“Prosperity may not know, yet, what they’ve stumbled upon. But I’ve got warrior-journalists in six factions’ territories working to verify or debunk the latest stories our curators have flagged as true.”
“The mindshare rebalancing …”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m worried about the long game, not who wins or loses power this week. People are finally starting to see why our work matters. If we have to stop—”
Lumi whirled and aimed a light from their jacket sleeve at the broken-out windows. Alia hadn’t heard a thing, but Lumi’s enhanced hearing was eerily good.
“Who’s there? Come out, slowly.”
“We won’t hurt you,” Alia added, remembering the cruelty on Lumi’s face. That was fake. The real Lumi doesn’t hurt people.
A figure rose outside the window, hesitated, then marched through the open doorway: a girl in a cracked rain-suit. She put back her hood, revealing an expression of disgust. “You traitor. You’ve been with them this whole time.”
“Bex.” Alia sighed. “A Prosperity intern. She must have followed me,” she told Lumi.
“What do you want to do about her?” Lumi asked in a low voice.
Alia’s infiltration was over, so it didn’t matter if the kid blew her cover. And Bex was young, not yet on the inside at Prosperity. Alia hated making hasty judgments about people based on gut instinct: her gut could lie, and she hadn’t decided yet what to think about Bex. But she needed to decide, right now.
“She’s a smart kid. Observant,” she murmured, and Lumi nodded in understanding.
Let’s see if she’s got good sense, too.
“Okay, Bex,” the spy said. “You’re right, I work with Choose Truth. But the narratives you’ve heard about us, they’re lies meant to discredit us. It’s not what we do.”
“All the narratives?” Bex shook her head, clinging to her sense of betrayal. I’m not an idiot. You can’t fool me, anymore. “The factions don’t agree on anything, but they all have the same narrative about you.”
The Fist smiled. “That’s because we don’t have a narrative. All we have is the truth, and that threatens all the factions equally. They’re scared shitless of us.”
“Of course you have a narrative. Everyone has one.”
“Narrative is all most factions have,” Alia said. “They put narrative at the center of everything they make. We center the truth.”
Truth. An obsolete word, like “nation” or “vote,” long since declined into irrelevancy. A word that might have meant something in ancient times, when information was hard to come by, but now, narrative was necessary to create meaning and purpose from a flood of data. Narrative was everything. “What’s the point?”
“The point is stories you could have watched with your own eyes, if you were there. Raw, undoctored footage. That’s what we create, and on the rare occasions when the factions put out true stories, curators like Alia promote it as such.”
“But that factory strike video …”
“Some of my best work. Not easy to get, that footage,” the Fist said smugly. “I camped for three days on a rooftop within the security zone with an ultra-zoom lens.”
“You were actually there?” The wildness of traveling hundreds of miles to get footage for a newstory that could have been produced in the most basic studio made her brain stall for a moment.
“That’s far from the greatest lengths my warriors have gone to in order to capture true stories.”
“See? You say you’ve got no narrative, but you call yourselves warriors.” She shook her head. “You talk about truth, but you tell people what they can and can’t watch. There’s a reason everyone calls you Control.”
“That’s not—” Alia burst out.
The Fist waved her silent and leaned forward, voice lowered confidentially. “Have you ever actually watched Choose Truth’s feeds, Bex?” Bex had to shake her head. “So, you believe whatever Prosperity says about us. That’s comfortable, isn’t it? It’s nice to listen to your preferred faction. You ingest the narratives that match your beliefs, that show you the type of world you want to live in, and ignore the rest. When a mindshare rebalancing comes around, you give factions power, not based on what they do for you, but what they say. Even if it’s all lies.”
“But it’s our choice! We have the right to decide what narrative we want to live in. You can’t force people—”
“All we do is give people the option, the choice, to tell the lies apart from the truth. To live based on more than a tidy, comfortable narrative. Many people want that. And for people like you, who don’t care what’s true, we won’t interfere.”
“Or maybe not like you,” said Alia. “I’ve seen you at work. Have you never been troubled by a newstory you knew was pure fabrication? Never got frustrated that Prosperity’s narrative is so distant from your actual life?”
“No. I like Prosperity’s narrative.” But Bex could smell those tomatoes. It had shaken her, the contrast between that green, bountiful narrative and the bleak reality of Jubilation Square.
But she didn’t blame Prosperity. That computer-generated kid was damn cute, optimally cute, designed for maximum mindshare, and yet … It would have been a nice thing for us, if it were true. I would have liked to taste that tomato.
Talking about bounty was much easier than providing bounty, but the narratives only went so far when she crawled into bed hungry, waiting for the next day’s ration bar.
A creak as Alia twisted on the old bar stool, watching with half her attention while one hand tapped out a command to her headset. The rain had stopped, but the sun hadn’t returned yet, and water from the eaves dripped dully onto the pavement outside. The Fist considered Bex with a too-perceptive gaze, like one of the jays in Golden Park when it thought you had food. Their eyes were silver, too, nano-enhanced. Who knew what they could see?
“You’re mad at them,” the Fist said. So gentle that it was unnerving. She’d watched them commit such violent acts, scenes that, true or not, had taken root in her brain. “It’s okay to be mad. You can—”
Bex didn’t hear a thing, but the Fist’s gaze snapped toward the window. Then came the pounding of booted feet in the alley. Lots of feet.
Alia tensed. The Fist sighed and rolled their eyes as an amplified voice called, “Stand down! We’re bringing you in for questioning.”
Safety swarmed into the room, a dozen officers, armed with electroshock guns. A file transfer request pinged in the corner of Bex’s vision—a local, line-of-sight transfer—and it startled her so that she accepted it without thinking. But it wasn’t from Safety, it was from—
The Fist flung a coin-sized object onto the floor, and Alia shoved Bex in the opposite direction. Bex dropped and kept her head down as electroshock beams crackled in the air. The Fist grabbed Alia and dove for the bar, just as the coin exploded into a blinding burst of blue light. More wild shots, but Bex couldn’t see a thing. She lay still, blinking spots from her eyes.
When she could see again, the Fist and Alia were gone.
Officers converged on the bar, weapons trained, but no one was there.
“A trapdoor! It’s sealed.”
“Blow it and follow them!” the commander shouted. “And search for other access points!” That was the work of minutes. Soon, all the officers had vanished in pursuit except for two, who approached Bex.
“You’re the one who called in the sighting? Prosperity appreciates your loyalty, miss. We have to ask you some questions.”
“And we’ll need any data you have from your encounter with the terrorists.”
That new file glowed in her incoming queue. A big file, multi-modal, labeled Truth Curators Training Level One. Before she could think better of it, Bex buried it in her personal files.
“Of course,” she said. “Whatever you need.”
Bex didn’t see the end of the chase. Safety led her off before she found out whether Alia and the Fist were captured or had escaped. The questioning was mild, mostly
focused on whether Bex had been infected with Control’s ideas. It wasn’t hard to satisfy them.
She turned over all her recordings of the incident, but the file, she kept hidden. She thought daily about how it would be better, safer, to delete it, but despite every logical reason, she didn’t.
“Look, we’ve got some good ones today!” Russhel effused.
The latest batch of Prosperity newstories was out, released to staff a few minutes before it hit the live feeds. Bex skimmed through them. He was right, the production team was on its game today. They’d done a smash job with her dog-befriends-rat idea, and …
Before her hovered corpses. Two bodies sprawled across a sea of wrecked concrete and bent rebar. Two heads, one dark, one silver.
She choked, an ugly cough racking her entire body. Doubling over, she couldn’t block out the image that now filled her head, the bent limbs and bloody jacket.
“You okay?” Russhel asked with apparent concern.
Recovering from the cough gave her space to recover her thoughts, to orient her mind to this new narrative. “Yeah. Sorry, got startled by the bodies, the …” What was Prosperity calling them? Terrorists. To Prosperity, Alia and her friend were terrorists. “… the terrorists. Wasn’t expecting that.”
“That whole incident must have been disturbing for you. You did good work, leading Safety to them. I don’t know how we would have gotten our mindshare back up before the rebalancing without this!” His grin dimmed. “It’s a shame we couldn’t bring them to trial, though.”
“Yeah, a real shame.” That was what Russhel expected to hear.
Bex made herself watch the whole story. It said Prosperity had captured Control’s leaders, thanks to a tip from a loyal consumer, and had learned they’d planned an attack on Prosperity Newservice headquarters. An attack against a faction’s newservice was an attack against the freedom of narrative, against the freedom of all people everywhere to consume content as they chose. Fortunately, with the two leaders in custody, Prosperity’s hard-working, elite security forces foiled the plot long before it reached fruition.
Most unfortunately, the leaders were killed while attempting to escape.
No.
Bex shut off the video. Beyond her screen, charts on the walls showed this newstory creeping upwards in the mindshare rankings. She needed something blank to look at, something narrative-neutral, so she shut her eyes, and held, side by side, two contradictory stories.
Choose Truth was a group of heroic rebels, warriors offering people freedom from the faction narrative machine and its lies.
Control was an authoritarian regime, set on destroying people’s hard-won freedom to base their reality around the narratives they preferred.
Alia, alive.
Alia, dead.
Both stories couldn’t be true. She’d called their notions about truth obsolete, but this, she needed to know. This mattered. It mattered whether Alia was honest, whether the Fist was right. Prosperity’s newest narrative was already extending its tendrils into her thoughts and memories, pushing out the things she’d seen with her own eyes and replacing them with claims of wrongdoing and those still, horrible bodies.
In a newstory, a corpse was easy to fabricate.
If Prosperity was lying and they were alive, hiding, planning their next move, then maybe Prosperity was lying about Choose Truth’s intentions, too. And if they were dead, if Alia was dead, there was one less curator in the world. One less person who could see through the lies and elevate the truth.
Bex had claimed truth didn’t matter, but with the difference between Alia alive and Alia dead … it mattered.
She sat forward in her chair, shaking. For the dozenth time, she read the text that had accompanied the file, a set of canned instructions, followed by a hasty, personal note:
I know the lies bother you, no matter what you pretend. Our advanced trainings need updating, but this one will get you started for now. Won’t teach you everything, but the basics should still work. Hope it helps.
If her boss discovered this program, she’d lose more than her job, and it might not even give her answers. Prosperity had learned to fool even Alia, and this was just beginner stuff. Such a risk for such a slim chance …
But it was a start. She opened the program and ran it.
Alia’s voice emerged. “This is a Choose Truth training program for recognizing fake and manipulated content. Welcome to lesson one.”
If the Fairy Godmother Comes
by Mary Soon Lee
Do not ask for a gown,
for a night at the ball,
for a path to the crown,
for any man just looking
for the prettiest girl in town.
* * *
Ask for a wart on your nose
and a house of your own.
Ask for answers, not clothes,
ask what drove your stepmother
to the life she chose.
* * *
Do not dream of the dance.
Do not pick the prince.
Do not melt at his glance.
Men wrote the rules. Rewrite them.
Give your stepsisters a chance.
* * *
Listen to what they say.
Better their bitter truth
than lies of an easy way.
Walk the hard road together
toward equal say, equal pay.
What We have Chosen to Love
by Cassandra Khaw
Callum likes it least when they’re desperate, but he can prescribe no fault to the situation. After all, he does not make it easy. Sunlight gowns the modest dining table in gold, a honeyed richness sanding away the imperfections in his homemade furnishings. Carefully, Callum tips boiling water into a kettle, its circumference barnacled with clumps of quartz: no shine to them, just a lucent milkiness. Callum has never had an interest in impressing.
“I only have a sponge cake today, I’m afraid.” His voice is an easy baritone, a voice that might have made him some money as a minstrel, but not much. “You should have come yesterday. When the witches made their appearance. I made them a mascarpone cheesecake.”
The herald nods. He is wearier than his steed, a roan gelding made threadbare by the journey. The two of them are ribs and parched throats and a memory of the woods, winter-wedded and spindled with frost, and they are so cold, these two. Cold to the gnawed-through pith of them. Cold enough that the herald will say anything, do anything, so long as Callum continues to let him thaw by the fire, a plum-blue plate of biscuits to one side, a mug of mulled cider to the other.
“You’re our only hope,” the herald says without feeling, only the cadence of ritual. “Without you, the kingdom will be lost.”
Callum shrugs. “There’s always another Chosen One. There are as many Chosen Ones as there are prophecies.”
The apples of the herald’s cheeks are still red as raw meat. “You really won’t come to our rescue, then?”
“No.”
“I see.”
“But you can have some cake,” Callum announces decisively. “And, if you like, information on how to contact some people who I think can help.”
Callum always knew he was special. Callum has never been able to escape the fact he is special. When he was four, a knight in rusting armor and a blood-rinded tabard came to the door of the house his father built, and he had knelt there until Callum’s mother bade him to come inside. There is a war, the knight had whispered, gauntleted hands so tight around his mug of tea that cracks spiderwebbed through the shining ceramic. A war that has been going on for a thousand years. And your son is the only one who can stop it.
“No,” said Callum’s mother, and the last light of the failing day was wine-gold in her hair and white-gold on the scars of the knight’s pale face. “I will not let him be taken by a prophecy. I know how long those children live. A year and a day, if they’re lucky. To their wedding day, if they’re not. They don’t grow old. They grow dead.”
<
br /> Please, whispered the knight, and Callum would always remember the sound of his voice. Like dust, like the motion of stars, like an old house coming apart, like a kingdom falling to its knees.
“No,” said Callum’s mother. “But I can give you the names of people who can help. Diplomats and seditionists, doctors and poets and peacekeepers, economics professors, farmers who can coax the cracked earth to bloom. I can give you the names of people who might make right what has broken in your kingdom. And you can have cake before you go.”
It is a child this time.
Callum pulls his robes tight around a chest made broad by a season of hard labour, and behind him, he can hear the blacksmith’s daughter, his beloved Annora, unsheathe her longsword. Of the two of them, she bakes better bread. The house smells warmly, still, of challah and lemon polenta cake, roasted almonds and strong black tea.
“It’s the princess.” Her mouth and her fingertips are blue as bruises, and when she speaks, her lips bleed in welts. Frost lattices the child’s long, black lashes, dusts her filthy coat in diamonds. “She won’t wake up. She needs to wake up. The spell wasn’t enough. She’s going to die when the roses … Please, please …”
She is still whispering please when Callum and Annora steer her inside, still whispering as they put food in her hands, blankets over shoulders so thin the two can count every crack in the bones, whispering like she’s a clock and the word please is how she marks the minutes. Please, the child begs.
Do Not Go Quietly Page 9