“What did you…?”
“A mild acid in your drink. Externally you’d never even notice it, but internally, it will corrode several of the finer contacts in your processor.” Zeta picked up the glass and tossed it into the fireplace. The crystal tumbler shattered against the bricks and tumbled down into the gas jets. “Most likely it’s something you came in contact with in Nimerica, made worse by your decision to empty four-fifths of your coolant system. Cruel irony that it didn’t affect you until you were home. Lucky for you, too.”
Gamm took another step, tilted, and fell against the couch. His head hit the hard frame at the top, but he barely felt it. He tried to roll over into a sitting position, but his limbs were weak and sluggish.
“It won’t destroy your brain,” said the doctor, “but it will require extensive surgery to fix. Everyone will be so happy you survived that no one will question any changes to your personality or gaps in your memory.”
The younger model managed to roll himself over. His body slumped across the cushions, but he faced his old friend. They stared at each other for a moment. “You just… you and the others don’t want to lose your power.”
The doctor shook his head. “You’re so far from the truth.”
“The truth is right there!” Gamm’s eyes flitted to the bone relic on the table.
“Yes,” said Zeta, “and the truth is that Man is dead. Man ceased to exist in his great wars. There was no ascension, no journey to the stars. Our creators are nothing but dust and bones.”
Gamm’s vision was fading. His left optic had dissolved into static. The view from the right was fuzzy. He tried to speak, but his speech circuits were unresponsive. He dug deep for a subroutine or emergency protocol and managed to get out one word.
“Why?”
The older model reached out and ran a gentle digit along the smooth top of the artifact. “Think of the millions who’d be shattered by such a revelation, that everything our society is based on, that everything they have ever believed, is no more than a fairytale.” He shook his burnished head. “We have maintained the lie this long. We shall continue to maintain it for the foreseeable future.”
Zeta wrapped his fingers around the skull and squeezed. The artifact crumbled into bits and powder. He gathered up the edges of the handkerchief, pinched the ends between his fingers, and swung the bundle into the fireplace.
“Try to relax,” he said. “I’m going to go call for an ambulance. This will all be over soon.”
He paused at the door and glanced back into the study. The younger model had seized up. His limbs were stiff. His eyes had gone dark.
“It’s good to have you back, Gamm.”
EDITOR BIOGRAPHY
Jennifer Brozek is an award winning editor, game designer, and author.
Winner of the Australian Shadows Award for best edited publication, Jennifer has edited ten anthologies with more on the way. Author of In a Gilded Light, The Lady of Seeking in the City of Waiting, Industry Talk, and the Karen Wilson Chronicles, she has more than fifty published short stories, and is the Creative Director of Apocalypse Ink Productions.
Jennifer also is a freelance author for numerous RPG companies. Winner of both the Origins and the ENnie award, her contributions to RPG sourcebooks include Dragonlance, Colonial Gothic, Shadowrun, Serenity, Savage Worlds, and White Wolf SAS. Jennifer is also the author of the long running Battletech webseries, The Nellus Academy Incident, now a novel.
When she is not writing her heart out, she is gallivanting around the Pacific Northwest in its wonderfully mercurial weather. Jennifer is an active member of SFWA, HWA, and IAMTW. Read more about her at www.jenniferbrozek.com or follow her on Twitter at @JenniferBrozek.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Dylan Birtolo currently resides in the Pacific Northwest where he spends his time as a writer, a gamer, and a professional sword-swinger. His thoughts are filled with shape shifters, mythological demons, and epic battles. He’s published a couple of fantasy novels and several short stories. He trains with the Seattle Knights, an acting troop that focuses on stage combat, and has performed in live shows, videos, and movies. He even jousts, and yes, the armor is real - it weighs over 100 pounds.
You can read more about him and his works at www.dylanbirtolo.com or follow his twitter at @DylanBirtolo. The idea for this story came from thinking about how robots can be relatively immune to the passage of time. What would happen if an android had programmed emotions that outlived the programmers?
Peter Clines is the author of the Ex-Heroes series and the acclaimed, genre-blending -14-. He grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and made his first writing sale at age seventeen to a local newspaper. His first screenplay got him an open door to pitch stories at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager. He is the writer of countless film articles, The Junkie Quatrain, the rarely-read The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe, and the poorly-named website Writer on Writing.
He currently lives and writes somewhere in southern California, where he has been known to relax by doing basic maintenance on robot vacuums. So take that, Mrs. Goodell—he did become a robot repairman. “The Apocrypha of Gamma-202” is his homage to classic ‘50s sci-fi with a steampunk twist.
Lillian Cohen-Moore is an award winning editor, and devotes her writing to fiction, journalism and roleplaying games. Influenced by the work of Jewish authors and horror movies, she draws on bubbe meises (grandmother’s tales) and horror classics for inspiration. The Imperial Companion came from a confluence of topics; current research related to the emotional range of artificial intelligence, colonialism in Western history, and dangerous faery tale journeys.
Mark Andrew Edwards has attended writer’s workshops by Dave Wolverton, Connie Willis and Jody Lynn Nye as well the Cascade Writers and the Fairwood Writers. He also leads a writer’s group in Seattle, the Cloud City Wordslingers. He lives in Washington State and enjoys reading, writing and watching films.
My inspiration for “Body as a Ship” came from reading Plutarch. I came across a reference to The Ship of Theseus, which Athenians sailed once a year for centuries, replacing worn parts as needed. It’s an old puzzle but when we start replacing and upgrading ourselves, it raises the old questions Plato and Plutarch did.
Mae Empson has a Master’s degree in English literature from Indiana University at Bloomington, and graduated with honors in English and in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Recent publications appear in print in anthologies from Prime Books, Innsmouth Free Press, Chaosium, and Dagan Books, and on-line in The Pedestal Magazine and Cabinet des Fees. Recently, two of her stories were nominated for Ellen Datlow’s long list of Honorable Mentions for Best of Horror of the Year, Volume 5. Follow Mae on twitter at www.twitter.com/maeempson. Read Mae’s blog at http://www.maeempson.com.
This story takes inspiration from her own experiences as an identical twin.
M. Todd Gallowglas, author of the bestselling Tears of Rage and Halloween Jack series, wrote his first fantasy story for a creative writing assignment in the third grade. Ever since, he’s loved tales that take the reader to the far future or mystical worlds of his own creation. High school was a convenient quiet place to hone the craft of writing adventure stories… when he should have been paying attention in class. While pursuing his Bachelor of Arts in Creative writing, he could never completely remove a sense of the fantastic from his writing… much to the disappointment of several of his professors. These days he makes his way in the world writing stories and books inspired by that first story and spinning tales at Renaissance Faires with his one-man storytelling show, “Bard’s Cloak of Tales.”
Sarah Hans is an author, editor, and educator. She has about a dozen short stories currently in print, and she’s the editor of the anthologies Sidekicks! and Steampunk World. Her story “Rest in Peace” was inspired by wondering about what will happen when everyone in the world falls in love with androids
, who are, after all, more perfect than any person could be. As often happens, the story deviated from this original idea quite a bit, so now Sarah supposes she’ll have to write another one. This is how stories breed. Find her online at http://sarahhans.com
Kerrie Hughes. I am a full-time writer, editor, and reader, and enjoy most genres but especially Sci Fi, Fantasy, and Urban Paranormal. I am also quite into Cats and Futurism. The story, “Do Robotic Cats Purr In Space,” was inspired by my years studying for a degree in community counseling. I wanted to save the world but ended up seeing that we can only really save ourselves, and sometimes those who cross our paths.
I was also inspired by what I see as the natural evolution of the struggle between individuality, corporate interests, and survival. To that end, if someone did offer to download the sum of my brain into a chip so I could live on as a robot, I would probably do it… but I would need two things, Free Will, and a Contract.
Christopher Kellen has authored nine books in fantasy and science fiction. His heroes of literature are Robert E. Howard, Jim Butcher and David Weber. He is a proud member of the Genre Underground. “In So Many Words” is inspired by a centuries-old story of unrequited love, and a desire to understand how we might relate to an intelligence vastly different from our own.
Seanan McGuire writes a lot of things, sometimes under the name “Mira Grant,” but mostly as herself. She does not sleep very much. In high school, she was once pushed into moving traffic by some kids who thought it was funny. This, among other things, inspired her story for this book. Seanan likes cats and Diet Dr Pepper and corn mazes, not in that order.
Jody Lynn Nye. Although best known for her collaborations with other leading authors in the SF/fantasy field (Robert Asprin, Anne McCaffrey, John Ringo), Jody Lynn Nye has written dozens of books and over 120 short stories of her own, most of them with a humorous bent. Her latest books are View From the Imperium (Baen Books), and Dragons Run (Ace Books).
“Lost Connections” came about because of the theme of Bless Your Mechanical Heart: robots and pathos. I was moved by the idea of a person outgrowing her best friend, who just happened to be an android. What would make her realize that the split had to be made, and how could she accomplish it and still live with herself?
Fiona Patton lives in rural Ontario with her wife, Tanya Huff, and a houseful of animals. She has written seven heroic fantasy novels, over thirty short stories, and is currently working on her eighth novel entitled The King’s Eagle. She has always professed a love of robots and guardsmen and so was very happy to explore both in “The King’s Own” for Bless Your Mechanical Heart.
Jean Rabe. When Jean Rabe isn’t writing or editing, she tosses tennis balls to her moose-of-a-mutt, visits museums, dabbles in role-playing games, and tries to lure Gene Wolfe out to breakfast at the Cracker Barrel. She is the author of thirty fantasy, science fiction, and adventure novels, and has penned more short stories than she cares to count. She’s particularly fond of this tale, inspired by a Cracker Barrel conversation over a plate of sourdough French toast.
Jason Sanford. Born and raised in the Southern United States, Jason Sanford currently lives in the American Midwest with his wife and two sons. His life adventures includes work as an archeologist and a Peace Corps Volunteer. More than a dozen of Jason’s stories have been published in the British SF magazine Interzone, which also devoted a special issue to his fiction. His additional publications include Year’s Best SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and other places, while his fiction has been translated into a number of languages including Chinese, French, Russian, Polish, and Czech. His website is www.jasonsanford.com. Jason was inspired to write “We Eat the Hearts That Come for You” by the title itself, which burned its way into his mind and refused to let him rest until he exorcised it through writing. He wrote the entire story during mutiple visits to the Bexley Public Library.
Ken Scholes is the critically acclaimed author of four novels and over forty short stories. His series, The Psalms of Isaak, is being published both at home and abroad to award nominations and rave reviews. Publisher’s Weekly hails the series as a “towering storytelling tour de force.”
Ken’s eclectic background includes time spent as a label gun repairman, a sailor who never sailed, a soldier who commanded a desk, a preacher (he got better), a nonprofit executive, a musician and a government procurement analyst. He has a degree in History from Western Washington University and is a winner of the ALA’s RUSA Reading List award for best fantasy novel, France’s Prix Imaginales for best foreign novel, and the Writers of the Future contest.
Ken is a native of the Pacific Northwest and makes his home in Saint Helens, Oregon, where he lives with his wife and twin daughters. You can learn more about Ken by visiting www.kenscholes.com.
Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her collection Soft Apocalypses will be released by Raw Dog Screaming Press in July 2014. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Chiral Mad 2, What Fates Impose, Once Upon A Curse, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Best Horrorof the Year, Vol. 5. Her story in Bless Your Mechanical Heart was partly inspired by seeing an online ad for a high-end sex toy juxtaposed against a news story about drone strikes in Yemen. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.
Minerva Zimmerman is the author of “Copper” in Winter Well: Speculative Novellas About Older Women. Her middle school experience encouraged her to take up mad science and plotting world domination. She’s since semi-retired from evil and is a one-woman curatorial department for a small museum. For more about her writing check out www.minervazimmerman.com
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Bless Your Mechanical Heart Page 27