Ghosts of Theodora and Dimitri Live On Forever? No, certainly not; far too pompous and unsuitable for a largely classical piece. Voices of the Dead? A Song of the Shipwrecked?

  Or simply: A Tribute.

  About the Author

  Julie Novakova was born in 1991 in Prague, the Czech Republic. She works as a writer and an evolutionary biologist. So far, she has published three novels, some twenty short stories in Czech and one other story in English (The Brass City in Penny Dread Tales Vol. Three: In Darkness Clockwork Shine). Her novels were The Crime on The Poseidon City (Zlocin na Poseidon City), Never Trust Anything (Nikdy never nicemu) and A Silent Planet (Ticha planeta). Julie’s short stories appeared in Czech speculative fiction magazines (Ikarie, XB-1 and Pevnost) and anthologies. She’s a severe were-workaholic (which means that most of the time she’s quite lazy and she magically transforms the night before deadline).

  Bits

  Naomi Kritzer

  So here is something a lot of people don’t realize: most companies that make sex toys are really small. Even a successful sex-toy manufacturer like Squishies ™ is still run out of a single office attached to a warehouse, and the staff consists of Julia (the owner), Juan (the guy who does all the warehouse stuff), and me (the person who does everything else).

  (You are probably wondering right now if that includes product testing. I make it a habit not to talk about my sex life with strangers but Julia requires that everyone she hires take home a Squishie or a Firmie or one of the other IntelliFlesh products and try it out, either solo or with a partner. I pointed out that if she ever hired an alien—sorry, “extraterrestrial immigrant”—the neurology doesn’t match up, and does she want to admit she discriminates in hiring? But I didn’t argue that hard, because hey, free sex toy, why not? Frankly, I found it a kind of freaky experience, having this piece of sensate flesh that didn’t really belong there, and after a little bit of experimentation I stuck it in a drawer and haven’t touched it since.)

  Anyway, we outsource the manufacturing and the boxes of Squishies and Firmies get shipped to us on shrink-wrapped pallets and Juan breaks them down to re-ship in more manageable quantities to the companies that resell our products.

  The original product were the Squishies, and Julia is not at ALL shy about people knowing about her sex life (we have an instructional video, and she’s IN it) so I don’t mind telling you that she came up with it because her boyfriend at the time had a fetish for really large breasts, we’re not talking “naturally gifted” or even “enhanced with silicon” but “truly impractical for all real-world purposes like breathing and using your arms,” and conveniently at the time she was working at a company making top-of-the-line prosthetics with neural integration. She made herself a really enormous set of breasts and after a lot of futzing with the neural integration she got them to be sensate. Then the boyfriend dumped her and she didn’t really need them anymore, but her friend who’d had a double mastectomy said, “why don’t you make me a smaller set?” and that, supposedly, was when it occurred to her that maybe she could make this product to SELL. She found a manufacturing facility and office space, hired me and Juan, and went into the Fully Sensate Attachable Flesh business.

  Depending on your predilections you may already be wondering why she started with boobs. IntelliFlesh is re-shapable, at least up to a point, and since I was the Customer Service department I started getting calls from people who wanted to reshape it into something longer, stiffer, and pointier.

  “Julia,” I said one day, taking off my headset, “You need to start making strap-on dicks.”

  “I can’t call those Squishies,” she said dismissively.

  “So? Roll out a new line. Hardies. Dickies. Cockies. If you go with Cockies you can say ‘like cookies, only better’ in the ads.” Maybe I should note that one of the few things Julia doesn’t let me do is write the ad copy.

  The Firmies were an even bigger seller than the Squishies. Between boobs and dicks, we had most users covered, but every now and then I got a call from someone who wanted something a little more customized.

  “You’ve reached Afton Enterprises, home of Squishies and Firmies,” I said. “How may I help you?” (In addition to not getting to write the ad copy, I don’t get to decide how to answer the phone, judging from the fact that Julia shot down the greeting, “How may I improve your sex life today?”)

  “I’m thinking about buying either a Squishie or a Firmie, and I . . . had some questions,” the woman said, her voice hesitant. “They’re sort of expensive and I’m not sure which will meet my needs.”

  “Well, the Squishie is squishier,” I said. “It’s more malleable, but it also doesn’t tend to hold alternate shapes for very long unless you refrigerate it for a while before you get started. The Firmie arrives long and narrow, but if you want it to have a different shape—say, a curve or even a hook—you can gently heat it up and mold it.”

  “What I want is a prosthetic vagina,” the woman blurted out. “In a different spot.”

  You’re not really supposed to say, “you want what?” to customers when you’re doing customer support for a sex toy shop. We are pro-sex, pro-kink, and anti-shame: there is officially no wrong way to have sex. So: “Which spot?” I asked.

  “Well, we’re not exactly sure. Part of the advantage of your products is that we can move them around. What if I bought two Firmies? Could I reshape those into two halves of a vagina, like maybe one could be the top of the, um, tube, and the other could be the bottom . . . are your products compatible with lubricant?”

  “There’s a special lube that we sell,” I said. “Other lubricants might void the warranty.”

  “That adds to the cost even more,” the woman said, clearly frustrated. “Is there any way to find out before I put down all that money whether it’s going to work for me? If they sold these at REI I would just buy it and figure I’d return it if I needed to, but nobody takes returns on sex toys.”

  “We do, under some circumstances,” I said. “Can you give me a little more information about what your goal is with our product?”

  “I want to have sex with my husband,” she said, impatiently, “real sex, or as real as it can get. And he’s a K’srillan male. Our God-given parts just don’t match up.”

  The K’srillan—our “extraterrestrial immigrants”—made radio contact about a decade ago, and arrived on earth a year and three months ago. Juan periodically mutters about how no matter what they say, they might still be planning invasion and how would we even stop them? But they offered us suspended-animation technology in exchange for asylum (from who? was Juan’s immediate question, but we’ve been assured that they were fleeing the death of their sun, not some second wave of dangerous aliens) and a dozen U.S. cities wound up taking settlements. (They’re spread around. There are a bunch of others in other countries all over the world.) So far in the U.S. it was mostly okay, other than some anti-immigrant rioting in Kansas City. I hadn’t actually met any K’srillan—there was a settlement in Minneapolis but I live in St. Paul and don’t cross the river much—but from what I could tell they were all law-abiding and hard working and in general the sort of people you want to have come and settle in your city.

  They also looked kind of like roadkilled giant squid. They don’t have faces, as such. I mean, they have eyes, seven of them, which are on stalks, and they have a mouth, which they use to eat and speak, but they’re not right next to each other the way you would expect in practically every earth species out there, from mammals to reptiles to fish. I mean, okay, we do have squids. But they don’t walk
around the shopping mall. On tentacles.

  K’srillan do talk, but they aren’t physically capable of making the same sounds as us, so they carry a voice synthesizer for communication.

  The thought of sex with, or marriage to, a K’srillan was completely baffling to me.

  Even, dare I say it, gross.

  But we are pro-sex, pro-kink, and anti-shame, so I said, “Okay!” in as cheerful a voice as I could muster, and didn’t add, “Husband? You sure moved fast.” (I might not judge sex lives but I reserve the right to judge major life decisions.) “I don’t actually know that much about K’srillan sexual anatomy. So, um. He has a penis?”

  “Yes, we don’t need a Firmie for him,” the woman said, dismissively. “Your products don’t interface with K’srillan neurology anyway or we’d consider buying him a Firmie and having him use that instead of his own penis. He has a penis, but it’s eighteen inches long, and bifurcated.”

  “Bifurcated?”

  “Branches into two, basically.”

  “You’d need at least four Firmies,” I blurted out. “To make a vagina for eighteen inches of branched penis.”

  “That is a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, for that much you could practically get a custom order.”

  “Oh! You do custom orders?”

  “No. We don’t. But surely someone . . . ”

  “Do you think I haven’t checked?” the woman asked, exasperated. “There has been a lot of discussion of this in the Full Integration community. I am not the only woman looking.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “No!”

  Well, that changed things, maybe. A custom order was one thing. A prototype was potentially a whole different matter.