Uncanny Magazine Issue 37

by Lynne M. Thomas

  Delta’s holding back her own tears, but she feels a responsibility to talk Xu out of this. “I know it’s hard—”

  The door opens and she’s pulled out of the car, a slam behind her. Lulu grips her shoulders to the point of pain, her hair a furious tidal wave threatening to crash over them both.

  “What is wrong with you?” Lulu rasps, face still blurry.

  “What do you mean? I’m being realistic. You did the math yourself.”

  “If Burdokovsky’s equations are right, we wouldn’t have had five skippers!”

  It burns, Lulu parroting the CSB lawyer’s argument. “But we have far more data on our exact atomizer setup for recreating Xu’s setting. Our scaling math is sound.”

  “Unless there are nonlinear effects we don’t know about.”

  Delta resists the urge to roll her eyes. There can always be nonlinear effects—without evidence, it’s empty speculation. “Are you a pseudoscience quack now? What do you want to do? Continue to take her money and get ourselves banned at all the atomizers?”

  “I want to build my own. A better one. Help her as long as she wants it.”

  She must be joking. “We have a great scientific result already. We can get funding, return to academia—”

  “We can’t tell anyone this!” Lulu snaps. “She’ll never be able to go back to China. Are you heartless?”

  Of course not. She didn’t think of the real world in her false triumph. She can’t think straight with Lulu in her visor frame. “Fine, then we pretend it didn’t happen and go back to our lives. I just got a contract for time services, not that you care—”

  “I do care, D. I’ve always cared. I don’t want you to regret your choices. Break the world together, remember?”

  “Thank you for your concern,” Delta grinds out. She feels so small, every hit cleaving a piece off her until she is only the knot. “It would be helpful if you didn’t suddenly leave and let my life fall apart. Twice.”

  Lulu never breaks eye contact first, but she does this time, letting go and walking to the end of the blacktop, staring at the horizon down the street beyond interactive glass and cracked brick. The rest of the world waits, observing.

  NEW SUBVOCAL FROM L: I need to show you something.

  INCOMING FILE FROM L. ACCEPT?

  Delta stares at the open box icon floating atop fading aqua she is trying not to look at. Thinks about ignoring the prompt and just walking away. Theoretically possible, but when has she ever been able to let go of whatever this is?

  She decompresses the file. A chat log between Lulu and her parents, going back years without a single response from Lulu, timestamps lined up with every tectonic rift between them.

  She’s not good enough for you.

  You’re not mentally ill, don’t lie. Stop wearing those ugly clothes. You embarrass us.

  We’ll find you a good boyfriend. Even girlfriend, if you insist.

  Your cousin just got tenure. Look at yourself, wasted potential. Shame.

  She’s so poor. She’s not from a good family. She’s not even pretty.

  Stop taking meds, they make you fat. Your real problem is laziness and disobedience.

  You choose. Her or us.

  Delta’s stomach threatens to expel its vacuum. So much poison to drown in, it’s a miracle she’s still here. Lulu’s head pivots back, a crystal to liquid phase transition in her eyes. “I never said anything because…you’re the only good thing I have. It’s my burden, not yours.”

  Delta wants to say no, it’s ours, but the wounds are pouring from them both and she can’t form words right now. Instead, she runs over, gathering the pieces of the woman she loves into her arms.

  After two months, Burdokovsky is found not guilty, projection Sophie crying as all charges are dismissed, though two of the jurors stress afterwards that they really don’t like him. The judge denies his request for Chandler-Sand to pay his lawyer fees, enough to run the atomizer for a day and more. The trial is as quickly forgotten by the public as they were to seize on it, relegated to the trivia section of the collective human archives. Burdokovsky declares bankruptcy, quits his professorship, and heads home. Rumor has it if you walk up the dirt road to a particular Yekaterinburg farm, you might hear a wandering man mumble about the cruelty of partition function renormalization.

  An embrace is a timeless space. In the plenum, only her, all of her.

  “I told you, parties aren’t really my thing.”

  “At least meet one new person before going back to lab, overachiever.” Jess’s hand thrusts out of the smoke and noise masquerading as music to drag Delta through a twisty passage of bodies. “Here.”

  Fuck, she’s gorgeous, is Delta’s first thought. Black boots, black jacket, black hair, black eyeliner. Black eyes far too cool for her.

  “Meet Delta, my roommate. Star experimental biophysicist.” Jess spins without spilling her full plastic cup of beer. “Delta, Louisa Chen does differential geometry and went to my undergrad. She was the smartest person there, so you probably have lots in common. Have fun!”

  And then they’re alone in the fray.

  “Nice to meet you, Louisa.” Delta grasps for an opener. “Part of my family was Chen, too. They changed their names to Phawilaisak when they fled to Thailand during World War II…” Way to go, she tells herself. Real fun fact.

  Louisa is unperturbed. “Just Lulu. I care more about the future. What do you want to do with your life?”

  “Is this a job interview?” Delta has a generic prepared response about advancing science, but she feels a sudden compulsion for honesty. “I want to make money for my family.”

  There is a softness in the black eyes. “That’s good. I want to break the world.”

  Delta feels her eyebrows raise. She’s not even sure what that means, but, “I do too, once I do the first thing.”

  “Want to get out of here?”

  The last time, she tells her—hushed, looking way—her proposal of therapy and words. She flinches away to another continent.

  The first time, she tells her—breathless, into the night—ideas and algorithms and machines. They promise to build them together.

  Delta will remember the ending most of all.

  You’ve probably heard that theory floating around: time skips are multiverse threads mixing up. All of us are living uncountably infinite lives at any moment, and sometimes the universal wavefunction vibrates a life from one branch of existence to another.

  Entertaining, mostly unscientific. If it were true, though, somewhere out there would be a version of Delta that stayed. Stayed in Lulu’s embrace and Xu’s hopeful tears and the adrenaline of free-falling, finding a crew of people with dreams as big as theirs, real therapy and medication, ordering millions of dollars of lab equipment, weathering sick days in each other’s arms, eating ramen and building electronics in a hangar, their hangar, hands together on the old-fashioned on-switch when the atomizer is ready for its first test. Surely, after all their endings, they deserve another beginning.

  But Delta’s been treading water her whole life, half-looking for adventure on the horizon while craving the safety of crystalline sand. Watching the car disappear like a heat mirage, signing up for the stable job with good income, workshops and meetings all day, four solid walls, a pot of a long-gone person’s favorite ordinary gardenias in the corner of the house. And if she drowns herself with work, maybe she can ignore the gnawing feeling inside.

  And that’s why Delta decides to live in the world where she stayed.

  NEW SUBVOCAL FROM D: Delicate girl, in the old days

  I strayed from you, and now again [

  (Editors’ Note: “Proof of Existence” is read by Joy Piedmont on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 37A.)

  © 2020 Hal Y. Zhang

  Hal Y. Zhang writes science, fiction, and science fiction, in no particular order. She has a language-and-loss chapbook Amnesia with Newfound, and a women-with-sharp-things collection Goddess Bandit of the Thousand Ar
ms with Aqueduct Press.

  Words We Say Instead

  by Brit E. B. Hvide

  Iyara taps the military implant behind her ear, and low static greets her. It’s been dead for years—a two-way line with only one connection—but the static is comforting, as if she’s listening to the sound of space itself. Empty with longing.

  Below her, the dealership is an orange, domed pimple on the otherwise placid blue world. Lights flash through the thin ozone advertising: “Cheap!” “Arturo-433 Models Used and New!” “Xanthian credits accepted!”

  Out front, rusted-out Eagle-12s fester in the sunlight, a dime a dozen, and old tanker ships wait for a second chance at hauling ice across the galaxy. They keep the newer models under the dome, protected from the caustic atmosphere, sheltered from the ding and wear of wind and dust. The dolphin-like hulls of the new, single-passenger skiffs are lined up perfectly, as if, given the right signal, they might all leap into the air at once and take off for the stars.

  Iyara lands her own skiff in the docking bay and enters the dealership. Immediately, a salesperson sidles up to her.

  “Hot out there today,” they say.

  She nods, glancing over the passenger ships. “Always hot on Eebos, though right?”

  They laugh. “Sure is, Mx—” They pause to let her fill in the blanks.

  “Ms. Iyara.”

  “And you can call me Jebd. ‘He’ is fine.” He smiles at her and she notices that all his teeth are perfectly straight and a trendy, pearlescent blue. Flashy orthodontia is a good sign. Only the sleazy ones have what she’s looking for.

  “Thanks, Jebd.”

  “So what kind of thing are you interested in today, ma’am? We’ve got some really sporty new skiffs this season.”

  “No, no, I’m happy with what I have for puttering around. I was actually thinking of something much…bigger. Off-world.”

  “Visiting grandkids?”

  She laughs, a short coughing sound edged with bitterness. Iyara’s never thought of herself as old, and she’s never liked children. In her mind’s eye, she’s still 32 and ready for a dogfight. But the rest of the universe is more than happy to remind her she’s got almost a century under her belt. Once your hair turns gray it’s harder for people to see you for who you really are. But maybe that’s for the best.

  “No, no. No spawn running around. Just little old me, trying to take one last spin around the galaxy.”

  “So something long haul?”

  “But comfortable.”

  Jebd smiles again and leads her around the lot pointing at the different models, explaining their features. This one is sturdier and better for the ’belt. That one’s faster. This one’s cheaper. That one’s got cup-holders. Blah blah. It doesn’t matter. Nothing she can see is what she’s here for. It’s all just an elaborate song and dance she has to go through before he’ll take her seriously enough to show her the good stuff. That’s fine. She’s learned to wait.

  She’d been on the list for a smartship for almost four years before they gave her command of one. Even before that, though, her recruitment class had spent five years doing flight simulations, taking personality tests, stress tests, neuro-compatibility tests, intelligence tests, reflex tests. Two years of ferrying Marines between drop zones. Two years of command training. And then another year of testing for god knew what else. Seventy recruits had winnowed down to twenty by the time it was all over.

  But damn was it worth it.

  When she first saw Ziggy she’d cried—an act her fellow trainee, Belal, had been quick to tease her for until they’d been assigned their own ship. In the end, they all cried. It couldn’t be helped. With so much anticipation, so much invested and sacrificed, so many invasive medical procedures, so much intensive training and so much painful, wracking hope, how could they not?

  Zig was beautiful. Sleeker than anything she’d seen before or since. Lighting fast and responsive as hell. Neuro-mapped to her brain, the SSV Zagreb didn’t just follow her commands, he predicted them, suggested them, felt them. The rattling of his hull was a shiver of anticipation; the whistle of his struts through the atmosphere was a whoop of joy. Her boy was smarter and stronger than any other ship in the fleet.

  We’ve got a problem, Captain, he’d chirp, seeing the flash of an enemy ship on the horizon.

  “What do we do with problems, Zig?” she’d shout back—a call and response—leading him through oncoming fire, or through an asteroid belt, or around a security detail.

  Blast them!

  Nothing beat Zig.

  Iyara smiles, remembering the way his lights rippled at the end of particularly daring maneuvers, so pleased with himself for pulling it off.

  Did we do good? he’d ask, seeking reinforcement for his budding neural pathways. Smartships were made to learn, after all.

  “Very good.”

  The absence of Jebd’s droning voice pulls her back to the present, and she realizes he’s waiting for a response.

  “Sorry, what?” The chip they implanted to let her interface with Zig more directly is old, but still powerful enough to mess with her hearing every once in a while.

  “No problem. My gran is the same way. Can’t hear a thing. I was asking if anything we’ve passed so far was speaking to you. Anything calling your name?”

  She looks around the lot again, but already knows the answer. “I was actually wondering if you had anything a little smarter.”

  “What?”

  “You know, smarter. Space can be lonely for an old lady like me, and I’d love something to talk to.” She emphasises the words carefully. After the war, as part of the de-armament agreement, the smartships were all supposed to be decommissioned.

  Jebd looks confused, his bright teeth hidden for just a moment behind thin lips, and Iyara wonders if maybe she’s met another dead end. There are dealerships like this all across the galaxy and at least half of the ones she’s visited hadn’t known what she was talking about.

  “AI-Level 3 comes standard in all our models, but if you’d like to upgrade any of them to a 4 or 5 that could be arranged.”

  She snorts. The problem with AI nowadays is that it’s static. Stock personalities railroaded between lines of rigid code. AI can’t ask why. Can’t figure out how to cheer you up after a long day. Can’t be brave or sweet or scared or loyal. They can’t make up games or have favorite lullabies or imagine futures where you both are safe and happy and together forever.

  Jebd senses her disinterest, and immediately changes tack. “Oh, you mean something really smart.” He says it as if trying out a key in a lock. Testing that their frequencies are calibrated.

  She nods and carefully taps her lapel where, if he looks for more than half a second, he’ll see her old wings, polished and safely pinned. Normal military issue except for the glitter of gold in the center marking her for special ops. She’s not proud. But if he recognizes it, then he’s more likely to entertain her requests.

  “Surely you’ve got something like that here for me.”

  The grin is already spreading across his face again, “Maybe we can help you out. Just…not here.”

  They arrange to meet the next morning at a chop shop further north, and on the sail back to her hotel, she can’t help but get excited. It’s foolish to hope after so long—there have been so many false leads and nothing promises—and besides, she doesn’t deserve hope after what happened. But it’s there nonetheless.

  That night she dreams of little ships calling to her from far, dark places, and she wakes up in a cold sweat.

  Even before the war had ended, people argued that the smartships were too great a threat. They were war machines—uploaded with three thousand years of battle history and guns the size of horses—of course they were a threat. But the ships could be dangerous in other ways too: some were immature, blindly loyal, or emotionally unstable. Just because they understood things didn’t mean they knew what to do with the information. Belal always said it was as if someone had taken a
puppy, augmented its intelligence by a million overnight, and then expected it not to still pee on the rug.

  Years of training had taught the captains to deal with these issues with detachment and forced overrides, to teach their ships strict boundaries and how to keep on task. But the secured chat line between them was still full of questions: “What do I do when it doesn’t want to go into dry dock?” “Whenever I use the overrides, my ship starts to pout. Is that a thing?” “How do y’all deal with it?”

  “I think Lin’s afraid of dying,” Belal told her a few years into the war, their voice hushed and hurried, barely audible over the bar’s thumping music.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve never had to use the overrides before, but this time, over Gharnum, he just…refused to go.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean—”

  “He’s my ship, Iyara. I can tell. Risk was within acceptable limits. No red flags in his memory logs. Just one second we were roaring and the next, we’d stopped.”

  They both sat in silence contemplating the weight of the revelation, and, for the moment, she was grateful Ziggy didn’t seem to have the same problems as the other smartships. He was brave and obedient. Didn’t ask questions except How far? and How fast? and Could we watch another movie before we go on our next run? The one with the ship that looks like me?

  “What are you going to do? You have to report this,” She said, finally. Any deviation was dangerous. That’s what they’d been taught.

  “I think I’m just going to see how it goes with these overrides. And…I don’t know. If it were one of my soldiers I’d know how to handle it. Therapy. Shore leave. But instead he’s a—”

  She interrupted before they could finish the thought. “A very dangerous ship.”