Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  “You mean you created us as a [capital-accretion enterprise]?” The clear bubble on the front of Renolz’s helmet turned cloudy, as if he were secreting excess poisonous gases. The other two members of his group kept clutching each other.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Toku tapped. “We . . .” She wrote, erased, wrote, erased, wrote again. “We created you, along with countless other sentient creatures. The idea is, you evolve. You develop technology. You fight. You dig up all the metals and radioactive elements out of the ground. As you become more advanced, your population gets bigger, and you fight more. When your civilization gets advanced enough, you fight even harder, until you kill each other off. We don’t even find out you existed until after you’re all dead. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  However they had survived their Closure, it obviously wasn’t by being super-intelligent. Toku mashed her marrows together, trying to think of another way to explain it so Renolz would understand, and then leave them alone. “You dig up the metals, to make things. Right? You find the rare elements. You invent technology. Yes? And then you die, and leave it all behind. For us. We come and take it after you are gone. For profit. Now do you understand?”

  “So you created us to die.”

  “Yes.”

  “For [industrial exploitation]?”

  “That’s right. It’s cheaper than sending machines to do it. Often, the denser metals and rare elements are hard to reach. It would be a major pain.”

  Toku hit “send” and then waited. Was there any chance that, having heard the truth, the “Earths” would get back into their little ship and go back home, so Toku and Jon could leave before their careers were any more ruined? With luck, the “Earths” would finish dying off before anyone found out what had happened.

  “What kind of [night predators] are you?” Renolz asked.

  Toku decided to treat the question as informational. “We are the Falshi. We are from a world 120,000 light years from here. We’re bipeds, like you. You are the first living civilization we’ve encountered in a million years of doing this job. We’ve never killed or hurt anyone. Now will you leave our ship? Please?”

  “This is a lot for us to absorb,” Renolz said from the other chamber. “We . . . Does your species have [God/creator beliefs]? Who do you think created your kind?”

  “We used to believe in gods,” Toku responded. “Not any more. We’re an old enough race that we were able to study the explosion that created the universe. We saw no creator, no sign of any intelligence at the beginning. Just chaos. But we’re not your creators in any meaningful way.”

  Renolz took a long time to reply. “Will you establish trade with us?”

  “Trade?” Toku almost laughed as she read it. She turned to Jon. “Do you see what you’ve done now?”

  Anger made her face smooth out, opened her eyes to the fullest, and for a moment she looked the way she did the day Jon had met her for the first time, in the Tradestation’s flavor marsh, when she’d asked him if he liked long journeys.

  “We trade with each other,” Toku tapped out. “We don’t trade with you.”

  “I think I know why we survived,” Renolz said. “We developed a form of [wealth-accretion ideology] that was as strong as nationalism or religion. Dorfco was strong enough to protect itself. Jondorf is a [far-seeing leader]. We understand trade. We could trade with you, as equals.”

  “We don’t recognize your authority to trade,” Toku tapped. As soon as she hit the “send” area of the comm-pad, she realized that might have been a mistake. Although communicating with these creatures in the first place was already a huge error.

  “So you won’t trade with us, but you’ll sell our artifacts after we die?” Renolz was twitching again.

  “Yes,” Toku said. “But we won’t hurt you. You hurt each other. It’s not our fault. It’s just the way you are. Sentient races destroy themselves, it’s the way of things. Our race was lucky.”

  “So was ours,” Renolz said. “And we will stay lucky.”

  Oh dear. Jon could tell Toku was starting to freak out at the way this was going. “Yes, good,” she tapped back. “Maybe you’ll survive after all. We would be thrilled if that happened. Really. We’ll come back in a few thousand years, and see if you’re still here.”

  “Or maybe,” Renolz said, “we will come and find you.”

  Toku stepped away from the comm-grid. “We are in so much trouble,” she told Jon. “We might as well not ever go back to Tradestation 237 if anyone finds out what we’ve done here.” Was it childish of Jon to be glad she was saying “we” instead of “you"?

  Toku seemed to realize that every exchange was making this conversation more disastrous. She shut off the comm-grid and made a chair near Jon, so she wouldn’t feel tempted to try and talk to the “Earths” any more. Renolz kept sending messages, but she didn’t answer. Jon kept trying to catch Toku’s eyes, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  “Enough of the silent tactics,” Renolz said an hour later. “You made us. You have a responsibility.” Toku gave Jon a poisonous look, and Jon covered his eyes.

  The “Earths” started running out of air, and decided to go back to their ship. But before they left, Renolz approached the glowing spot that was Instigator’s main communications port in that chamber, so his faceplate was huge in their screen. Renolz said, “We are leaving. But you can [have certainty/resolve] that you will be hearing from us again.” Instigator dissolved the membrane so the Earth ship could disengage.

  “You idiot!” Toku shouted as she watched the ship glide down into the planet’s atmosphere. (It was back to “you” instead of “we.”) “See what you did? You’ve given them a reason to keep on surviving!”

  “Oh,” Jon said. “But no. I mean, even knowing we’re out there waiting for them to finish dying . . . it probably won’t change their self-destructive tendencies. They’re still totally hierarchical; you heard how he talked about that Jondorf character.”

  Toku had turned her back to Jon, her cilia stiff as twigs.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Jon said. “I just, you know, I just acted on impulse.” Jon started to babble something else, about exploration and being excited to wake up to a surprise for once, and maybe there was more to life than just tearing through the ruins.

  Toku turned back to face Jon, and her eyes were moist. Her speaking tentacles wound around each other. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I’ve been in charge too long. We’re supposed to take turns, and I . . . I felt like you weren’t a leader. Maybe if you’d been in charge occasionally, you’d be better at deciding stuff. It’s like what you said before, about hierarchy. It taints everything.” She turned and walked back towards her bedchamber.

  “So wait,” Jon said. “What are we going to do? Where are we going to go next?”

  “Back to the Tradestation.” Toku didn’t look back at him. “We’re dissolving our partnership. And hoping to hell the Tradestation isn’t sporting a Dorfco logo when we show up there a few thousand years from now. I’m sorry, Jon.”

  After that, Toku didn’t speak to Jon at all until they were both falling naked into their Interdream envelopes. Jon thought he heard her say that they could maybe try to salvage one or two more dead cultures together before they went back to the Tradestation, just so they didn’t have to go home empty.

  The envelope swallowed Jon like a predatory flower, and the sickly-sweet vapors made him so cold his bones sang. He knew he’d be dreaming about misshapen creatures, dead but still moving, and for a moment he squirmed against the tubes burrowing inside his body. Jon felt lonesome, as if Toku were light-years away instead of in the next room. He was so close to thinking of the perfect thing to say, to make her forgive him. But then he realized that even if he came up with something in his last moment of consciousness, he’d never remember it when he woke. Last-minute amnesia was part of the deal.

  Copyright © 2010 Charlie Jane Anders

  A History
of the Internet, by Charlie Anders

  It started with a girl named Tammy who said she knew where Xaxa and I could score some acid. Tammy had a skateboard that she carried everywhere, but it took us three hours to realize Tammy didn’t know how to skateboard at all, she just identified as a skatepunk. She had the hair and the arm-warmers, and the septum piercing with a chain that she said went all the way down and connected to her clit ring. Anyway, Tammy said she knew a girl who knew a girl, who knew a whole bunch of girls who had a lab. Tammy said it was an Internet thing, so Xaxa and I were cracking jokes about alt.sex.fetish.tentacle.porn.on.acid andwww.drugzdrugzdrugz.com. Xaxa and I followed Tammy around for five hours, including watching her shoplift bath bombs at the bath and beauty store, and finally she led us to the webd00ds 1.0 conference, which was in a big warehouse with a skylight. (Do you know the “warehouse with a skylight” song? Neither do I.)

  One guy had a flame thrower and another guy was using it to light a humongous spliff with the face of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, and there were naked girls doing cartwheels. Which, whatever, Burning Man. But then a guy jumped up in our faces and started telling us about his website,www.ieatyourafterbirth.com, which turned out to be a band he wanted to start but it was easier to start a website than a band, unless you had a drum machine or unless there were DDOS attacks. And everybody else had a site too, like the girl who posted pictures of naked British men smiling, cropped so you could only see their teeth and their penises and it was called britishteethandpenises.org, because it was nonprofit. So Xaxa and I started saying “Hey yeah, we have a website too.” We kept making up fake sites, and we changed the URL around every time we told someone: nasalsex.net or nononotthehair.edu or bucketofthumbs.com and by the time we found out there wasn’t any acid, just blinking lights and NLP, some guy had bought us all those URLs in exchange for a teledildonic lapdance. (Never do those, they suck.)

  We ended up with a network of sites, and five years later we were huffing provigil to keep generating content, and the nasal sex fetishists were mad at us because our site wasn’t a one-stop shop any more. We had to blackmail people sexually to write articles for our sites, which is harder work than you would think — blackmail is not a one-time thing, blackmail is a dark flower that requires tending — and then everybody said it was all about blogs, so we had to blackmail people sexually to keep upgrading our wordpress. It got fancier and fancier, all the university hair-pullers wanted to socially network and the thumb-bucketers wanted to twerp us. And finally we were in a hottub with ICANN and people were talking about how the next thing was the internet of bad follow-thru, which was where packet loss was built into the concept. And the KING OF ICANN said that as long as none of us got out of this hottub, we would never get any older. And so we stayed and a thousand years passed, and we had to blackmail people sexually to bring us food and orangina martinis, and finally we got out of the hottub in the year 3007 because the internet was ending, and that meant ICANN’s special eternal-youth protection was wearing off and plus we were getting all pruney. The last day of the internet, everybody celebrated by covering their faces but going around naked from the waist down. We wanted to know why they were so happy the internet was dying, and they said it was because the internet had gotten cyber-rabies in 2937 and started stealing everybody’s identity, so that the internet was everybody, and nobody had any identity any more. And now they could finally be people again, but that meant no more nasalsex.net. Which felt like a huge achievement by this time, a thousand years of nasalsex, now deleted forever, but at least we finally scored some acid.

  SARAH PINSKER

  I'm from all over the place, but I call Baltimore my home. It doesn't seem to mind.

  I've been to forty-eight states, played music in about twenty, and lived in five and Canada.

  I've been writing stories since we got our first computer when I was six or seven. I think it may have been the first computer in Texas. The internet didn't exist yet, so life was much less distracting. Six year old me got a lot of writing done.

  I started my first band when I was thirteen, which, not coincidentally, is when my cousin Phyllis gave me my first guitar. The band was called Hellbound Train, and had one song, called Hellbound Train. We won't speak of that again.

  My first album, Charmed, was produced by SONiA of disappear fear and released on disappear records in 2000. I followed that up with Wingspan in 2003. My rock band, the Stalking Horses, put out an album called This is Your Signal in 2007, on a lovely indie label called The Beechfields. I've toured with and without the band from Seattle to Boston, and have the van repair bills to prove it. I used to have the most awesome van ever, with a bed and curtains and a haunted radio and a dashboard lizard. Somebody stole it, and returned it without the lizard or a working front axle. I miss my van.

  I've been working hard on a new album, which should actually be out very soon. I've also been writing a ton of stories, many of which are in various stages of publication.

  In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind, by Sarah Pinsker

  Nebula Nomination for Best Novelette 2013

  Part 1

  "Don't leave."

  The first time he said it, it sounded like a command. The tone was so unlike George, Millie nearly dropped her hairbrush.

  They were in their bedroom, in their home of sixty-six years. Outside the French doors, fresh snow settled on top of old snow. The lights in George's sprawling treehouse made it stand out against the otherwise unbroken white. George sat in the chair at the telephone desk. He was in the middle of changing his socks, one leg crossed over the other, when he dropped the new sock to the floor and coughed once. Millie glanced in the mirror on her vanity, caught him staring at her.

  "Don't leave," he said again.

  She turned around to face him.

  The third time it arrived as a question, a note of confusion lurking in the space between his words. "Don't leave, please?"

  He seemed to struggle with the next sentence, his last. "I'm sorry."

  "What are you talking about, old man?" she asked, but he was already someplace else. He opened his mouth as if to say more, but no words came out.

  She had always been calm in the family's minor medical crises, but this time the words this is it blazed across her brain and crowded everything else out. She took deep breaths and tried to remember what she should do. She crossed to his chair, put her hand on his chest, felt the rise and fall. That was good. She didn't think she could get him to the floor, much less perform chest compressions. She stooped to put the clean sock on his bare foot, then reached across him to pick up the phone and dial for an ambulance. Should those actions have been the other way around? Possibly. This is it.

  "I'll be right back," she told him before leaving the room to unlock the front door. He was still in the same place when she returned, collapsed slightly to the right in the chair. His left eye looked panicked, his right eye oddly calm. She dragged the chair from her vanity over and sat down facing him. Behind him the snow continued to fall.

  "I wonder if this will be the storm that proves too heavy for that poor old sycamore," she said, taking her husband's hand in hers and looking out at the treehouse. "I think this is going to be a big one."

  ***

  It had snowed the day they met. Chicago, Marshall Field's, December 1944. He had held the door for her as they both exited onto State Street.

  "Ladies first," said the young man in the Army overcoat, gesturing with the fat notebook in his free hand. He was shorter than her by a few inches, and she was not terribly tall; if he hadn't been wearing the uniform she would have mistaken him for a boy.

  "Thank you," she said, giving him a smile over her shoulder. She didn't see the patch of ice beyond the vestibule. Her left foot slipped out from under her, then her right. He caught her before she landed, losing his own footing in the process. The pages of his notebook fluttered to the ground around them as he broke her fall with his body. They both scrambled to their feet, red-faced and breathless.


  "Thank you again," she said.

  He brushed snow off his backside and bent to grab several loose pieces of paper from the pavement. She picked at one that had plastered itself to her leg.

  He pointed at it. "It likes you. You should probably keep it."

  She peeled the page from her nylon and examined it. Even as the ink blurred and ran she could tell it had been a skillful sketch of the grand staircase and the Tiffany dome at the library. The soaked paper tore in two in her hands.

  "It's ruined!"

  "It's okay, I have more." He held out the others. She saw the Field Museum, the Buckingham Fountain, the building they had just left, all bleeding away.

  She put her hand to her mouth. "Your drawings are ruined, and you've torn your coat, too."

  He shrugged, touching the ragged edges at his elbow. "Don't worry about it. These were just for fun. Practice. I'm an architect. George Gordon. You don't have to memorize it. Everybody'll know it someday."

  "Millicent Berg. Nice to meet you. And I'm sorry about your drawings, even if they were only for fun. Can I make it up to you?"

  He scratched his head in a pantomime of contemplation. "I'd ask you to have lunch with me, but I've already eaten. You might let me draw another for you over coffee, I suppose."

  Millie glanced up at the clock jutting out from the building. She shook her head. "I'm afraid I'm already late to meet a friend."

  "Another time?" he persisted, rubbing his elbow in an obvious fashion. In another man she might have found it rude, but there was something about him that she liked. Too bad.

  "Sorry. I'm only visiting Chicago until Tuesday. I go to college in Baltimore," she said.