365 tomorrows

The glow of a television never graced two happier faces before that summer day. Aaron was blonde and wide-eyed while next to him, in an almost mirrored image save for the black hair, sat his friend Hamel. Both children were staring at the images of a mad scientist and kid from the 1980′s flying around in a steel contraption through time. One might incorrectly assume there was a science fiction special on. Try the history channel.

With a frustrated look, Hamel turned to his friend and curiously inquired, “I say, do you ever wonder if people have already changed history without us knowing? If, forty years ago, some madman had come and swiped our parents, neither of us would be around. So forty years ago, we could stop existing.”

Aaron raised a brow. “That might be the dumbest idea I have ever heard. People can’t travel in time. If they did, then there would be nuclear wastelands everywhere and bad people would prosper.”

Despite the comment, Hamel just shrugged and turned back to the screen to watch the time-travel shenanigans continue. Both sat in silence until a commercial.

“What if good people had control of the time machine?”

The blonde boy just sighed, “You can’t tell if people are good or bad, dummy. Bad people would eventually get their hands on it anyways.”

Hamel lifted his head up high, his expression unchanged. “No. I believe in a good nation. One with values and a belief that people can be good.”

“Not all people are good. Some people have to do bad things to get to the good.”

Both children shut up for a moment after the movie came back on. The one-liners, the classics shot from the speakers. A voice from the kitchen rang out into the living room interrupting the two and their cinema reverie.

“Aaron Francis Hitler, you have been watching television all day. Get your rear in here and help your father clean the dishes.”

The poor embarrassed youth rolled his eyes and started to get up off the floor, followed by Hamel’s giggles. “Your middle name is funny,” the tall child next to Aaron teased.

Sticking out his tongue, the blonde boy turned to go towards the kitchen, “At least my last name isn’t the same as a car!”

Pouty-faced, the dark-haired boy yelled after Aaron, “At least Lincoln is an American name!”

“Iljek, it’s time for another piece.”

The Interplanetary Artist Laureate, holder of the Sigil of Creativity, founder of the Union of Visionary Crafters, chair of the Board of Humanities at Reykjavik University of the Arts, leaned back in his lounge chair and put his porn on mute, giving his assistant a long-suffering sigh. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Elarii bit her lip and tried to hold Iljek’s upside-down gaze without letting stress get the better of her. Breathe. Breathe. That was what her therapist had told her. Deep, calming breaths. Elarii took a quick sniff of oxygen from the decorative tube affixed to her robes at the shoulder. Calming breaths. “No, Iljek, I’m not. It’s been almost four months since you produced any new art.”

Iljek snorted and glanced back at the holo-dish projecting his entertainment. “So the creative spirit hasn’t hit me yet. Tell the papers I’m sequestered in meditation or whatever.”

“That’s what we told them last month,” Elarii told Iljek, reaching down to surreptitiously turn off the alarm on her blood pressure meter. “Last time it was three months. We can’t just keep stringing them along without anything to show for it. You need product.”

Iljek sighed and sat up in his chair, scratching his head with one hand and his balls with the other. Elarii had been on him for several weeks about this, but the tone in her voice told him she was getting desperate, and that meant it really was time for him to earn his keep. “All right. Bring me a recorder.”

Relief thrumming through her body, Elarii came around to the front of the chair and set down the silver cube she’d had prepared for the last two months. Hesitant to do anything that might break the fitful spell of productivity, she didn’t speak, just turned on the device and backed away. Iljek held out his hand and she pressed a baton into it, the sophisticated tool that would tell the three-dimensional recorder what to paint in the air in response to Iljek’s creative vision.

Standing slowly, Iljek faced the recorder. He was silent for several moments, and the hush over the room was only accented by the soundless ecstasy of the porn star writhing doggie-style in front of the dish. Elarii stayed absolutely still. She wasn’t worried about disturbing Iljek’s ‘creative process,’ but if he got distracted, there might never be anything to show for this brief moment of responsibility.

Suddenly, Iljek’s hand shot out, and a splash of colour appeared in the air in response to the movement and angle of the baton. A quick twist and the shape took on a metallic sheen. With gyrations almost as complicated and random as the image itself, Iljek soon produced a visual cacophony that closely resembled the regurgitated spleen of a Geritenal llama. The artist grinned and stuck the baton into an empty beer can, chucking the contraption through the recording area with a final flourish, creating a puce-gold splotch through the center of the image. “There,” he said triumphantly, putting his hands on his hips and then flopping back into his chair. “How d’ya like that, huh?”

Elarii smiled with pure relief. “It’s perfect, Iljek. True creative vision.” She moved forward and carefully disentangled the baton, turning it off and setting the recorder to freeze.

Iljek grinned like a madman and resettled his underwear over his skinny artist’s stomach. “Now where’s the remote…? Ah, thanks.” He took the device as Elarii offered it and hit the dish back on, settling in with a happy sigh.

Elarii shook her head and carried the recorder away, leaving Iljek to his holo-women and ‘creative juices.’ She locked herself in her office, a room used only once every few months–if she was lucky–and placed the recorder on her desk. When she pressed the button, Iljek’s creation sprang to life, in all its three-dimensional glory. Elarii frowned at it for a few moments, deeply considering the swirls and splotches arrayed chaotically across the canvas of air. Everything was still.

At last, her eyes brightened, and Elarii picked up a stylus and turned on her computer monitor. Across the top of her screen, she scrawled Inverted Innocence–the suffering of the Ternean meteor disaster. Sinking back in her desk chair, Elarii smirked. This one would be easy; the art institutions of the galaxy would have her heart-wrenching interpretation of Iljek’s scribbles within the next forty-eight hours. She’d have to clear her schedule to accommodate the coming lecture circuit.

Stylus in hand, Elarii bent over her tablet, scribbling away. Now the real art could begin.

Herbert Mumble was proud of his house. He had every right to be: he’d spent nearly a decade compiling it. Most of his friends had bought discount single-structure mansions in the Midwest and used a portal to get to work, but Herbert wasn’t the type to buy pre-fab. Herbert was an artist.

It started as a studio in Key West, which was expanded to a one-bedroom when he purchased another studio in Calcutta. While his coworkers were deciding on whether they wanted one or two stories, Herbert Mumble was choosing continents. Now, nearly completed, his house spanned twelve countries and existed in every hemisphere, providing views that included the Eiffel Tower, the shores of Thailand, and the vast expanses of the still-rural Australian Outback. Herbert took pleasure in hosting business dinners in Beijing, or entertaining dates on his balcony in Madrid.

All of the research had been done on his own time: Herbert didn’t hire an agent. He learned the patterns of the market and bought when the time was right, and because of his patience, the house was worth nearly twice what he paid for it. Still, it hadn’t come cheaply.

“It’s beautiful,” a friend said when she came over for dinner. She’d been standing at the window of the living room, looking out over Brazilian beach. “But why didn’t you just install viewscreens?”

Herbert leaned past her and grabbed the edge of the window, pulling up. A gust of hot air pushed through the crack, carrying with it the crisp, salty smell of the sea. “Feel that?” he asked with a smile. “You can’t buy weather like that. Somewhere, it’s always sunny and it’s always summer. The trick is to find that place and build a house.”

Look at you. Take a good look at yourselves. Five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. You’re not victims, you’re not rookies. You’re human and each and every last bloody one of you is going to let the enemy know that.

You hear them outside the hull? Hear them knocking on our doorstep? You saw the red sirens going off in the corridors on your way down here? You can see their fighters gliding past on the scanners, blasting some other cadet off the roster. Some of you might think they are winning. Some of you might have heard that this is a line of defense; that we are expendable in the defense of our home planet.

Well that’s bureaucratic bullshit. I am here to tell you that no matter what the bloody hell you have heard from the suits and the stars, you are not going out there today to defend. No, cadets, I want you to suit up and go win this fucking war.

For too long we have been plagued by their kind. So many men and women have died in service of United Earth that we can barely bury our dead on their home soil. Command wants me to tell you to defend and to stand ground in honor of our species until God takes you all.

A man once said, “War is not about who survives the longest. It is about how many of the enemy you kill.” We did not go to war to defend, cadets. No, we came here in this carrier to show those slimy bastards that we are fire. We are the fire!

I’ve seen that fear in your eyes before. It’s a gift. That’s right, you have a gift in that fear of yours, soldiers; a gift that you must give to the enemy. Take it with you, hold it tight and don’t you dare let it get away. Give it back to them and make them feel what we have felt over the past decade.

Do not doubt and do not waver. Do not wait for mercy that will not come and in turn do not give that which will not be returned to you. Cadets, suit up.

And remember… for honor, for Earth, and for man!

For a successful space pirate, Valentine Arvossio did not seem particularly intimidating at first glance. His eyes, though smug, were a rather peculiar shade of grey that in another context might have been referred to as “soothing.” It was the sort of grey that one used for office complexes and prison lavatories to keep the inmates subdued. His wiry frame was somewhat lacking in the “mighty thews” department, and his crew had mentioned to him on at least three nonconsecutive occasions that the long, flowing red hair was less “pirate” and more “dilettante.” Valentine ignored these complaints.

On the rare occasions when he could be persuaded to comment on his intimidation factor, Valentine insisted that anyone who was named after a type of gun could be nothing less than fearsome. If pressed, he might be magnanimous enough to tell the story of his conception, which occurred shortly after his mother shot his father with a Valentine .45 SXG handgun–precisely the same gun that Valentine kept strapped to his hip waking and sleeping. He claimed that he planned to find true love in the same way his mother had. It was a fantastic story, and all came away from the telling convinced of this fact, if not of the tale’s veracity.

Valentine had most recently related it to his latest mark, a mild-mannered engineer who owned a ship that Valentine would dearly love to get his hands on. The ship itself wasn’t much—without an engineer like Claude on board to give her tender, loving care, the thing wouldn’t make it through hyperspace, let alone a battle—but on board was something Valentine coveted. Bounty on empathic species was high, and the pirate had no doubt that such a creature would sell for even higher on the black market. His informants had managed to locate one of them on board Claude’s ship, and Valentine was not about to let a jewel like that get away. The fact that Claude also happened to be the most delectable morsel that Valentine had set eyes on in some time was naturally beside the point.

Unfortunately, at their last meeting, Claude had been far too miserable to fully appreciate the intimidation Valentine intended to work upon him. The morose engineer had been hunched over Retichken vodka in a bar that Valentine happened to frequent, and once he’d gotten over his shock, the pirate had swooped in—to no avail. In his semi-drunken state, Claude had found the story “romantic” and “heartwarming” and had thanked Valentine with a drunken pat on the back that the latter had been too stunned to enjoy. As he reclined in the central chair on his own ship’s bridge, the pirate’s full lips curled into a frown that came off as more of a pout. He was still cursing himself for letting Claude get away that night, in every sense of the word. At the very least, it had been highly unprofessional.

For the three days since his unexpected contact with the engineer, Valentine’s crew had been scouring space for the plucky little ship to no avail. His bridge officers had made themselves scarce, knowing that it was best to stay out of the captain’s way when his will had been thwarted. For all Claude’s drunken amiability, he was a top-notch engineer, and had somehow managed to elude even Valentine’s sophisticated tracking methods. After punching up a series of patiently blank scan screens, Valentine heaved a sigh and pushed his display away. At this rate, he wouldn’t find Claude again until the man once again decided he was in need of a drink. His first officer had sarcastically suggested to the pirate captain that next time he encountered Claude, he should use his ‘manly wiles’ on the quarry. Valentine had dismissed her in annoyance. “Next time,” he muttered to himself, “I’ll just drug the booze.”

Greetings Everyone! J.R. Blackwell, here, reporting from 365 Tomorrows Central. I am writing to tell you that Jared Axelrod and I have been invited to attend Balticon 40, which takes place this weekend.

The great folks at Balticon have asked us to talk about Podcasting, specifically, about our podcasts, Voices of Tomorrow , the official 365 Tomorrows Podcast where you can listen to audio versions of some of the stories from the site, and The Voice of Free Planetx .

It’s really an honor to be invited to Balticon 40, especially with the fantastic guests they have on the program this year. If you’re interested in attending, you should check out their website at: http://www.balticon.org/

Tonight we are driving down to Baltimore with free swag which we will be giving out to anybody who is brave enough to introduce themselves to us.

I hope to see you there!

K’dackis was slivercaster, scout and herder of wildfeeds, piping when needed, but always in pursuit of the genuine driveway effect. She was constantly sisbertized by the right or the wrong people, surfing the waves of condemnation and approval as she launched onto her next coffee-spitter. She was queen of the third screen. Grey as I was, by comparison I might as well have been egocasting. K’dackis swallowed muffin-chokers whole, and spit ‘em back out at lightning speed; because of this, she was the darling of screenagers everywhere.

I have been told my obsession with K’dackis is nothing but anus-envy, that any fool could create irritainment with a notebook dump on a feed and garnish it with a middle finger. This was true to some extent, but I’m no beat-sweetener with his head up his ass. K’dackis’s appeal went beyond mere hathos and anger. She was a half-step away from a placeshift, and when that happened all of us in the Outerrnet would feel very, very insecure about our place in our chosen professions.

Obviously, a fleshmeet was required, and not just podhacking her playlist, either. I had to interview her. Took some cajoling; my editor is a NIMBY when it comes alt-media, partly due to the pessimal state of modern info, partly due to how close he is to sundowning. But the man’s watch contains feedlets and bytebits, same as mine, so I had some elbowroom.

“I’ll authorize this,” he said. “But you better put some pants on the copy before it reaches my desk. I ain’t paying you to take a duvet day.”

Strangely enough, K’dackis consented to an interview. She had read my grey, and gave me a webrarian’s approval of a go ahead. I suppose I should have expected something unusual out of her, but doing the interview in a dumpster came as a headsmack.

“You gotta be a mongo hunter is this world, get your hands dirty, get in the scene.” K’dackis looked strangely cheery amongst the garbage. Her clothes carried no badge item, just ergomorphic shirt and pants. “What we throw away says the most about us, dig? What’s in your trash this morning?”

I found myself lost; she might as well been speaking Miévilleese.

“Listen, you didn’t come here to quiz me on my hairdo. You’re no thumbsucker, your grey speaks for that. But you’re in a bathwater situation. Think about the language we use. What’s the first thing we toss aside? Curse words, old relics of medieval speak. But what’s the primary we utter when we glom a muffin -choker? It’s all a goddamn circle, Cochise. When was the last time you let out a good old curse for the scream of it?!?’”

I hemmed and hawed, but I didn’t have an answer. The interview, such as it was, went this way; K’dackis was playing at being a knowledge angel, sure, but it was fascinating, abrasive and exactly what was wrong with the state of grey.

Naturally, my editor wouldn’t print a word a word of it..

“Primary, this contains language, which we do not print. Our grey is clear of such things and we are proud of that,” he espoused. “Secondly, what is the point of this?”

“We’re lost in the words. It’s mindblindness, pure and simple. We’re not even communicating anymore, we’re just speaking.”

“Manure. There’s a medieval word for you and your bloghopper. Shit. Excrement. Crap, detritus, garbage, junk, offal, refuse, remains, rubbish, trash, waste. We are in the business of words, mister. YOU are in the business of words.”

“I thought I was in the business of news.”

“Keep this up, and you won’t be. Do I make myself clear? Or am I using too many words?”

K’dackis was slivercaster, which means she played to, at best, a small audience. She could play to the screenagers, and have her outrage displayed on their phones and watches, gathering evidence from feeds and stray bytes. But she and her ideas weren’t news, even if they were to us in the news business.

I found myself going through my grey, pieces that had once won awards, had garnered acclaim. I was told that my grey spoke for me. I couldn’t slivercast, couldn’t ride the wildfeeds, and I wasn’t going to be a third screen darling anytime soon.

But I did remember what makes me curse.

All through college, the three of us were best friends. When we graduated in ’18, Bob and I joined the Galactic Defense Force and got shipped off to the Sirius Sector, but Dmitri’s calling was Postdoctoral research, studying Xenobiology in the Vega system. We tried to keep in touch, but you know how those things work. It’s bad enough to write letters when you aren’t in the Force, and all that moving around really kills the motivation.

Anyways, I think it was Bob’s idea to drop in on Dmitri during our extended leave. Old time’s sake and all, he said, and I wasn’t going to argue. It would be nice to see the guy, so we rented a shuttle and picked up a couple cases of Sirian slurry and warped over to the coordinates we had from his last letter.

As usual, Dmitri was extremely enthusiastic. Unfortunately, it wasn’t because of our visit. Apparently, the Bugus whogivesacrapus (I don’t remember the actual name, but I think I’m pretty close) was just hours away from the beginning of its mating cycle. This bug only mates one night in the 377-day year (poor bastards), and tonight was the night (lucky bastards). Dmitri had to leave immediately, but he told us to make ourselves at home, and he said he’d be back in time for supper the next day. After a quick hug and another apology, he disappeared into the woods with his sample pack.

For Dmitri, “home” was a five-room hut in the middle of a dense forest. It was primitive but livable, like something out of an old documentary. We cracked open the slurry and started a campfire in a pit out back, but when we reached the end of the first case, we realized we were pretty hungry. Of course, we hadn’t brought anything to eat, and when we searched Steve’s home we couldn’t figure out what was food and what was research.

We weren’t going to let that stop us. We were soldiers. Armed men trained in the art of survival. Despite the case of slurry, it only took us a couple minutes of tromping through the forest before we bagged a large, flightless bird with our phasers. One thing was certain: if people lived on this planet, they’d never go hungry. The thing must have weighed fifty kilos. While Bob prepared the “bird,” I constructed a spit and support over the fire. Three hours later, we were deep into our second case of slurry and feasting on roasted alien meat.

You know, during my years in the force, I’ve learned that there is one sure constant in the universe: extraterrestrial meat always tastes like chicken. There’s a scale of chicken, too. Good chicken, bad chicken. This was most definitely the former. In fact, it was so good that Bob and I tossed around the idea of bringing a couple back for the other guys in the Force. It took a few hours and a few more rounds of slurry, but eventually, we smothered the fire and called it a well-fed, well-drank night.

The next morning, we carved up the excess meat and hauled the bird carcass deep into the woods for the scavengers (Another constant: all life bearing planets have scavengers.) True to his word, Dmitri returned at about 1600 hours, and the reunion got into full swing. Bob and I shared our tales of adventure and interstellar conquests (complete with body measurements and, if we remembered them, names) while we sat by the campfire, eating leftovers and drinking the last of the slurry. Later, Dmitri chimed in with his boring stories of the indigenous flora and fauna of Vega-4. Scientists lead such wasted lives. We let him ramble for a few minutes, maybe an hour. It’s tough to tell when you’re half-asleep, but when he started telling us about his paper on the development of Vegan Civilization, we stopped him right there. “Whoa, hold on. Civilization?” Bob said. “Are you telling us this planet has intelligent life?”

“Absolutely,” replied Dmitri. “Although the Vegans are less technologically advanced than us, they are probably more advanced, socially. In fact, I’m living with a Vegan. This is the home of Meleagris Prime. He’s an “elder” here. I’ve been studying under him for the last three years. He’s a fascinating individual. Man, can that guy tell a funny story.” He held out his hand, palm down, approximately one meter above the ground. “He’s only about this tall. I can’t believe you haven’t met him yet. He’s usually home. Let me see if I can find him.” Dmitri jumped up and headed toward the hut. “You guys will love him. But be prepared, he’s not humanoid. He looks like a really fat turkey.”

There is nothing to burn. Modern life is plasticine, cheap and mutable and easily manufactured. Wooden furniture is the stuff of history textbooks and Better Homes and Gardens pinups, the pictures affixed to smooth synthetic walls with reused sticky-tack. Pinup is a misnomer; pins have no purchase in plastic.

The poor live in dingy cubes of space stacked on top of each other like ice cube trays, twelve stories high even in the slums. Oil is a thing of the past, hoarded by the elite and unheard of by the ordinary. Coal is a fiction in the lower city, a dream that children are chided for to protect them from the inevitable disappointment. There is nothing to burn. Even the telephone poles are polyurethane. Snow is praised as an insulator in the country, building up over low, squat houses and keeping their residents alive for as long as they’ve stockpiled food, but here in the city there is no such thing as snow. The heat of humanity melts it before it ever hits the ground.

Winter is the new population control, and the means of survival serve a double purpose. There is nothing to burn, so they burn their own, the stiff frozen twists of the unfortunate packed into thermoset stoves and lit with the dried dead fur of a squirrel or mouse. The vinyl clothing is carefully cut away before lighting the inferno, melted down by the heat of its previous owner and reused for the survivors. Bodies never rot. They are too valuable to be left so long.

Thick black smoke spews from the dingy acrylic chimneys, blanketing the slums in a charnel haze. Poor workers plod through the streets with heads down, trying not to breathe in their brethren. There is nothing to burn. They no longer notice the smell.

No one saw the meteor coming. It was faster than any meteor yet recorded. It didn’t so much as break the speed of light as it did beat its face in, set it on fire and sleep with its girlfriend. No one saw it coming when it smashed into what once was the Pacific Ocean, and a century later, not a single person survived.

They came from the corners of the globe, dressed to kill in their own odd ways. Mankind forgot ancient myths and made up their own legends. Fathers passed it onto sons and mothers would nurse their daughters on what it was to be what they were. It was a chance to start over for the parents after the meteor crashed down, but no one could have guessed it would end like this.

If you could call America a desert at that point, then it was safe to say you’d lost the idea of what humidity really meant. From the east came the heavy shoulder pads, the pronounced foreheads counting every ridge as a badge of honor despite their origin as radiation-induced bone growths. The tribe gathered shrapnel from wreckages and sharpened the pieces into their own homebrewed mix of jagged death.

These deformed figures all stood tall and bulky and they had no question as to why they were here today. Each one carried a weapon, and each one knew how to use it.

The other tribe came from the west. These shadowy figures began as shadows on the horizon, looking far healthier than the mutated easterners. Their humans faces were still intact and they dressed in nothing but free-flowing cloth that became a robe wrapped snugly around their figures. Each of these men and women also had a weapon of destruction latched neatly onto their belts. Though at first glance these weapons seemed like nothing but bludgeoning tools, there was a distinctly scientific look to them that held more back than it presented. Each of these “weapons” had at least one button on it looking as if they had been crafted from gutted scientific laboratories in the west. Silicon Valley might have been to blame.

Within sight of each other, they stood in a single row facing their opponents for control over the aftermath of the apocalypse. This was no longer America to them. For each it held a different, unpronounceable name with no Latin origin to be found.

With deformed sharp teeth and darkened, rigid skin, the easterners raised their oddly shaped metal weapons in unison and cried out, “Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam!”

Robed and without emotion, without fear, the westerners slowly removed the small metal cylinders from their belts. The man in the center stared at the angry mob before him and spoke in a soft, elegant tone: “There must be balance.” Behind him, the other members of the tribe pressed the buttons on their devices and thin rods of light burst from the cylinders, ready and waiting to be used.

The words had been said and on this day the ultimate showdown began.

It was a week before opening night and Bub was still flubbing his lines.

“I don’t understand,” said Bub, “Why can’t I have a feed? Why do we have to memorize our lines?”

“You have to memorize your lines,” said Daven, clenching his hands into fists “because that is the way actors in the old days did things.

“But no one will know!” complained Bub. “No one will know that I don’t have a feed inside my head! I could download the entire script and have it running behind my eyes. I’ve done it that way for every other performance I’ve ever been in. I did that at Cambridge!”

“Well, this is not Cambridge.” said Daven.

Bub threw up his hands dramatically. “Davan, I understand what you are going for here. I mean, the cloth costumes, that makes sense, and the painted sets look very rustic, very historical. I get the feel you want, but I don’t understand why it matters what is going on in my head!”

Daven climbed up onto the stage. “It matters because I’ll know Bub, and more importantly, you will know. You will know that this performance isn’t authentic to the old twentieth century style of acting. The only way it can be authentic is if you struggle just like they struggled, learn just like they learned. Now, get over your cheap self and take it from the top.”

Bub sighed. Daven was a method man, and you could never argue with one of them. “Now is the winter of our discontent” he said. “Made glorious summer by this sun of York. . .”

Innocence may be a commodity, but it’s easily emulatable. I get it in thin aluminum cans from the drugstore downtown, the kind that energy drinks come in. They’re kept behind the counter; innocence isn’t a controlled substance, but like condoms and suppositories, it’s kept out of reach to deter the easily embarrassed. Our society needs a moral compass, after all.

Me, I take pride in asking for a can. I keep my eyes languid and my tone casual, and I watch with a slightly widening smirk as the clerk’s smile fades to uncomfortability. I make no effort to hide it from the people in line. They’re all silent, watching me with individually tailored levels of outrage or disgust.

The clerk rings me up with thin lips, thanking me tonelessly for the purchase and handing me my plastic bag. As I leave, he wonders what kind of person would need to purchase innocence. He imagines what I’m trying to hide. He worries that this town isn’t safe with me in it. He wonders if I’m using it on a date with his daughter tonight.

“I’m leaving.” Viktor said as he pulled the duffel back over his shoulder and made for the door. He’d had enough of the quarantine, and he had a hankering for Luna stew that needed some satiation.

“You can’t do that, Vik! They’ve got every spaceport in the continent under lockdown. Something big is going on, and I need you here!” Cynthia reached out to tug Viktor’s arm, which only earned her a blue-eyed glare from her partner.

He grumbled and turned around. “You think I don’t know about the population issue? They want to keep people here because it’ll mean more consumers on Earth.”

“It’s not that” she sighed and glanced up to him, pleading with her eyes, “People are dying and no one is being born. They’re blaming it on people leaving but they won’t tell us why. Haven’t you noticed the lack of children, Vik? Haven’t you seen that they are closing the borders and keeping us in because they physically… spiritually need us?”

Viktor stared at her for a good long while before he dropped the bag and clasped his hands over both her shoulders, “Cynthia… what you’re talking about is madness. You need some sleep. It’ll be good for the baby.” His hand dropped down to gently rub against her stomach.

Her head lowered she turned her gaze to the side because she could not look at him, “I’m not pregnant, Vik.”

“What… what did you just say? Did you lie to me!? How the fuck could you-” Rage began to rise in his eyes.

“Viktor, wait! I didn’t lie. I was pregnant and then… it was gone.” She looked up to him, her eyes slick with tears.

The man’s expression soon turned to sorrow as he let go of her shoulders. Walking over to the couch, he slumped into it and stared out over the blue skies and the cityscape they had always dreamed of seeing from their home window.

“When did you miscarry?” he asked.

“I…I didn’t. When I went in for the second trimester ultrasound, there was nothing there. The doctor said it was like I had never been pregnant at all.”

Shutting his eyes, he dreamed of never dying of always being there for Cynthia. He hoped that she would forgive him and yet he ignored her very presence. Finally he spoke up just as he re-opened his eyes, “I’m… sorry. Maybe you’re right about the environment here. Mars and the orbital stations are showing increased birth rates. It has to be a government thing… we’ll fix it honey. We’ll fix it.”

Viktor turned his eyes away, letting the impossibility weigh down the air like a lie. Both knew the futility of the theories but, no one knew the truth.

Somewhere on Mars, a woman sat in a pristine doctor’s office, staring at her positive results and wondering how it was possible.

It’s my first time at the Persomod. Tann, who’s been my best friend since my family moved to Set, took me as a surprise gift for my birthday. We planned it carefully; Mom and Dad are traditionalists, static to the core. Let their only daughter get a personality graft? No, thank you.

I sliced through the snooper circuits on the security system and snuck my way out into the communal garden across the street. Tann was waiting for me, smiling as she perched on her aquamarine bike, the color clashing horribly with the deep red of Setian skin. “Ready for the new you?” she asked with that mischievous smile I had quickly come to associate with my friend.

“Absolutely.”

Personality additives developed about a century ago, but it wasn’t until the last twenty years or so that the technology really became safe. Back then, unbuffered transplants got slapped directly into the mind, an instant fuse. Sometimes it worked. But other times, people just shut down. Or they went crazy. You know, messy stuff.

Inside the pristinely white store, I wander around aimlessly, trying not to feel lost as I study the clear plastic display units that each heralded the qualities of the personalities within. I can’t quite control my excitement—a small smile keeps sneaking onto my face as I browse, almost like being in a toy store as a child.

Today, templates are used for personality grafts. People choose their dummy personality, an artificial construct specifically designed for the grafting process. The dummies are safe to use—they have no memories so no one goes crazy. It’s a lot better.

“This one.” Tann stated definitively, her finger lingering on a display. She smiled at me. “It’s perfect for you.”

“Are you sure?”

The girl’s smile didn’t waver. “This one’s good. Trust me.”

I do trust Tann. She’s an expert on grafts and had her first when she was twelve. Since then, she’s had a lot more, maybe six or seven, I’m not quite sure. I asked her once what she was like before but Tann just smiled and shook her head. It didn’t matter, she said.

Everyone says you’re a lot happier with the grafts. You can be what you want. Who you want. And it’s still you, only better. Tann thinks I’m too shy, that I don’t make enough friends. She says this will help. I agree; I wouldn’t mind being better.

Tann handles the credits while the technician leads me into the grafting chamber. I sit in the soft white chair, my hands pressed flatly against my thighs. I’m not scared. Just nervous. The technician nods to me and leaves the room. I wait.

There’s a vibration in my head. It’s faint and annoying, like a small hover engine. It grows louder and louder. Is this what’s supposed to happen? My hands clench tightly. I’m having trouble thinking.

A bright light flashes.

When I wake up, Tann is standing in front of me. “Well?” she asks softly, her face leaning directly into my field of view. “How do you feel?”

I smile back without hesitation. I know that something in my smile echoes something in Tann’s. I’m different now. I know it. “Better.”

“Who can blame them for what they do?” Sergeant Dobbs sipped his coffee as he leaned back in the patrol car, musing to Lieutenant Carson. Through the windshield, the morning throngs of people left their homes and crowded the streets on their way to work and life as they knew it.

“I can blame them, Roger. It’s the same thing as blaming a drunk driver for killing someone on the road. It just ain’t right, and it’s not excusable.”

It was then that their mark came into view. He must have been wandering the streets for at least a few nights with a sawed-off shotgun and a roll of cash. The kid had the usual glazed look in his eyes, and the twitch of a gamer in his stride. The epidemic was easy to follow. That wasn’t the issue; the issue was how randomly it occurred.

“There he is,” Dobbs said. He sat up and poured his coffee out the window as he moved to open the door.

Carson knew that making a scene would be a mistake. “Shit, Roger. Wait a sec.”

Too late. The kid saw the cops and raised his gun, blasting a slug right into the hood of the cruiser before taking off. The blast left Dobbs diving for cover and Carson revving up the engine as he grabbed for the radio.

“We got another one headed east on Union, requesting back-up. This ones been in the game a while.” He threw the car into gear and the cruiser jerked into traffic just in time to see the kid yank a driver from the door of a hybrid Honda. It definitely wasn’t his first car-jacking either.

Sergeant Dobbs pulled his Beretta from the holster and cursed, but the Lieutenant grabbed his hand before the gun could be leveled.

“Roger, we can’t kill the kid. He’s gotta do his time in rehab just like the others.” Despite his anger, Dobbs complied and let the gun return to its holder. Besides, up ahead, the lights and sirens indicated the barricade had already been set up. The trap was sprung.

Moments later their car came to a screeching halt as they nearly T-boned the kids’ jacked ride as it met with the barricade. Six cops weren’t going to point their weapons and wait. The ring began to tighten.

“Out of the car, now! Get the fuck out of the car!” The boy seemed more perplexed than he was nervous. He looked around and tried to rev the engine, hoping to break away from the two cars that had wedged him in. Eventually, the cops pulled him out and gave him a taste of asphalt before cuffing him.

Sergeant Dobbs glared at the kid as the boy struggled, kicking and screaming as they dragged him off. Carson came up behind Dobbs and gave him a pat on the shoulder. “It’s all nice until they fire at you, eh?”

“Yeah, it is.” Dobbs was still watching the boy as his pale frame was shoved into the police car and his shrill voice was screaming about the tragedy.

“I have a saved game! I want to go back to the save point! Fuck! You can’t stop me from resetting!” The slammed door muffled the final words, but Dobbs thought he caught something about an upgrade.

Lieutenant Carson just sighed. “Back in my day, the console and the LCD were all you needed. Poor bastards.”

It’s a dangerous job. They told me that in college, they told me that in my doctoral studies, they told me that when they recruited me, and they tell me that every morning of a jump. It’s a dangerous job, Jodie. But I know the risks. Everyone in this field knows the risk.

My first case was standard: a sociopath who slaughtered half a dozen children in his basement two centuries earlier. We don’t save the victims, of course…that would mutilate the timeline. We don’t even see the subjects. In the projection chamber, I lie on the table as wires are taped to my head, stimulating REM. It takes a special type of person, I hear: a lucid dreamer. Without that ability, it’s easy to lose yourself.

I enter him as he’s almost there, hovering on the brink and fantasizing about the pale-eyed brunette in the basement. I feel the body shudder with the feeling of falling that accompanies the transition to sleep. His mind unfolds into images: the man who sold him bread in the morning, people he passed on the subway. They never dream about the victims. They have their waking hours for that.

Years in the future, the movements of his unconscious are being recorded. In hours, they’ll be processed and scrutinized, and the database will be updated.

His mother, long dead, walking down a corridor and holding a glass of water. She opens a door and he’s inside. “Did you finish shopping?” he asks, and she gives him the glass. He drops it, spills it. The water is the ocean and the shattered glass is light breaking on the jagged edges of waves as he looks overboard. Dreaming. I watch.

When they pull me from his mind the transition is gentle. The scientist enters the dream patterns with keystrokes. “Nice job,” he says, because he’s flirted with me for months. I smile and leave. I’ll be back the next day.

As I sleep in my own bed, fragments of the dreams are recycled. The lucid dreaming distances them…this is simple review, observation rather than motivation. The scanners realize this, and ignore me. Across the city, people are dreaming, matching and evading profiles. Dangerous cases are summoned and saved by doctors who do my work in reverse. I research, they cure.

It’s a dangerous job, but someone has to do it. We haven’t had a serial killer for centuries.

The rosy Martian sunrise had just dusted over the white curtains on Beth’s bedroom window when her parents heard the wild thudding of eight-year-old feet charging their door like a herd of wild horses. Marlene groaned and stuck her head under the pillow as a small fist tapped earnestly on the sleek plastic of the door. “Greg, it’s five in the morning. Can’t you tell her to wait a little longer?” But her husband was already dragging himself out of bed. Marlene groaned. Beth had always been a daddy’s girl.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” came the voice from outside, and Marlene forced herself to sit up, rubbing her eyes. Gregory pressed the blue button that would unlock the door and was immediately assaulted by a small, brown-haired bundle in a white nightgown. “Daddy!” Beth cried out gleefully, launching herself at her father’s pajamaed legs. “It’s my birthday!”

“I know it is, Beth sweetie,” Gregory said, casting a helpless look at his wife. Marlene couldn’t help but smirk as she took her time getting out of bed, leaving Gregory to deal with their offspring. He leaned down and hopped the child up into his arms, and Beth squealed with delight. Gregory grinned and tickled her stomach. “Is my big girl ready for her present?”

“Present!” Beth crowed, flinging her arms around her father’s neck. “Can I have it now?”

“Ask your mother,” Gregory replied, his lips quirking with amusement.

“Can I have my present now, Mommy?” The girl turned immediately to Marlene, squirming in her father’s arms to face her mother completely. “Pleeeeease?”

“If you want it, you’d better run downstairs quick before the little green men show up and take it away!” Marlene laughed as Beth squealed and squiggled out of her father’s arms to pelt back down the hallway and thunder down to the living room. Gregory shook his head, and Marlene smirked. “Mother’s instinct,” she replied to his unspoken question, then plucked her silk robe from the closet and patted her husband’s shoulder. “You’d better go down there and give your daughter her birthday gift.”

Gregory kissed her and disappeared downstairs, and Marlene took her time finding her slippers and tying her robe. It was only when she heard a child’s shriek from downstairs that Marlene dropped her hairbrush and rushed to the sound. In the living room, Beth was clinging to her father’s shirt, face buried in Gregory’s chest, while a placid creature with large blue camera-eyes and sleek white plastic hide looked on.

“Beth, what is it?” Gregory was clearly distressed. “You kept saying you wanted a pony for your birthday! Daddy got you a pony, sweetie… what’s the matter?”

“It’s not a pony!” the eight-year-old wailed, casting a look of mingled fear and reproach at the silent android. “It’s a robot! It’s not a… not a real pony!”

Marlene bit her lip and knelt on the floor. “Beth, you know we can’t have a real pony on Mars. Daddy and I thought you would like this one…”

“But Daddy’s the con-soo-late!” Beth protested, emphasizing the word she’d heard time and again to describe what, to her, was simply a Very Important Job.

“Even the consulate can’t break the law, Beth,” Gregory reminded his daughter, looking helplessly to Marlene for guidance.

“I don’t want it!” Beth cried out, shaking her head and burying it in Gregory’s shirt again.

“Look, Beth honey,” Marlene said, trying to coax her child to face her. “It’s a good pony—better than a real one. You can ride it and play with it and even polish it if you want. You get to pick the name, too.”

“No, no, no!” Beth shook her head emphatically with each negation, her little fists balled up in Gregory’s shirt for emphasis. Gregory looked at his wife, entirely at a loss. Marlene pressed her lips together.

“Beth, would you like the pony if we got him a hover attachment?”

The tears stopped. Round blue eyes peeked out at Marlene from Gregory’s shirt. “You mean… a flying pony?”

Marlene nodded solemnly. “A flying pony of your very own.”

Beth blinked at her mother, then turned to face the pony. Its luminous eyepieces gleamed back at her. Before Gregory could blink, his child’s arms were flung around the warm plastic neck as tightly as they had been around his own.

“Thank you, Daddy!” Beth smiled at her parents as brightly as if her eyes had never known tears. “He’s perfect.”

They sealed Emily’s room three days after the accident, trapping puzzle games and animatronic bears behind the white hydraulic door. Her parents did not want to see the small proofs: things like names doodled on digipaper, the I’s topped by pixellated hearts. A week later they shut down the biofield to save energy and the house’s mainframe showed the room turn cold, its window displays no longer marking the difference between imagined night and day.

The cards and flowers dwindled off after a few weeks, but Emily’s parents waited months before disposing of the everblooms. The white and green plants, caught in photosynthetic stasis, did not shadow the evolution of grief. “Who’s getting married?” the mother of one of Thomas’s school friends asked when picking up her son. Her question was met by lingering silence until Thomas told her, “They’re my sister’s. She’s dead.”

That night, the organic material was recycled, and for days, every meal tasted of chlorophyll.

The forms arrived eighteen months later, stating in cold, efficient terms that the period of sanctioned mourning was over and it was time to consider the population stability of the community. It was a matter of duty, and only the mattress made sound.

Thomas watched his mother swell. Against all odds, pregnancy had improved her mood; she now spent days smiling, one hand resting over the growing bulge. “We need to renovate the room,” his father said.

“Emily’s room?” Thomas asked.

“It’s just a room,” he said, his tone flat. “Rooms don’t belong to anyone.”

At night, Thomas stood before the mainframe, trying to guess the password his parents had set. Her birthday, no. The day of the accident, no. Nothing. He pressed his hand against the sense panel and the mainframe grew warm.

Password accepted, the display read, although Thomas had typed nothing.

The door to the room opened with ease, just like the door of every other room in the house. The lights were dimmed for night, as Emily had always been terrified of the dark, and he noticed the scent of a recent biosweep, killing the bacteria that might have harmed the young girl. It took Thomas several moments to realize that the biofield had never been lowered, despite what the mainframe had claimed.

On the opposite wall, the constellations of Earth hung in the frame of the window display and Thomas moved closer, scanning the well-mapped ocean that his parents had chosen as his sister’s view. At the edge the dark and textured expanse, the horizon showed the faintest signs of dawn: darkest purple blending into the night sky like a bruise.

The Annual Garden Party was called such more out of tradition than anything else; there was no vegetation to be found, only green crystal ferns and porcelain roses. However, appearances and traditions had to be respected and kept up. It was commented on that the way the artificial sunlight glinted off the facets and glaze was, in humble opinions that would never be expressed if the whole effect wasn’t just so breathtaking, better than the original.

Byron hated it. Cecelia could see he hated it, but she brushed it off as concern for his younger sister, Bunny, as she continually tottered dangerously close to the ferns, her immense platform sandals and limited coordination not helping the matter any.

“Bunny,” Byron called, and the girl ambled over to the table he and Cecelia shared. “Look, here. I brought your tiara. Why don’t you go pose in it away from the ferns?”

“Oooooo! Shiny!” Bunny’s jewelry clattered noisily as she half-ran, half-fell away from the tables.

“She’s a beautiful girl, your sister,” Cecelia said. Byron only looked sad.

“She’s a beautiful girl with Holstein-Gottorp’s Disorder. I’m just glad she’s still young enough for the pageant circuit. When that goes, I’m not sure what she’s going to have.”

“It’s wonderful the way you care for her. You’ll make an excellent father.”

“Cecelia, we’ve talked about this.” Byron nervously ran his fingers over the gold tabletop. “You know I love you, but my sister has Holstein-Gottorp’s, and, well, with our combined inheritence, there’s a good chance any children we have could end up a…”

“BRIETARD!!!” Some smaller children were yelling at Bunny, throwing chocolates at her ample cleavage. She ran away from them, crying, and hid under a table. Byron looked pale.

“Byron, baby.” Cecelia took his hands, their multitude of rings clacking as they came together. “Even if we have brietarded children, we’ll make it work.”

“You don’t understand. Yesterday, my sister was asked to introduce herself, and she said ‘What? Like, with words?’ I can’t live with that.”

“So then we’ll give it up,” Cecelia said. “All of it. Maybe we even…I don’t know, get jobs or something.”

Byron looked aghast. “Are you mad?” He turned to watch his sister, once again tottering toward the glimmering fake plants. “Can’t we just do something sensible like adopt one of those strange little alien refugees? Something sane like that.”

Even in the heart of the city, Rene is in the open places. His feet splash in streams, not gutters, and his ears feel the whistle of the wind and not the cry of sirens. Past the dumpsters and yakatori stands, Rene smells green grass and the air right before a storm. He can hear his brother’s laughter, and the thunder of a thousand wild horses running with him.

Shelia Ruye told him it wouldn’t last, and when Rene reaches the docks, he hacks and he wheezes and the real world slithers back in into his frame of vision. Shelia Ruye told him that Reservation was the best, like no dose he ever had, that Rez took your fondest memory and gave it back. Didn’t last long, though, and to Rene the city looked small and crumpled and dirty and his brother was still in the ground. Rene tried to vomit food he hadn’t eaten, and made sense of the city best he could. Because making sense of the city was the only way to get away from it, only way he could find more Rez.

Rene runs to the heart of the city in order to run back out of it again, with enough Rez pounding in his ears and his eyes to make it past the docks, past the city. His brother’s laughter will hold him up and wild horses will carry him across the moonlit water.

He sees this as surely as he sees the wide open places and the cramped dank alleys. And Rene knows that to stay in one, he has to leave the other.

By federal law, I am required to inform you that by stepping outside of these doors, you are releasing the federal government from liability for your safety. Although I have never lost a person on one of my guided tours of the Outside, I have seen people maimed and kidnapped. People have died when taking these kinds of trips, and it’s important for all of you to be educated about the dangers that exist Outside.

I see many young new faces today, so I think it would benefit us to review some of the safety standards for an Outside Tour.

For the first time since the Great War radiation and air pollution levels are within acceptable limits for human tolerance. However, we still recommend that you keep your air filters on your face and your suit zipped over your head. Experienced Outside travelers enjoy removing their protection for limited periods of time, but until you know your own limits, I don’t recommend doing this. I have had individuals who were unprepared for unfiltered air become very ill. Many of you may have medical conditions that you are unaware of because you have been breathing filtered medicated air since birth and the adjustment from this air to the Outside air may be uncomfortable.

Remember, even with the filter, you will not be getting the regular medications that the government provides indoors. Unless you have purchased daily pills to compensate, which are openly available over the Net, you may experience symptoms of withdrawal. Some people report feeling very tired, some people report high energy and anxiety. Most people experience feelings of nausea, which pass after a day or so. Please be aware of your own needs. If you begin to feel ill, please report to a group leader.

The buddy system is imperative to this trip. Keep your buddy in sight and touching distance in all times. Watch your buddy carefully for signs of physical or mental illness. You are responsible for each other. Team leaders on my tour are highly trained professionals with hundreds of tours under their belts. They can protect you and keep you safe, but only if you follow the simple rules that I will set out for you.

Rule one, don’t touch anyone. There are no real people on the Outside, only monsters and people so far deformed it ain’t worth calling them people anymore. Although most of these individuals are quite harmless, some of them are tricksters in the worst way, and will try to get you close so that they may inflict violence upon you.

Rule two, don’t eat anything you find Outside.
Remember that what we consume here on the inside and what is grown on the Outside are very different. We cannot anticipate your body’s reaction to anything you consume on the Outside. Fruit of the Outside may be the greatest taste that you have ever had, but there have been cases where people have been driven mad, or died, from consuming the food out here. Do so only at your own peril.

Rule three, do not give handouts.
At select points during the tour you may see group leaders trading with individuals on the Outside. Do not attempt to do this yourself, as individuals Outside can be highly unstable, and may be able to use even the simplest of tools or food to fashion weapons. You may see some terrible things on the Outside, but leave your sympathy here in this room.

Obey these rules and your group leaders and you will see some of the most magnificent sights of your life, and you will be challenged beyond anything you’ve done before. Everyone have their packs ready? Are your suits zipped? Check your filters?

Alright. Open the door, we are going Outside.

The stranger had come full of bizarre smells and even odder forms of payment, and while Hikari wrinkled her nose at the collection of coins and seeds, it was technically money. So she tucked the coins away, placed the seeds in some soft earth so they could blossom properly, and offered the stranger coffee.

“No, thanks,” he said, his eyes glued to the window and the hangar beyond yet. “Is that a monkey?”

“Say ’bout eighty percent of him, yes,” Hikari said, her ears twitching. There was something about this man she wasn’t sure she liked. Though she had to admit, now that she had gotten over its exotic nature, she couldn’t get enough of his smell. “It’s not just a clever name.”

“And he’s going to be working on my ship?”

“If he likes the look of you. ” Hikari allowed a sly smile to play across her muzzle. “Wouldn’t sweat it, I haven’t seen him turn down a pregnancy once. He’ll probably go at it all night. ”

“All night, but how could..well, if that’s what it takes…” The man slumped on the couch, and ran his hand through his hair. He had lots of hair, long black curls. Hikari liked his hair.

“This your first time, hon?”

“Yeah. That obvious? Caught me a bit by surprise. Checking the cargo hold and finding…I didn’t think she was that kind of ship, you know. I probably left her too long at port. Back at Sumter there was this whole gang of Plesocopuses that were up to no good, bet it was one of those…”

“Oh, hush,” Hikari said. She leaned forward toward the man and played a bit with the shoulder strap of her tiny shirt. “That ship of yours ain’t hussy. And you can trust me, I know the type. Back when I was kitten on Osiron, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some bastard swizzleskid or tamerind. You fellas forget how much of your ship is flesh and blood, forget that a girl’s got needs.” She walked over to him, her hips swaying in time with her tail.

“I imagine she does, at that….”

“She was just doing what came natural.” Hikari slinked onto the couch next to the man and stared at him, black slits narrowing in deep green eyes. “You two came from Sumter? Long ways. Not surprised you turned down the coffee. Reckon I could find other ways to help you relax. ” Hikari snuggled up close, and gave a soft purr as he stroked the soft mottled fur down her back.

“Well, if the monkey’s gonna be at it all night…”

Liberty ate her lunch alone. It wasn’t that she was shy; back at home in the national park where she grew up, she had been very outgoing. In the city, under the press of glistening buildings and cars speeding through the sky, advertisements wailing and the press of people, sensation zappers shooting through you from ads, spreading the taste of chocolate or burger or the scent of perfumes Liberty needed time to recoup. Liberty took quiet lunches to collect her thoughts before going back out into the crowing sensations.

The little Martian restaurant close to campus always seemed crowded but somehow there always seemed to be a table when she came in. Then Liberty realized that the Martians were seating her before other people, preferential treatment for a regular. They always smiled at her when she came in, and she always left them a big tip on her credit line.

Once, on a slow day, she asked for a dish they didn’t have on the menu. Most Earth people didn’t like it; it was a pickled root that was engineered on Mars, and cooked in a spicy curry.

Liberty had been to Mars once, after the war. She was only ten years old then, but she had family on Mars. Her grandmother had gone through the genetic treatment before the war to become fully Martian. When her father and her mother had stepped off the ship onto the alien world, six Martians were waiting for them. They were the tallest people that Liberty had ever seen, they looked like they had all been stretched by giant hands. Their skin was red and orange in swirls that bled into each other, and each one of them had giant eyes with a thin clear eyelid that slid over quick, and a thick outer eyelid that looked tough and callused, even on the children. Back then, all the Martians looked alike to her, but her mom had known her grandmother right away, and they touched each other’s faces and embraced, and all the weirdness of standing in front of people they didn’t know seemed to disappear. In those few months Liberty was free from school, and spent all her time running around the red Martian caves with her grandmothers children, and eating the Martian curried root. Her father had said that the war happened because the Martians didn’t want to be human anymore, and by being there, Liberty was showing them what they were missing. When Liberty was older, she learned more about the war, and a lot of what her father told her was shattered.

Once, when she was eating her lunch, a couple at the table beside her started to argue with their waiter.

“Bring me the tab in Chinese!” demanded the purple haired woman. “ I can’t read it in Martian, I want it in Chinese.” she said, her voice like a car horn. The man with her, with matching puffy purple hair muttered something about Martians, and how they aught to learn the three basic languages if they wanted to live here.

“The menu is in Chinese.” said their waiter helplessly holding out the menu pad to them. “You can read the price there if you think we are cheating you.”

“I need to enter the data values of calorie consumption and fiscal consumption into my data bank.” She exposed her left breast, which had a counter of calories and her exposed credit line in moving ink on her flesh. The waiter looked away. Tattoos of any kind were forbidden in Martian culture.

“Can’t any of you write in Chinese? Or can you only write in your make-believe language?” screeched the woman.

Liberty stood up and grabbed the data pad out of the waiter’s hands. “I can translate Martian.” she said, and she wrote the words into Chinese on the tab and threw it on the table. “There. Now I think you should pay the man.” The woman with the purple hair paid the bill and left in a hurry. They did not leave a tip.

“How did you learn to read Martian?” asked the waiter.

Liberty picked up her bags. “When I was a child, I used to be a Martian too.”

Today, my arm itches like hell. Then again, lots of me itches. Everyone has an itch somewhere, but the scarring is never permanent. I’m working my new arm left and right trying to get the feel for it down while walking to my favorite breakfast place. Everyone I pass looks at me in the same way I looked at them when they told me I wasn’t perfect. Crazy asshole.

I don’t know why they think I’m different. No one with cash is 100% themselves. The good lord giveth and then he taketh away. Then chop shops borroweth and giveth back to people like me who can’t stand being at anything less than full potential.

Sitting down at the diner I order an OJ because I gotta remind myself that some part of me is still lactose intolerant. If I knew which part, I wouldn’t have that problem anymore. Today, being allergic to dairy products is the least of my worries. My daughter is having her play tonight and I’m going to go see it.

She don’t think much of me since I got the new nickname; won’t even look me in the eye when I come and visit. I dropped the idea that it was because parts of me were African or Asian. Nah, she’s too young to remember what racism used to be. Ex-wife tries to put on a happy face when I come around but I can smell the same old bullshit running through her head, too. Crazy asshole.

Orange Juice is good for you and so is an arm from an Olympic weight-lifter who had a bad case of the trips; the kind of trips that end at the bottom of a fifteen story building. Tough luck for him and his family, but I’m the one cashing in on it.

That’s what makes them sick, I think. Most are all right with what happens to people when they’re alive. People get tortured, molested and raped and the world goes by without a bat of a lash singing happy songs about how fuckin’ grand everything is. Somebody dies and you get the stink eye because you want to claim a piece of organic material as your own.

Checking my watch, I can tell I got to get a move on if I want to be ready for the play. That waitress is giving me a real mean look like she sees a cockroach she can’t crush. “Something wrong with your tip, ma’m?” I asked. I didn’t expect her to answer. I didn’t expect the owner to ask me to leave, either. One look at his scalp, though, and I had his number. “Nice hairpiece, buddy,” I said. “What was his name?”

I always wonder about what piece I’m going to get next. People are talking on the streets and in the courts and the big fucking temples they call legislative buildings. They’re talking about a revolution of flesh. Something about that reminds me of pitchforks and torches. Fuckers might even go storm a castle to find me one day. I wonder who’s going to get my parts.

The neon sign outside the dingy brown building said “Roxie’s Travel Agency” and featured a woman in a fedora holding a white machine gun. Few people but Roxie, the owner, are old enough to get the reference. She’s had a good deal in front of her that night, a couple of newlyweds right out of the chapel, coded together forever. The door displayed them as legally married when they passed under, a fact that made the woman squeal with delight. They were holding hands so tight that she could see their tattoos shift over between them, the designs and the viral skin ads all mixing together. Roxie smiled. Newlyweds were always a sweet deal.

“How can I help you folks?” she said reaching out and shaking their hands, shaking the mechanical ad dust off the membrane on her gloves. Roxie was plump and just old enough to start reminding people of their grandmothers.

“We want to go to the Moon!” said the woman, one of the high-rise women, manufactured celebrity feature. She leaned into the man. “It’s our honey-moon!”

The man laughed. Roxie pulled her tight plastic pants down on her legs; crazy fabric was always riding up. “That’s mighty expensive folks, are you sure you might not want to take a few weeks and go to New Slavia?” She pulled out an animated brochure. “Best service in the world in New Slavia. For what you would pay to go to the moon you could stay in your own palace apartments and be treated like a King and Queen!” She winked. “Awfully romantic.”

“My baby wants to go to the moon,” said the man “What she wants, she’ll get.”

Roxie could never understand trips to the moon. Sure, there was a bit of romance behind it, but there were much better, cheaper and more comfortable trips here on earth. “Well alright, but you know lots of people get nauseous up there and have to take pills – you two have any objections to pills?” The couple looked and each other knowingly and roared with laughter. Roxie shook her head, aware she was being made fun of “Well, it don’t hurt to ask. I never do like to assume anything.” She removed one of her gloves and palmed her computer.

“Luna-Vista travels” she said, and the booking site popped up. “When you folks want to leave? They got a shuttle going in two weeks, you want to be on it?”

The man looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Nothing sooner?”

Roxie produced another brochure, but the couple didn’t even glance at it. “Luna-Vista is the only real reliable tour and it only departs once a month. I wouldn’t be responsible if I told you to go on the Wen-Kuo or Verba lines.”

The man shrugged. “We don’t care. We want to go now. You don’t book us for tomorrow, and we’ll take our business elsewhere.”

Roxie shook her head. “Now I’m going to be honest here kids. The Wen-Kuo line departs tomorrow, but they’re not going to treat you right, no amenities, lots of turbulence and you can barely see anything from those little portholes on the ship. Folks, for what you are paying, you should really book something nicer, even if you’ve got to wait.”

“We don’t want to wait.” The mans smile was stiff.

Roxie folded her hands. “Well it just don’t feel professionally right to do it, so if you want to take Wen-Kuo, you can book it yourself.”

The woman’s face fell, the ditzy, happy expression vanishing. “We need to get off this planet, as soon as possible.” Her voice had fallen about an octave, was now husky and dark. “Just book the goddamned flight.”

Roxie wouldn’t have noticed it if she wasn’t looking, but her Buddy had been a member of the Central Enforcement before she lost him in 52’ to that horrible infection scandal. Both of these folks had clothes that covered up places just big enough to hide a holster right in the places where Buddy used to carry his. She relented. If this was Central Enforcement, she didn’t want to block their way.

“Fine, whatever you want.” She said. The man handed her a credit disc, and she fed it into her wall unit. She reserved the flight, her first ever booking with Wen-Kuo. The wall spit out two plastic discs. She handed them over cautiously.

“Your flight leaves tomorrow at 5AM. You can use your discs to take any kind of public transport you want to the shuttle.” The couple examined the silver discs and tucked them away.

“Thanks.” The man cracked a smile. “Take it easy.” He sounded earnest and sad, like he really meant for Roxie to take the rest of the day easy. The couple turned to leave. Roxie called after them.

“Hey!” The couple turned and Roxie gathered up her courage. “Is there any reason why you two want to leave Earth so quickly?”

“Yeah.” Said the man “Remember the expression; live each day?”

“Like the last.” Roxie completed the phrase. The man nodded.

“Nothing truer.” He said, and left with the woman, into the florescent night.

“What just happened?”

Eliot’s eyes were as wide as Cid’s as both of them skimmed the code-riddled display. The letters and numbers went on for as far as the eye could see…literally. Their cruiser looked like a speck of dust next to the onyx-colored greatness that spanned out farther than anyone could see or detect in both directions.

“I uh… think I pushed a button like you suggested.” Cid said weakly.

The two stood in their vacuum-suits on the platform that held the console, a half-mile back from the screen. The metal console had two buttons, nearly identical except for the fact one had seen much use while the other looked untouched. Two big red buttons on a small console in front of a huge expanse of teeny tiny code.

“Let’s back up here.” Eliot said. “I told you to hit that button, right?”

“Yup, you sure did,” replied Cid.

“Okay. And then, did you hear anything? Feel anything? What happened?” It was hard to keep calm. Eliot had this feeling that something had gone horribly wrong, but it felt like the screen before them: simply too big to comprehend.

“I pushed the button and then… uhm. Then you asked me what happened.” Cid, not being the brains of the operation, turned back around to give the dwarfed cruiser the thumbs up before turning back to his partner.

Brows coming together, Eliot sighed and turned back to Cid. “So nothing happened, then. Great.”

“Should I push it a-”

“No!” Eliot nearly smacked him across the visor for suggesting it. They both turned and looked at the cruiser hovering only a few hundred yards off. “We’ll just go back to… uhm. Go back to… ”

Cid was smiling like a fool but even he was wondering something just as similar when he asked Eliot, “Something wrong?”

“No, you buffoon. We’re just going to go back to…uh….that place. You know what I mean. Where we keep all our stuff and… wait, do I even have stuff?” Eliot’s eyes went wide and he turned back around towards the console. Rushing over to the lesser-used button, he used his gloves to wipe away the space-dust covering the space below it.

Both stood there staring at the word in utter horror.
“Does that say…”

Eliot nodded to Cid without turning away. “Delete.”

She carried the link with her on the airplane, exchanging witty comments and gossip with her friends through small boxes on its high-resolution screen. “I’m going to miss you so much!” Cindy typed. “You’d better keep in touch!” She promised postcards and souvenirs, though she rejected Mike’s request for a pound of Thai opium. “Don’t worry,” she told Cindy. “You can always text me.”

She spent layover hours in hard plastic chairs, legs folded and link open on her lap. Boredom was a thing of past generations: even when time zones changed and her friends fell asleep, there were emails and message board posts to respond to.

Fourteen hours on a bus in Cambodia were spent sleeping and chatting. Through the lens of her linkcam the endless rice paddies were converted to 72 web-safe colors and uploaded to her album, where they immediately generated a flurry of posts. “I’ve never seen so much open space!” Kim said. “Promise to post more!”

The neon-lit shore of Koh Phangnan under a full moon was converted to a scattered collection of notes for her travel blog, and as she boarded the boat back to the mainland, she chatted as she organized the notes into an update. “Sounds like fun,” Leah said, and they gossiped about Leah’s coworkers as the crystal-blue ocean spread out in every direction.

Months later, back on home soil, she sat in a diner with several friends recounting stories they’d already read on her blog. “It’s nice to be home,” she said with a smile. “It’s only been a couple days, but I feel like I never left.”

Danny jumped from the roof this time, hitting the ground with a short thump and glancing down at his legs with pure awe in his pale blue eyes. It took him a moment to jump for joy, feeling his weight on those strong, solid legs. It was the best gift a ten year old could ever ask for.

His parents kept pictures of him before the accident and hid them away after he had recovered. They preferred the new Danny, who loved to run and play sports, to the one that read books in his wheelchair. They watched through the window, smiling at their investment towards a better future for their son.

The boy never knew it, but he was better now. Yes, his legs were whole again, but they were better than before. Jumping off rooftops gave pause to some of the kids walking by. Danny loved it, though. He kept running around the yard, looking over every detail his young eyes could capture.

A phone rang somewhere inside while he played, and Danny’s mother walked over to pick it up. “Gene residence, Carolyn speaking.”

“Mrs. Gene, this is Dr. Bast at the National Medical Lab for Gengineering and Human Development. We, uh, need you to bring Daniel back into the East Hampton lab within the next few hours.”

A worried look brought over the father who mouthed concerns at his wife before she shooed him away. “Is there something wrong?”

She stood there listening to the jargon, holding the phone out so her husband could hear and the only words that seemed to make sense came clear in the end, “In some patients, the splicing has been having some unanticipated side effects. Everything is fine but we need to get Daniel back in to make sure he’s clear of any anomalies.”

Both stood staring at each other as a silent wave of worry just washed over them both. Mr. Gene looked out the window for Danny and saw him crouched behind the tree out front. “He looks fine to me,” he said

Carolyn spoke softly into the phone. “Dr. Bast, you told us they used the DNA of several cats to accelerate the mending. What harm could a few cats do?”

Danny’s father smiled at the thought before turning back around. Danny wasn’t behind the tree anymore. He was perched on the fence, glaring at Mrs. Collins from next door with an unfamiliar intensity. Mr. Gene wasn’t really sure what was going on till he saw Mrs. Collins step closer to the boy, and, faster than any human, Danny struck her with his palm. “Carolyn…” Mr. Gene said, “get the car.”

Master Paranthany set the vase down delicately at the feet of Mr. Lurgess. Mr. Lurgess, for his part, rubbed his spongy hands together excitedly. Master Paranthany removed his velvet gloves and returned them to their pocket in his coat.

“How did you–” Mr. Lurgess sputtered out. “How did you find it again? It’s worth–”

“A fortune, yes.” Master Paranthany scratched his nose and moved to Mr. Lurgess’s prismatic windows. The cold light of dawn was covering the entire room apartment with bits of red and green and indigo. “Porcelain from the original Ming Dynasty is extremely rare in this day and age. It’s worth quite a bit, to the right person. Or it’s something to let flowers die in.”

“I must insist.” Mr. Lurgess scurried over to the window himself, almost tripping over his dressing gown. The colors that cavorted around his face did little to improve it, in Master Paranthany’s eyes; the little man still looked like a roast pig. “You must tell me how you found it! I know your agency is one of the best–”

“We are the best. You will find no better insurance company on any of the Five Worlds.”

“And you’re a credit to their investigators, Master Paranthany. But you must tell me. I thought for certain this would have been on the black market by now, exchanged through a dozen hands.”

“I am certain it has been. However, I was able to recover some dust from the vase’s former resting spot. With that, it was only a matter of finding the exact combination of molecules and paint patterns.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I had copies made. Printed them right out back at the office. Flooded the market with them. Would take an expert to tell the difference, and even then, its extremely unlikely. In short, I made the thing totally worthless.”

“But that would take hundreds…”

“Millions, actually. Three point five. Most will find their way back to the office, and they’ll be used as base material for another hunt. Standard procedure really.” In one fluid motion, Master Paranthany reached into his pocket, withdrew a package of cigarettes, and shook one into his lips. “But there will be just enough to keep anyone from stealing that vase again. It is effectively worthless to anyone but you.”

“No smoking, please. It’s bad for my eyes.” Mr. Lurgess looked back and forth from the vase to Master Paranthany “But if you…does that mean…do I have…?”

“Well I suppose there’s only one answer to that question.” Master Paranthany lit his cigaratte and let an extravagant plume of blue smoke glide out of his lips. Colors formed unique patterns and shapes upon the surface of the smoke before it all dissipated. “How much is it worth to you?”

Mrs. Lansing slapped the back of Edward’s head. “What is this?” she asked, pointing at his computer pad.

“It’s the site I built!” whined Edward, rubbing the back of his head.

His teacher tapped her foot and folded her arms tightly to her chest. “That site looks like it was built by a program. Did you use a program to build that site?”

“Well, yeah, but I-“

She slapped the back of his head again. “You don’t listen to me, do you?”

“I listen to you!” cried Edward.

“No you don’t. If you listened to me, you wouldn’t build shitty sites using a program. But since you aren’t going to listen to me when I tell you how to build a site, maybe you will listen to me if I tell you a little story. Do you think you could listen to a story Edward?”

Edward winced, looking at her upraised hand. “Yeah, yeah, I can listen to a story.” he said, shrinking in his chair.

“This is about one of my former students. Her name was Melody. When she was born, the doctors said that she was a retarded autistic that would never walk. Her dad was raising her by himself, and he was always working or fucking his secretary, which was something he called working.

She had to go to school in one of those robotic suits, and all the other kids made fun of her and called her a cyborg and stole her computer and fucked with her robot suit, putting sand in her tank or glue in her metal knees. She had to go to special classes after school with the rest of the retarded autistics, and all the teachers treated them like they were big problems and a hassle and like they chose to be screwed up.

When it came available, she had to get gene therapy to replace the cells in her brain that were screwed up and the muscles in her body that wouldn’t grow. And people say gene therapy is great, and it’s a cure all, and it’s a miracle, and sure it is if you’ve been born with everything working, but even people who need to get a single finger replaced know that it hurts, it hurts worse then hell because you are supposed to be grateful, and if they are messing with your brain you see visions of things, things you don’t get, half made memories and fake shit, dreams like horror movies, and all the while you are changing and in pain.

That’s what she went through, and while that was going on she put her nose in her screen and learned to code, and not code like you do playing with your little pictures in those nice little games that help you make those standard little webpage’s that look so pretty, just fucking like everybody else’s. She learned real code, hard code, the languages that make things go, right down to the root, those words that make things light up and become something wild, something to make people shake, those langagues that bridge the gap between men and the machines that run them, and that makes her a master, and that makes her in control of the machines, which makes her human. More human than you will be, because the machines run you now, and unless you learn what makes them work, unless you work them, you are their slave. You want to be a slave to the machines Edward ?”

“No.”

“Do you want to be human?”

“Yes.”

“Then get to work.” Mrs. Lansing slapped him again, for good measure.

The last time I saw Alnersans was back when I owned a bar. We used to joke that Alnersans always brightened up the place, due to the lights implanted on his arm.

Alnersans had 6 LEDs crawling out of the flesh of his left forearm. I asked him about them once; he told me that they were his six closest friends. The LEDs were tied to their iDents, and Alnersans would talk about them as if they were the people themselves.

“Now, Shirl,” he would say, pointing to a LED that flickered noticibly in the bar’s dim light. “She’s not doing too well. Doctors ain’t givin’ her much time, but when do they ever? Better pour one for me and one for Shirl, on account she can’t join us.”

While I knew Alnsersans back in college, I never saw him so much as when I served alcohol for living. About a month before the bar closed, Alnersans seemed to vanish. I thought about taking the iDent he paid his tab with and entering in a hospital query or plugging in a GPSearch, but I never did. He hadn’t given me his iDent to use in that way, anyway.

I thought on him every now and then, but I didn’t expect him to show up. When my door read his iDent soon as he stepped on the welcome mat and said it was him, I about fell out of my chair.

“Hadn’t seen you in a while, Alnersans.”

“Your bar’s been torn down.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t. Coulda told me. I liked your bar. Can I come in?” I offered him a beer and he took it hungrily, draining the bottle in seconds.

“You want another?”

” You make such a great bartender. This is why you shouldn’t have closed the bar.”

“People change” I said. I noticed that, of the six LEDs, only one remained. Alnsersans gently fingered the ragged maw of scars that surrounded them, as if he was reminding himself they were still there.

“That they do. I’ve learned that, here recent.” Without warning, without a change of expression or twitch of his body, Alnersans smashed his empty beer up against my end-table, Alnersans then took one of the slivers of glass and gouged out the last of the LEDs, Despite wincing from the pain, Alnersans let out a low chuckle as the glow of the light slowly faded. “Serves you right, you son of a bitch. Serves you right. Sorry about the mess,” he said, turning to me.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re a good friend,” Alnersans said. “I see that now.”