Best Canadian Stories 2018

by Russel Smith

  But this wasn’t a campaign year—I didn’t have a candidate—and, in fact, I was planning to go back east that summer. Kim invited me to the house, which their mom had left to them. We had coffee in the living room. I’d never sat there before, always just breezing through on my way to the basement. Every few minutes, I heard Spencer’s coughing. Kim said she didn’t know what to do anymore; she had to get out of the house, get on with her life. She asked about Vancouver, then seemed to lose focus as I described it.

  In a few minutes, I went downstairs. Spencer had the lights off, the room dimly blue from two computer screens. He greeted me as if it hadn’t been four years, which made me feel loved. I sat on the edge of the bed. On one screen, he had some chat open; Russian MMA streamed on the other, two women in a bloody knot. He offered me a beer from a mini fridge and coughed.

  I asked after his health, and he said, “Black lung.”

  “Seriously?”

  He laughed.

  I said that if he was sick, he should’ve told me sooner.

  “Animals hide weakness,” Spencer said. “Come on, sit here. I’ve been wanting to show you something.”

  One woman drove her knee into the other’s spine, but Spencer pointed to the second screen. It was a simple interface, white text clipping down a black box. I recognized certain proper names interspersed with the usual fap and fag. They were talking politics.

  We watched. We laughed together. Sometimes, his laughter ended in coughs. He kept a blanket over his legs.

  “We start things here,” he said. “Out west, did you ever hear about that third-line goon we got into the all-star game?”

  My eyes were trained on the text, as if discerning starlight.

  “How many of you are there?”

  And my best friend said, “More all the time.”

  The following year, when the Russians beat us in the World Championships, a retired hockey coach named Dom Crossman would make headlines by suggesting that Canada’s national vigour was diluted. He singled out certain players; he cited ancient Roman history. Reporters had trouble suppressing smiles. When the Toronto Star ran an editorial against him, he said there should be a referendum to decide if the writer should keep her job. Within minutes, the paper’s site had crashed.

  New faces appear in the green room. Before the convention, they spoke of our campaign as an act of vandalism. Now the president of the party pops an oversized bottle of Veuve Clicquot and toasts Dom Crossman, our nominee.

  Even in victory, Wei never stops working. She monitors how many flutes Dom’s finished. I bask in the news online, where there’s a clearer sense of velocity, even destiny. By contrast, the faces in the green room are as worried as they are celebratory. I only worry they won’t go far enough, that this marks the moment Dom becomes one of them. All of a sudden, we’ve gained a lot of old weight.

  “Always on the phone,” says the president, who clinks my flute. “Tell me—what are people saying?”

  “They’re laughing.”

  “Laughing.” She searches my eyes. “I can’t tell if you’re serious. It’s not a pleasant feeling.”

  I’m about to say, “I had a friend like that,” but I keep it to myself.

  “Don’t sweat it, chief.”

  The president empties her champagne and looks across the room at Dom. The candidate’s face has reddened. Wei hovers at his elbow.

  “I’ve been doing this a long, long time,” says the president. “Let me enlighten you. Crossman isn’t really one of us. In a federal campaign, people will see that. Be serious for a second—you know he can’t win.”

  I can’t hold it any longer. Spencer is here; he’s bursting out of us. I break into a smile, and the president reflects it, and now the room fills with laughter.

  Twinkle, Twinkle

  Stephen Marche

  The following story was algorithmically generated. I call it an algostory.

  Two researchers named Allan Hammond and Julian Brooke have spent the past few years developing software that analyzes literary databases. Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those stories have in common.

  Hammond and Brooke agreed to collaborate with me on a simple experiment: Can an algorithm help me write a better story? I began by giving them a collection of my 50 favorite sci-fi stories—a mix of golden-age classics and some more recent stuff. (We decided I’d write a science-fiction piece, both for the obvious reasons and because sci-fi is easy to identify.) They used their program to compare my stories to a mass of other stories. First they came back to me with a series of stylistic guidelines that would make my story as much like the samples as possible—things like there had to be four speaking characters and a certain percentage of the text had to be dialogue. Then they sent me a set of 14 rules, derived from a process called topic modeling, that would govern my story’s main topics and themes. All I had to do was start writing.

  Hammond and Brooke created a web-based interface through which their algorithm, called SciFiQ, could tell me, on the textual equivalent of the atomic level, how closely every single detail of my writing matched the details in my 50 favorite works. (I’m talking “nouns per 100 words” level.) When I typed in a word or phrase and it was more than a little different from what SciFiQ had in mind, the interface would light up red or purple. When I fixed the offending word or phrase, the interface would turn green.

  The key, obviously, was the texts that I selected: “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Father-Thing” by Philip K. Dick, “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury—I can’t list them all, but you get the idea. I wanted to write something incredible, so I picked stories I thought were incredible. Whether that’s what I got might be another story.

  The machines sat empty in the dark. Only a single light was on when Anne and Ed entered. A lone searcher was staring at the Other planet1, his face half-swallowed by the viewer and the empty banks of blank screens2 sloped into the room’s vague emptiness.

  “Profitable and marketable,” Ed said. “I cannot stress that enough.”

  “Profitable and marketable,” Anne murmured in agreement.

  The man at the viewer sucked out his face with a faint squelch and, with no acknowledgment of either Anne or Ed, began to pack up as quickly as possible. Anne had overdressed for her first day, obviously. Ed was night supervisor, but he was wearing blue and green overalls. The guy at the viewer was in head-to-toe sweats. His sallow eyes were exhausted3. He emanated a grotesque odour of off-brand bleach, and it burned the inside of her nostrils. And she was wearing her best outfit, the pencil-skirt outfit she’d bought for her dissertation defence.

  “Once upon a time,” Ed continued, “people were interested in the Other world just because it was another world. There was discovery. Then there was building the telescopes, carrying the mercury to the translunar observatories, constructing the antigravity bases, the discs within discs of whirling silver the size of cities to capture the light.”

  The sallow man Anne was replacing misted the inside of the viewer with antiseptic spray, and gently rubbed the screen down with a paper towel. Nodding curtly to each of them in turn, he half-jogged out the door. They were apparently not to be introduced. Her coworker couldn’t wait to be gone.

  “If you’re curious, go to the archives. I know, you’re a full prof, full xenologist. I know you’ve spent ten years in the archives already, but you’ve got four hours tonight, well, three hours and forty-two minutes. The archives have a hundred million hours cross-referenced. Your job is to keep looking to find something so we can justify keeping the lights on here.”

  “I understand.”

  “This light here,” he said, tapping the lamp.


  The glow from the viewer that no one was looking into unnerved Anne. The Other world, 1564 light years away, was flowing brightly4 and glamorously5 into the machine, unobserved, while Ed concluded what must be his boilerplate orientation speech.

  “Nobody cares. That’s the thing to remember. While you’re here, I’ll be making phone calls to the South China coast begging for cash. Help me out. Keep the lights on here to keep an eye on there. That’s our motto now.”

  “Curiosity isn’t enough,” she said.

  “Curiosity isn’t enough. Exactly. You’re starting to understand. When people with money, people who matter, think of the Other, they think of aliens who have been dead for fifteen hundred years. It’s a nightmare, in a way, a planet of corpses who don’t know the oblivion they have momentarily escaped with us. Everybody knows. If they were ever going to find their way to us, they probably already would have. And if they’re looking at us, which they probably aren’t, what would we have to say to them? So it makes everybody sad, that there’s intelligent life out there and it doesn’t matter much. And sad is a hard sell.”

  Ed was obviously wrapping up.

  “You’re here to see, not to have insight. You will no doubt be struck by the reality of a planet so similar to ours, so distant from ours, and you will think deep thoughts about the loneliness of the cosmos. You may come to think even about the fate of a universe that is probably one of many universes, exemplified only by the fact that the universe that we happen to reside in happens to have to have created observers. Don’t bother sharing these digressions. They have already been written down by people who are ten thousand times more perspicacious than you and I and still managed to die in comprehensive obscurity.”

  “Profitable and marketable,”6 Anne repeated.

  “That’s correct. So tonight you have fewer than four hours to look at Othertribespeople on a ring of the lesser Chekhovs. Nobody knows much about them. They might have some new medicine. Anything that might have saleable value, report.”

  “So I should call you if I see something new?”7

  “Call me if you see an Other holding up a sign that says, ‘Hello, earth. It’s us up here.’”

  At its peak, the Institution for the Study of Extraterrestrial Life had employed 264 fully trained researchers at the banks of screens. The mania for the Other had gripped the world and every school devoted a class a week to its study. Universities all over the world had Other departments. Biologists handled the various pockets of life discovered in the rest of the universe, slimes mutating fiercely but drably on dozens of freezing or burning hells. The Other was its own field. The similarity had come as an existential shock to the earth. A planet 1564 light years away had forests that were not dissimilar to earth’s forests. They had animals that were not that unlike the remaining animals on earth. And they had the Others, who lived in cities, with streets, or in villages, or in tribes, just like us. The Others wore clothes. They fell in love. They wrote books. They kept time. They had laws. The odds of two worlds being conjured by chance at such similar points in their development—the Other was roughly at Earth’s 1964—had to mean something. The anthropic principle was considered proven. The universe could only exist under conditions in which ourselves and the Others were there to witness it. Those were the day when children, like Anne when she was a kid, wore pyjamas with patterns of glublefrings gamboling among the tzitziglug trees, and everybody called it The Yonder. But all novelty eventually wears off. The natural market for the shock of recognition is perishingly small.

  Alone in the vast8 dark room, Anne wiped down the viewer again, just to be sure. She understood why there had been so many conspiracies in the days after discovery. It was like the machine fabricated the planet. Anne placed her face inside. The sucking in of the face curtains sealed her. She was hovering over a planet on the other side of the galaxy, twenty feet over a small group of Othertribespeople at night fishing.

  The quality of the screen was so impeccable that the sense of her own body dissolved, and she was a floating dot. There was no comparison to watching a tape; this was live, or rather it was live 1564 years ago. The tribe grouped tightly around a mountain stream. The males held torches up to the water, where a flurry of small fishes roiled on or under the surface, and a female Other poised, a spear in her hand, waiting for a Gallack. They were huge, the Gallacks, nearly the size of an Other. A single fish could feed a group of tribespeople for a month of desert season.

  Anne wanted to look a bit more closely. She reached down and her screen went blank. She had zoomed too far. She pulled up with a clenched fist and an elbow curl, and she was among the clouds above the mountains. The fire of the tribe’s torches made a rosy-red9 and blue dot in the centre. She pushed down slowly, adjusting. She had asked one of her dissertation supervisors what it was like working on the screens and he had told her it was like being an impotent god, and the description was precise. Delicately, tentatively, Anne focused on the face of the Other woman holding a spear. Sometimes a Gallack might not come to light for hours, and when it did, it offered maybe three seconds of its purple-streaked skull bone for a strike. The Otherwoman’s eyes had narrowed sharply in concentration, her eyes small, even for the eyes of the Others, who had no nasal bridge, and whose button noses, like tiny dogs, were considerably more powerful than a human nose. A horrific violence lurked in her gaze.

  The Others stood so still, so intently and contentedly waiting for a slimy mammoth fish to rise out of the waters. Why was she watching this? The hope was that someone would hurt themselves in the hunt, and that the tribe would use a herb that had found an analogue in the surviving jungles on earth, to repair the damage. That’s how they had found the bark of the Amazonian gluttaree had curative properties for Bell’s Palsy. That was profitable and marketable. Only the leaves on the Other trees—she thought they were hualintratras, or maybe grubgrubs—moved at all10. The shimmering and the stillness were so different from the recordings, somehow. The recordings were always significant. That was the difference. Something had always happened to make them worth watching, worth preserving. The Othertribespeople, were just waiting around for a Gallack. Maybe the Gallack would come, or maybe it wouldn’t.

  It wouldn’t really matter if she snuck off to the city for twenty minutes, would it?

  She marked the place of the tribe, flicked up with a curled fist, saw the planet whole for a second, found the biggest dot, centred herself visually, and pushed down.

  She landed accidentally in a funeral, right in the middle of the green twigs. Curling up, she could see that a ritual was in its final stages, the morbid consummation. The funeral must be the Middle Space, off the straight avenue. Soon they would have a horrible shattering, a grandiose howl, an unconditional prostration. The crowd was small, six Others, so a prominent Other must have died. The body was already under the branches though, so Anne couldn’t quite tell.

  She pulled up, too quickly, and she was once again too high. She hovered over the whole of the OSC, the Other South City, momentarily dazzled11. There were twenty-four million Others in the city, more than any city on earth had held for fifty years, and that was without counting however many were living in the subterranean tunnels. Even at night, glowing with torches over the large avenues, the circles within interlocked circles, orbs within orbs which were so typically a figure of the Southern part of the main Continent, the City Center sprawled haphazardly. So much life. So much life to see.

  But all that life was none of her business. Her business was back on the lower Chekhovs. Anne flipped back to the saved locale. The Othertribespeople were still waiting patiently for a big fish to come to light.

  Back in OSC, she floated over the Coil, the central avenue of the biggest Other city. The flashes of the running Others, the tumult of their flat faces. Who to follow? Who to forget?

  She followed one Other licking his lips anxiously. He turned off the corner and was gone.
She followed another Other woman before she dipped into a store that sold texts. The universe is crammed with fascinating irrelevance. Anne was just watching now. All the work had already been done on the main streets, although it grew out of date so rapidly. When she had been a xenosociologist, she had studied some of the commercial patterns, the gift and theft matrices that seemed to be their version of exchange. That was before her department, and all the other departments except xenolinguistics, had been folded into general xenology. They were all just xenologists now.

  She widened her gaze and drifted into one of the neighbourhoods halfway or more than halfway if the city was still spreading since she had last read about it of the Uppertown Stage. The harsh tangerine dawn was rising on Other children as they played the string game in its labyrinthine star patterns laid out in the sand. She had written one of her first papers in grade school on geometrical erudition in Other children games, an A+. Her teacher, Ms. Norwood, had said, not quite believing it, that she might work at ISEL some day.

  She remembered that Ms. Norwood had been a devotee of Wodeck’s theory of distant proprioception, though it had been defunct as a theory even then. By virtue of the Heisenberg principle, Wodeck argued, we must be altering the Others in our observation of them. The idea was too Romantic for the academy or the public, both of whom thought Heisenberg was fine for electrons but not for aliens who had been dead for 1500 years and whose remains had long since rotted to ashes by the time their light had arrived. The idea was doubly distasteful, because who knew who was watching us, and from where? Who wanted to believe their lives were shaped by alien eyes?